In Preparation for your Flight
Plan Now, or Pay (a lot more than you should) Later!
Four Months Before Your Trip
(or whenever you decide you’re going)
Shop for Airfares on a Tuesday. According to this NY Times Article, shopping this early before your flight (and on a day when companies try to one-up each other on Monday’s deals!) gives you the best odds for getting a cheap airfare.
Consider alternative travel arrangements. Megabus and Amtrak routinely offer cheap or comparable travel (Megabus tickets famously start at $1!), and if you’re not in a hurry to get to where you’re going or dealing with issues that might make slower travel a problem (e.g. children), it’ll stretch your budget nicely.
Check your company’s vacation policy for how long you can take off, how much advance notice you need to give your company, etc. Even if you’re your own boss, you likely don’t want to schedule the trip around a time you know you have other obligations that might cut the trip short (or if you’re concerned about your ability to get back in time, might conflict with an upcoming event!)
Clear your calendar of any other appointments. We know it takes a while to get on some folks’ calendars — so get these sorted out as soon as possible!
Expecting your Period? Consider switching to a Moon Cup. (NSFW) Your period is likely to happen at SOME point during your trip, and one big advantage over carrying a bunch of tampons and pads is that there’s less stuff to carry when you use a cup. If you want to try it, it’ll take a couple of cycles to get used to these — so you’ll need the next few months to get the kinks out of your process.
Double-check your finances. This isn’t talking about your general financial state — it’s about the state of your credit cards and any alternative forms of finance (Bluebird, traveler’s checks, etc.) you might come to depend on during your trip.
A credit card that’s nearly maxed out and about to be denied is NOT a good credit card if you find yourself needing to buy a full-price airplane ticket to hustle home. If you don’t have the means, you’ll need to consider where you’re going to find the means, even if “the means” is just a card with a high enough credit card limit to get yourself out of trouble.
The Month Before Your Trip
Order address labels, device skins, and/or business cards. You’ll have about a week between now and when you need to order them (keep reading), but a little forethought now will mean the difference between labels and designs you’ll want to use after the trip, and stuff that ends up scraped off afterwards.
You need the business cards for networking and exchanging contact information with people, and device skins will save your electronics from minor scratches, but all three of these items can work double-duty as makeshift luggage tags and “if lost, contact:” labels to reduce the odds that your belongings become permanently separated from your person.
Check Pinterest for Travel and DIY tips. These projects always take longer than you think — especially if you’ve got it in your head to try making an infinity dress, or making a reusable shopping tote, or any of their other solutions designed to save you money and luggage space in the long run.
Even if you don’t try to DIY your way out of this, some of the more novel ideas — like how to pack a capsule wardrobe to minimize your luggage — can still give you good ideas, especially if you have special requirements (e.g. transgender, wheelchair user, diabetic) that require you to take some extra precautions.
Check your shoes. If they need replacing, you may have to hunt for a new pair over the next couple of weeks, assuming you don’t just order replacements online (which also takes time to get to you)! Make sure to give yourself time to break in your new shoes do you don’t develop blisters while traveling!
Three Weeks Before Your Trip
Finish your Online Shopping. Just because you can order certain online purchases with overnight shipping doesn’t mean that you should, and in this case planning ahead means saving a buttload of money on said shipping.
Each site and service you use has a different time scale of what is “fast turnaround”, but assume they’ll take two weeks. (the extra week is so you have time to deal with shipping back returns and any other kinks in the system!)
The Week Before Your Trip
Take care of your prescriptions! Hopefully you’ve not “forgotten” to move your appointments so that they don’t overlap with your trip, but make sure you’ve either acquired enough medication to last the duration of your trip, or at least you’ve managed to set it up with a pharmacy system that allows you to pick up more while traveling (HINT: make sure your system exists where you’re going if you’re trying to do this option!)
Finish your Local Shopping. Yes, you could do this the ‘day of’, but the whole point of this article is the idea that you should be doing things now so they’re not so expensive later. A strategic trip to Target or the Container Store at this stage to pick up anything you’re missing (e.g. travel chargers, USB cords, SD cards, organizers) will pay major dividends later if it means you’re not having to buy the same items at the airport or your destination.
Print up some insurance. If you haven’t already taken care of things like custom address labels and business cards already, put your inkjet printer to work on printing up DIY versions of Address Labels and Business Cards from your office supply store.
More importantly, do a quick copy of anything that’s going to be tough to replace in a pinch and/or will require you to show some proof of identity if said identity becomes lost or stolen — credit cards, driver’s license, passport, insurance card — and stow it someplace safe, either kept at home, with a trusted companion, or in a cloud service. You probably want to take a copy of this WITH you as well somehow (score one for cloud services!), as long as you can keep it in a safe place.
Document all your devices. Every modern device you own — your laptop, your e-reader, your iPod — has a serial number that can be used to track your device as well as keep up with warranties, and you should make sure to have EVERY device you’re taking with you documented (if you haven’t done this already!)
And on that note…
Add digital contact information to all your devices. You may have a label on your items, but labels can still be damaged, and this next step is easy enough that there’s no reason not to do it: on devices that contain digital information, include your contact information (e.g. cell phone number, email address) digitally. You’ll want to include it in multiple places, as the information’s only good if people actually find it, so:
- For anything with a camera feature: take a picture of yourself holding up a sign with your contact information.
- For e-readers: use your contact information as a sleep screen if you’ve hacked your device to have this functionality; if not, send yourself a PDF containing this contact information to be stored on the device.
- For anything you can upload pictures to: Include pictures containing your contact info on the device, and use them as your wallpaper if you can!
- For laptops, smartphones, tablets: Install Prey before your trip. If any of them go missing, you’ll activate Prey and be able to track down your gear.
Day(s) Before Your Trip
Do Laundry. Do I have to explain this one?
Assemble everything you’re taking with you. You’ll likely realize you’re missing something when putting your luggage together, like luggage locks or tags. It’s better to take care of these issues now versus trying to do so the day of!
Back up your Electronic Devices. If you’re not doing this already, you NEED to make a copy of the data on your laptop and other devices because anything that happens to them (e.g. breakage, loss) will also mean the loss of your data if you don’t. If you don’t have an external drive, you may need to use a cloud service like Carbonite.
This goes double for anything that has an SD Card — which includes your camera, your 3DS, and possibly your smartphone! If you’re bringing flash drives, don’t forget to back those up too!
Before you Leave
Download (and update)! your apps, games, ebooks, and other software. Besides preventing additional charges on your data plan, you’re likely going to have to do without wireless access for some of your trip (not to mention whatever signal strength is at your destination!)
Print up your itinerary, along with any necessary trip information (reservation codes, etc.) Yes, you’re probably using Tripit or another app to manage all this on your phone, but if anything happens to your phone between when you leave the house and when you board your mode of transit, you don’t want that to cause you to miss your connection as well!
Verify you have your ID! If you misplace or lose your Driver’s License / Passport, you’ll need to provide extra time to make it through the TSA — because you’ll be going through enhanced screening. So yes, it IS possible to board a plane without ID, provided you’re ready to bend over backwards for the TSA in the process. It may suck, but not as much as having to burn all the money you spent on your flight up to this point.
Do a dry run. You don’t have to run to the airport and back, but the less you leave to chance on the day of travel, the less likely you’ll forget something important like, say, your underwear or your charge cord.
Clean up your shit. This should go without saying, but it’s the easiest way to make the return home that much more pleasant. Besides, it’ll help make sure you’ve got all your things accounted for and that you’re not forgetting something important because you didn’t see it before you left.
And beyond that?
The idea behind these tips isn’t to make you super-prepared, its to keep you from spending extra money and time ON your trip (or at least to make recovering from a bad accident that much easier) so that when things go wrong, they don’t go horribly wrong.
Bon Voyage!
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