Travel Tech Essentials I Never Leave Home Without

I’m not someone who wants to travel with a suitcase full of gadgets. If anything, the more I travel, the more I appreciate having fewer things to keep track of.

But there are a handful of tech essentials that have earned a permanent place in my bag. They’re not particularly exciting, and most of them are there to solve the very ordinary travel problems we’ve all encountered: a dying phone when you need directions, no signal when you’re trying to find the hotel, or realising your charging cable is sitting comfortably at home while you’re already at the airport.

These are the travel tech essentials I genuinely find useful – the things that make travelling feel that little bit easier without adding loads of extra stuff to carry.

My phone, with everything sorted before I leave

My phone is probably the most important piece of travel tech I own because it has gradually replaced half the things I used to carry.

Boarding passes, hotel bookings, maps, train tickets, restaurant reservations, photos and payment cards all live on there. Which is incredibly convenient until your battery dies or you suddenly can’t get online.

Before travelling, I normally download anything I might need offline, particularly boarding passes, booking confirmations and maps. I’d rather have them sitting on my phone and never need them than be standing somewhere unfamiliar trying to coax one bar of signal into loading an email.

I also like getting the boring security bits sorted beforehand. Travelling inevitably means connecting to hotel, airport and café Wi-Fi at some point, so having a VPN already installed is useful rather than trying to sort one out once I’m away. Surfshark, for example, has a dedicated download for iphone, so it can be set up before travelling and ready when needed.

It’s one of those five-minute-before-you-go jobs that’s much easier to do from the sofa than in an airport departure lounge.

A power bank that actually has enough charge

There is absolutely no point carrying a power bank that has been living at the bottom of your handbag on 7% battery for the past three months.

I have learned this lesson.

A compact power bank is now one of the first things I charge before a trip. Phones work ridiculously hard when we travel — taking photos, navigating, searching for places, displaying tickets and generally entertaining us through long waits — so the battery inevitably disappears faster than expected.

I prefer something small enough to carry around all day rather than one of the huge battery packs that feels like carrying a second phone.

The other thing I’ve learned is to check it before leaving. Not just whether the power bank itself is charged, but whether I’ve actually packed the right cable to connect it to my phone.

My Kindle!

I still love a physical book, but I don’t love sacrificing half of my hand luggage allowance to one. My Kindle is particularly useful for longer trips because I can download several books before we leave and decide what I’m actually in the mood to read once I’m there.

It also means that if I unexpectedly tear through a book in two days, I’m not hunting around the resort for the one tiny shelf of English-language paperbacks.

One charging cable that’s long enough to be useful

Hotel plug sockets appear to have been designed by people who have never wanted to use their phone in bed. They’re behind bedside tables, underneath desks or inexplicably positioned halfway across the room.

A slightly longer charging cable takes up virtually no extra space but has saved me from balancing my phone on some questionable pieces of hotel furniture more times than I can count.

If we’re travelling with several