The Best Hacks Every Traveler Should Know

We travel for a wide variety of reasons (vacation, business, family obligations) and in different ways, but there is one constant: the real travel can be hectic, stressful and expensive. Considering that the Americans took almost 2 billion travel in 2025 alone, that stress can be pretty epic. From planning to disembarking, traveling can be a challenge unless you know and use these tips.

There are plenty of wilderness travel hacks out there, many of which are questionable, but when a tip actually reduces your costs, increases your comfort, or simply solves an irritating problem, it’s pretty magical. Here are the essential travel tips that everyone should implement, whether you are traveling for pleasure, business, or any other reason.

Get a vacuum travel backpack

You may have been asked at some point to roll your clothes to make your packing more efficient. It’s not that it doesn’t work: rolling clothes tightly can improve your packing and unpacking experience. But there is an even better solution: vacuum packaging. You can use vacuum-sealed storage bags to compress your clothes, allowing you to fit more in your bag (or travel much lighter with just one carry-on), but there’s a downside: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may require you to unzip your clothes for a special check when you go through security, which can wreak havoc on your luggage.

A better choice is a carry-on backpack with a pump included, like this one. If you are flagged for a special inspection, you can quickly repack everything and continue on your way.

Off-peak travel

If your main travel goal is to visit exotic places, have new experiences, or even see old friends, traveling off-peak is a powerful tip. Off-peak, this simply means going to places where most tourists are not there. Most people travel for pleasure during the warmer months, for example, so deciding to go on a European tour in February nets you cheaper flights, cheaper hotel rooms, and fewer crowds.

Start Using Packing Cubes

Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you: you realize you need something in a piece of luggage that you spent six hours carefully organizing, compressing and closing. You rummage through everything to find what you need, then repacking that bag is a sweaty, stressful failure. This is where packing cubes come in.

Packing cubes don’t have to be shrink your clothes and other belongings, but they do the whole experience of packing, unpacking and I really find things while you travel much more easily. They transform your chaotic piles of clothes and supplies into geometric cubes that can be individually organized and easily removed and replaced in your luggage. Because you’re dealing with uniform cubes, putting things in and out of your suitcase won’t lead to a nervous breakdown either.

Store clothes in cabin pillows

It’s truly time to live: you can now buy so-called “basic” economy class airline seats, which do not allow you to carry hand luggage. And carry-on baggage fees and restrictions are also increasing. If you’re trying to travel with just one small bag, you might struggle, and that’s where the pillow hack comes in. The basic idea is simple: grab a neck pillow or pillowcase, remove the stuffing, and put on extra clothes instead. The pillow can still be used as a pillow (your clothes act as a cushion), but you can smuggle extra stuff onto the plane. This works, although it works best with the neck pillow option: bringing a huge pillowcase stuffed with jeans and T-shirts will be less successful in fooling unamused flight crews.

Mount your phone horizontally

Staying entertained on long flights can be a challenge, especially if your survival plan involves sleeping for ten hours and you can’t seem to get comfortable. If your plane doesn’t offer convenient screens (I really like the “small screen in the air four rows in front of me” arrangement, myself), or if the available entertainment choices aren’t appealing, you can always load a device with movies, shows, and games.

If you find yourself stuck with just your phone as a screen, you can improvise a phone holder from the barf bag usually provided in the seat pocket in front of you, as demonstrated here. By clipping the bag between your phone and its case, then clipping the top of the bag under the flip tray, you can mount your phone horizontally at the right height for watching content. This could be a real sanity saver (assuming you don’t need to use this bag for any other purpose).

Pay for your daily expenses with a travel credit card

You spend money pretty much every day anyway, but by putting all of that spending on a credit card that gives you miles or points for traveling (and then paying that card off in full each month), you’re essentially getting free travel coupons. You’re going to do your shopping anyway, so why not go a hundred miles every time? Many travel credit cards offer large sign-up bonuses ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 points (or more) once you spend a certain amount on the account. So, by paying your daily bills for a few months with the card, you can finance an entire trip for free.

Perform a reverse image search on your Airbnb before booking

Booking accommodation while you travel can be complicated and you need to wonder if you’re getting the best deal. An Airbnb may seem ideal, but it’s a big drain on your budget, but it can be listed elsewhere, and perhaps for less money. You can find out by using Google’s “reverse image search”. Choose a photo from the Airbnb listing, search for the image on Google and other rental platforms will likely appear – or a link to a hotel’s direct web page. At the very least, image search can identify the building or hotel depicted, which can give you a head start on pricing. There are also tools like HiChee that will compare ads across multiple platforms for you, but where’s the fun in that?

Use a pants hanger to close your curtains

You drag yourself, exhausted, into a hotel room at night and don’t notice the window curtains hanging down. You collapse into bed, then wake up at 6 a.m. to a vengeful sun shining through the cracks in those curtains. This tip is so simple, but it can make a big difference in the quality of your sleep: Grab a pants hanger from your hotel closet (the ones with metal clips) and close your bedroom curtain. When morning sunlight tries to leak into your bedroom and wake you up early in the morning, the clips will keep it out.

Store a shoe in the hotel safe

If you use the safe provided in your hotel room to store valuables or your essential travel documents, the worst thing you can do is forget about them when you check out. A quick trick to make sure this doesn’t happen is to put something you can’t maybe forget about that too. Some people suggest a shoe, thinking that when you get dressed for the next leg of your trip, you will definitely notice if a shoe is missing. But it will work with anything, as long as you choose something you can’t live without.

Download offline maps before you go

We once lived in a world where finding your way around a new area meant paper maps and confusing directions from friends who referenced numerous fast food restaurants as landmarks. These days we have access to military-grade GPS systems, and a pleasant computer voice will tell us to turn right in a hundred feet. It’s amazing when you travel to an unfamiliar place, until you lose your internet connection.

A good tip is to download offline maps of your destinations before you travel. You can do this with Google Maps or using an app like HERE WeGo. This requires some planning, as you need to download the maps while you have a signal, but once you have them downloaded you can use them more or less as you normally would, getting directions and seeing distances clearly. Take a moment to do this before every trip and you’ll never be lost again.