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A Consultant's Opinionated Notes on Traveling

In my decade as a consultant, I’ve done my fair share of local and international travel. There’s a lot of tribal knowledge around how to travel well and how to minimise the stress. Some of it’s written down, some of it isn’t, but this post will sum up many of the things I’ve learned the hard way over the years.

Hand Baggage Only

Avoid checking bags. Luggage you have with you is luggage the airlines can’t lose, damage or delay. It might not have happened to you yet, but it absolutely will at some point if you travel enough. It’s also a lot easier to move around if you’re not dragging massive suitcases. Most people ought to be able to manage a week’s business travel in a carry on suitcase plus a personal item. I can usually fit a week’s clothes, gym kit and trainers, plus work laptop and gear, and still have room for some personal comforts. Men have it easier here than women in many ways, but I know plenty of women who travel this way too.

Build a Travel Kit

The easiest way to forget something on a trip is to be unpacking and repacking your bags each time you travel. I keep travel specific duplicates of at least the following:

  • Toiletry kit

    • I keep mine in a TSA-compliant bag with TSA-compliant sized toiletries

  • USB charger and cables

    • You want a powerful multi-device charger, and a set of cables to match your specific devices.

  • Laptop charger

    • Look at smaller options that have the same power rating as the charger that came with the laptop

  • Dongles and adapters

    • You’ll know what you need here, but have duplicates for whatever you use on a day to day basis

Booking a Trip

Flights

Flying sucks, however you spin it. My usual goal is to minimise how much it sucks. Most airlines are about as bad as each other in my experience. You’ll find horror stories for any of them if you go looking, so I usually go with whatever makes for the easiest trip. I’ll prefer OneWorld airlines where I can take them, purely because I have status on one. I’ll also take anything but Ryanair where possible. I always book flights with the airline, rather than through Kiwi, MyTrip, Expedia or other third parties. It’s much easier to fix things (be they your fault or the airlines) if you’re dealing direct with the airline. If you book via a third party, you have to work through them at every point after that too.

I’ll take priority boarding or security fast-track where I can, it can make life a lot easier. Lounges are nice if you’ve got a way to access them for free, or can expense them. I tend to find the cost of them to not be worth it if I’m paying myself.

General Transit

I’ll usually take trains, metro or trams over taxis and rideshares where at all possible. I dislike cars, and I’m used to navigating public transport systems. Plus, you never know quite how bad traffic will be, and most good public transport systems usually run predictably. I’ll even choose trains over flying if there’s a sensible route, even if the train ride is a fair bit longer. By the time you’ve accounted for airport chicanery at each end, the time adds up. I would usually rather take a train for anything that’s less than a 4/5 hour train trip. After that, it depends on how easily accessible the airport is at each end.

Hotels

My advice is to pick a hotel chain (or set of chains) you like and stick with them. Trying out hipster boutiques or AirBnBs can be fun at first, and I still do this when traveling for pleasure sometimes. Boring consistency’s worth quite a lot when you’re knackered at the end of a work day, though. Knowing that when you arrive, you’ll have the same reasonable room and bathroom is worth quite a lot to me.

I maintain status with Radisson and Accor, and I like CitizenM when they’re convenient and I know I won’t need to work from my room. Anywhere those aren’t a reasonable option, I’ll find something good with Booking.com. For the UK, Premier Inn is a reliably boring and consistent option available all over the country. If I am on a budget I’ll take that over most other options, but I always skip the breakfast. It’s dire.

Gear

Luggage

You’re going to put a lot of miles on whatever gear you buy, so buy something solid. I prefer 2-wheel to 4-wheel, you get more space within the airline size constraints and the wheels are less likely to break/jam. They’re also much easier to wheel on cobbled streets in Europe. It’s far from a universally-held view, though. I’ve had a Samsonite carry on for the last 10 years, and an Eastpak Tranverz M as a checked bag for when I’ve needed one. My next carry-on will be a TravelPro International Rollaboard. Other than that, the options I see well reviewed are:

  • Mid-range: Samsonite, TravelPro, Delsey, Antler
  • High-end: Briggs and Riley, Tumi, Rimowa

The personal item is worth thinking through as well. It may not be big enough to fit a laptop, depending on the airlines you fly with and the laptops your company issues. It will end up holding half your personal travel gear, though, especially on long flights. Things to look out for here:

  • A luggage strap, so it can go over the handle on your main rolling case
  • Comfortable straps, to allow you to carry it separately if need be
  • Good organisation, to make it easier to find things while you travel and at airport security
  • Size, compared against restrictions for your commonly used airlines. Personal item sizes are usually pretty tiny

Packing Cubes

The travel community seems to be split on packing cubes, but I never travel without them. They make organising and packing your bag much easier, I find. It’s also then easy to unpack and repack at your destination, too. I tend to stick with the smaller sizes as it’s a lot easier to pack carry-on bags with smaller cubes. Most of mine are the Amazon Basics models, I find their smalls are a good size for most purposes. I have more specific options from Eagle Creek for a few things. Most of mine are the Pack-It Specter line which they seem to have discontinued, so I’ve linked the closest I can find below.

  • A Garment folder or similar helps keep the wrinkles out of dress shirts
  • Shoe sack for a pair of gym trainers, but it’ll keep any shoes and their dirt away from everything else
  • XS packing cube for the electronics pack
  • Clean/Dirty cube for underwear and anything else I want to isolate from the rest on the way back.

Electronics

I tend to travel with a cornucopia of gadgetry, but as with everything else here, in most cases less is more. That said, there are a few non-obvious recommendations to make here.

Travel USB Charger

I’ve used an older version of EPIKA’s TA-105 series world-wide USB charger, plus various cables by Anker, for years now. There’s a few different options in that series, varying by the ports and power output you want. Having this means I always have a travel adapter, even if I forget to pack others, and can always charge my phones. The built-in plug types will cover you for the majority of countries world-wide. If you’re a regular visitor to India, South Africa or a few other awkward countries, you will need other adapters.

Noise Cancelling Headphones

Essential for anyone who travels by plane or long-distance train, to me. I’ve had a few different pairs over the years, the current are a well-worn pair of Bose QC35s. Bose don’t have the monopoly on good options like they used to, though. I’d shop around and experiment to find a pair that works best for you.

Streaming Devices

I’ve carried an Amazon Fire TV stick on nearly every trip I’ve made for the last decade, and it’s seen a lot of use. They’re small and lightweight, so it lives in my travel electronics kit. You can just plug into into a hotel TV and instantly have access to all your streaming services. It makes life a lot easier at the end of a hard day’s travel when you want to just crash and watch Netflix. Some hotels try to lock down their TVs so you can’t switch inputs, but there’s usually a way to override this. Some googling for the TV model or hotel chain will often tell you how.

There are other options like Chromecast, Roku etc if you want to stay away from the Amazon ecosystem.

Travel Router

A more recent addition to my travel kit is a Gl.iNet Beryl AX travel router. All my devices have the router’s Wi-Fi network configured on them. All I have to do when I reach a hotel is plug that in and connect it to the hotel Wi-Fi, then all my devices have internet access. It also has a built-in VPN client, can do file sharing off its USB port and a range of other useful things.

E-Reader

A battery life measured in weeks, small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and you can carry half a library on it. I find them ideal for the time spent waiting in queues and standing around, as they’re easy to use one-handed and can quickly be tucked away. I have a Kindle Paperwhite now, but I’ve had Nooks and Kobos in the past.

Travel Survival Kit

You never quite know what’s going to go wrong when you’re traveling. Maybe your plane gets delayed and you’re stuck in your seat for hours or in a crap hotel overnight. Perhaps your phone dies, and it has all the details for your flight and hotel bookings on it. Maybe you get sick, or maybe you just go out for a few too many beers after a conference. I have a pouch that goes on every trip with me that contains the following:

  • Snacks (I pack a couple of Clif Bars, but anything filling and with a long expiry works)
  • An eye mask
  • Earplugs
  • A small power bank plus appropriate cables for your devices
  • Emergency sewing kit
    • It only needs a needle, a couple different colour threads, a safety pin or two and a couple of spare buttons. Some hotels will provide these for free alongside the free toiletries.
  • Wet wipes
  • Electrolyte tablets
    • These are great for the morning after a night out, but are also a good thing to have on hand for food poisoning and the like
    • Do some research on the brands available to you locally, best to avoid ones full of sugar and carbs
  • A small medkit, with:
    • Plasters / blister plasters
    • Antiseptic wipes
    • Ibuprofen/Paracetamol/Aspirin
    • Travel sickness tablets (Cinnarizine if I’m buying in the UK/EU, Dimenhydrinate in the US/Canada)
    • Anti-allergy tablets (Acrivastane, failing that Cetirizine or Loratadine. Never Diphenhydramine or other first-generation equivalents that make you sleepy)

You also absolutely always want to carry a full change of clothes in a bag that stays with you. It’s bulkier than most of the above list, but it’s been useful when I’ve been delayed in transit.

Not Screwing It Up

Anyone who’s done a ton of traveling will have a story about missing a flight, getting a hotel booking wrong (or not booking it at all), leaving something critical at home or at the destination or what have you. In my case, probably the most spectacular was missing a transatlantic flight back home because I didn’t read the ticket correctly. What followed was then a 5 hour Amtrak down the east coast of the US, a last minute hotel booking, and a new flight back from a totally different airport booked at <24 hours notice. These days, I do a few things to reduce the chance of screwing things up:

  • Load all travel plans into TripIt
    • TripIt will automatically parse the vast majority of confirmation emails, so you can forward them on and it’ll populate an itinerary for you
    • The mobile apps can serve as a single source of truth for a given trip, which saves hunting back through different apps and emails to find things
  • Minimise the number of different sites and services I use to book things, so you’re not left hunting around for stuff
  • Pack via standard packing cubes
    • Eyeballing that I have 2 clothes cubes, the electronics kit, the travel survival kit and my shirt folder is a lot easier and more reliable than checking each individual item

The Points Game

You’ll notice that I’ve not mentioned card points systems, airline loyalty points and so on through this post. This is because, fundamentally, I’m lazy and want to travel with the minimum amount of hassle. I do my best to keep my airline choices consistent so I build up air miles in one place, and to stick with one hotel booking service and as few hotel chains as possible, but beyond that I just can’t be bothered. Life’s too short. That said, there’s a bunch of rewards to be earned this way if you want them - https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/beginners/ isn’t a bad run down of how to get started.

What’s Next

With the amount I travel, I’m always experimenting with ways to improve it all. The wireless router is a good recent example, as is the occasional addition of a portable steamer when I can’t trust the hotel’s iron. Right now, I’m focused on making the planning easier after a couple of recent cock-ups. I’ll happily take any tips on that front!