Travel Tips & Hacks

I set my eSIM up at home before ever packing a bag, and it was already working the second I landed in Washington, D.C. Here’s exactly how I do it on every trip.

Before our first trip with our son, I was told — more than once — that travelling with a baby or toddler was not worth it. That we should wait. That it would be too hard. I heard the same thing again when we started planning longer trips. We went anyway, and here is what…

Most people book accommodation the same way: they find something that looks nice, check the price, and confirm. Then they discover — sometimes at check-in, sometimes weeks later on their bank statement — that they paid more than they needed to, booked the wrong thing for the trip they were actually taking, or missed a…

I used to land at a foreign airport, turn airplane mode off, watch my phone connect to some random local network, and then spend the next 20 minutes either finding free wifi or accepting that I was going to pay my home carrier’s roaming rates. Then I switched to eSIM. I have not thought about…

Most advice about finding cheap flights is either obvious or wrong. Book on a Tuesday. Use incognito mode. Check at midnight. None of it is consistently true — airlines use dynamic pricing algorithms that change by the hour, and the idea that there’s a magic day or time to book is a myth that’s been…

With a background in statistics and a habit of treating every decision like an optimization problem, you’d think I’d be immune to getting ripped off on exchange rates. I wasn’t. On my first trip abroad I got hit with a 4% currency conversion fee because I used the wrong card — and only noticed it…

What if your connection wasn’t just a connection? Stopover programs let you turn a layover into a free — or nearly free — city break, sometimes with a hotel included. Instead of sitting in an airport for six hours, you could be watching the sunset over the Bosphorus, walking along Dubai Marina, or exploring Lisbon’s…

Trip planning gets expensive when you book in the wrong order. A cheap flight can become a pricey trip if the hotels are sold out, a beautiful road trip can fall apart if you choose the wrong base, and a flexible itinerary can quietly turn stressful when you leave transport, money, or phone data until…