As a follow up to my travel guidelines, I want to share some practical tips from my experience.

Research ahead of time

I'm paying a nice chunk of change to travel, so I will invest some time in planning ahead: tourist attractions, tourist pitfalls, etc.

Reddit and youtube travel vlogs are fantastic for this. I was so nervous about traveling to India that I even found a video of someone arriving at the airport and booking an uber to the hotel (warranted anxiety - it was overwhelming!).

Book but don't pay ahead

This bit me on a recent trip, where I booked the wrong dates for the hotel, and had pre-paid. Lesson learned!

Hotel breakfast

Be mindful of the price and reviews, to be sure, but in my experience, a decent hotel breakfast is a great way to start the day.

Travel esim

I was recently told about purchasing an esim for travel, and tried out Airalo on this trip. While pricier than purchasing a local sim card, it's also far less hassle. Landing from the flight with data access makes traveling to the hotel a breeze.

And there's no risk of losing the sim card for home, since it never leaves the phone. Nice.

City mapper

City mapper is a directions app that specializes in certain cities. I found results to generally be higher quality than google maps. Compare and contrast - in some places, neither will be great.

Google maps list

This is a super handy feature: make a list for the trip, and add tourist attractions, restaurants, the hotel, etc.. This is great to help guide explorations around the city, and also serves as a historical list of places visited.

Look up

Speaking of map apps, I was amazed that in Amsterdam, there were restaurants and cafes missing! I learned my lesson: open my eyes and look around, don't tunnel vision to the internet.

Tourist transit passes

Some countries have info desks at metro stations - I asked at Amsterdam and was pleasantly surprised to find a great public transit pass (covering bus, tram, subway, train) geared towards tourists.

Go forth

This list is non-exhaustive - I will come up with more ideas as I continue to travel.