In the pre-internet days it was easy to take off for a trip of weeks or more. You checked your pockets for your passport, wallet, and plane tickets and you were good to go. Now that we’re all digitally connected and tethered all the time though, those benefits all have corresponding downsides. Now the preparations are as much about your travel tech services as they are about what you’re packing.
Just think about the answers to these simple questions:
Will your phone work where you’re going?
Will you have to pay extra to make a call or upload photos?
Can you get to your plane tickets, train tickets, or hotel reservations when you need them?
If you want to watch a movie or TV show, can you do it on the hotel TV or or your tablet?
Can you securely do work from a remote location if something pressing comes us you need to deal with?
Are you covered in case of an emergency and do you have the info you need at your fingertips?
Sure, some of these problems can be solved by a personal assistant, a travel advisor, or some other person who is used to dealing with offloaded problems, but that assumes you can reach your savior when the time comes. Otherwise, it’s always prudent to anticipate the potential problems and have a plan for how to handle them.
So here are six travel tech services that could mean the difference between travel disaster and awesome vacation.
A VPN for Security and Streaming
It is news to some people that the streaming services you enjoy at home aren’t always available abroad and even when they are, you might be locked out of them. Each country has its own licensing regulations (or lack of) and companies like Netflix have a whole different line-up in Argentina than they do in the USA.
Then you have services like Amazon Prime where you have hundreds of things to watch at home, but maybe only 12 of those when the notice pops up saying, “Looks like you’re traveling.” You may not be able to access Hulu or Max at all without a local subscription.
This is especially a bummer if you’re trying to tune into some big sporting event, like an NBA playoff game with your home team playing or a Formula 1 race you’re excited about. Thankfully you can deal with all of this with a quality VPN service, then on top you’ll get the benefit of having a more secure connection when you’re logging in from some sketchy Wi-Fi service with questionable security.
Check out this information source for more details.
An eSim Service if You Don’t Have T-Mobile
If you’ve got a T-Mobile plan, you can probably surf the web from anywhere in Latin America with your phone as long as there is local coverage from the local partner. It’s included with most of their monthly plans so you don’t even have to think about it, plus Canada, Mexico, and the USA are basically one territory for calls and texts.
This is not true for the other Canadian and American carriers though and you could end up spending a fortune on daily roaming charges with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, or Rogers. If you’re with one of those carriers, you’ll probably save a small fortune by getting some kind of eSim plan from a carrier like Saily, Airalo, or Gigsky.
The way these work is that you buy a data plan of 5GB or 10GB for $10 to $30 and you can do all the normal things on your phone that you usually do when you’re away from Wi-Fi. You’ll still get your e-mails coming in (if you want) and you can still upload photos for your friends to see on Instagram or Facebook. You normally can’t make calls with these unless you buy an enhanced plan for that, but these days you can use WhatsApp, Messenger, or Facetime instead over Wi-Fi or the eSim data plan.
Online Backup Services
What happens if your phone gets lost or stolen? Or your laptop or your tablet is gone. Would you lose all your photos and videos or is everything backed up to the cloud?
Sure, it’s going to cost you something for this peace of mind, but how much are your memories worth?
The easy solution is to pay Google or Apple, depending on the kind of phone you have, but those aren’t your only options and you’ll need another method if you use a real camera as well. I back up my camera photos on my laptop to Amazon Photos, which is free with Prime. Then I back up my phone photos to Dropbox because I’m already paying for an annual subscription there for business needs and have enough space to store 10 years of photos probably.
You could use a physical hard drive as well and that doesn’t require a subscription. Whatever you do, don’t just leave them on your phone or laptop and assume everything will be fine. I learned that the hard way when my laptop’s hard drive fried and I lost a few months of camera photos that had not yet backed up to Amazon because of a connection glitch I hadn’t noticed.
Luggage Tags for Tracking
I find that people worry way more about lost luggage than they should and with only 5-8 bags out of 1,000 even getting delayed (depending on the airline), the chances of really losing your bag for good are slim. I’ve never lost one in decades of travel and I check one more often than I carry on. Bar code tracking even lets you see where the bag is with some airlines.
If you want to go a step further though and have control over that yourself, you can buy tracking tags that will ping you with a location. The best-known ones are Apple Airtags, but if you have an Android phone you can buy comparable ones like Tile that are a similar size and work the same way.
Apps for Itineraries and Alerts
One of the principle concepts of the classic book Getting Things Done is that you need to offload things to do in a place you can access later instead of trying to keep track of everything in your head. This is especially important when you travel since there are so many details to keep track of every day.
I use the TripIt app as my second brain and love how confirmations that come into my e-mail box get automatically forwarded to the app. Occasionally it gets tripped up when there’s a PDF instead of html, but for the most part it works seamlessly. If you have an iPhone, another option is TravelWith.
If you are flying with United, you should probably have the United app on your phone and if you have the Delta or Southwest one it might even get you free Wi-Fi or entertainment. There are independent apps like FlightAware that will alert you if there’s a gate change or delay.
The “What If?” Safety Backups
Before you take off on your long-anticipated vacation, it’s important to do a quick “What if…” thought exercise to know if you’ve got a Plan B ready or not.
Photo by Allianz Partners
For instance, what if you get injured? What if the ATM eats your debit card or you leave it somewhere? What if your credit card gets declined? What if you lose your phone or it gets stolen?
It’s good to have all the information at your fingertips assuming you don’t lose your phone, like having a medical app installed for drug name translations and finding an English-speaking doctor. If you have good travel insurance it might be a part of that, along with a phone number to call if you need help. There’s evacuation insurance you can get too if you’ll be in a remote area.
Do you know what is covered and not covered by your credit card if you rent a car? Do you need to purchase liability insurance on top? Do you have access to multiple bank accounts and credit accounts if your main card (or phone payment connection) has problems?
Backup cloud services aren’t just for photos. Keep all your important docs in one too, like your passport, driver’s license, boarding passes, and whatever else you might have stored electronically.
By running through what could possibly go wrong, you’ll breathe a lot easier later if something actually does. Thankfully there’s a travel tech solution for almost any obstacle. Otherwise, money, time, and kindness will usually resolve the issue instead.
