December 12, 2025

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We travel for a wide variety of reasons—vacations, business, family obligations—and in a variety of different ways, but there’s one constant: The actual traveling can be hectic, stressful, and expensive. Considering Americans took nearly 2 billion trips in 2025 alone, that stress can be pretty epic. From planning to de-boarding, travel can be a challenge—that is, unless you know and utilize these hacks.

There are a lot of travel hacks out there in the wild, many of them dubious, but when a hack actually works to lower your costs, increase your comfort, or simply solve an irritating problem, it’s kind of magical. Here are the essential travel hacks everyone should be implementing, whether you’re traveling for pleasure, business, or any other reason.

Get a vacuum-seal travel backpack

You may have been instructed at some point to roll your clothes to make your packing more efficient. It’s not that this doesn’t work—rolling clothes tightly can improve your packing and unpacking experience. But there’s an even better way: Vacuum-sealing. You can use vacuum-sealed storage bags to compress your clothes, allowing you to fit more into your bag (or to travel much lighter with a single carry-on), but there’s a downside: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may require you to uncompress your clothes for a special check as you pass through security, which can wreak havoc on your packing.

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

Travel during off-peak times

If your main goal for travel is to see exotic places, have new experiences, or even see old friends, traveling off-peak is a powerful hack. Off-peak simply means going places when most tourists aren’t there. Most people travel for pleasure during the warmer months, for example, so deciding you’re going on a European tour in February nets you cheaper flights, cheaper hotel rooms, and less crowded everything.

Start using packing cubes

Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you: You realize you need something from a piece of luggage you spent six hours carefully organizing, compressing, and zipping closed. You dig through everything to find what you need, and then re-packing that bag is a sweaty, stressful fail. That’s where packing cubes come in.

Packing cubes don’t necessarily shrink your clothes and other possessions, but they make the whole experience of packing, unpacking, and actually finding stuff while you’re traveling much easier. They turn your chaotic piles of clothing and supplies into geometric cubes that can be organized individually and removed and replaced in your luggage easily. Because you’re dealing with uniform cubes, popping stuff in and out of your suitcase won’t result in a nervous breakdown, either.

Stash clothing in carry-on pillows

It’s truly a time to be alive: You can now purchase so-called “basic” economy airline seats that don’t allow a carry-on. And carry-on fees and restrictions are increasing as well. If you’re attempting to travel with just one small bag, you may find it a struggle—and that’s where the pillow hack comes into play. The basic idea is simple: Grab a neck pillow or pillowcase, remove the stuffing, and jam in some extra clothes instead. The pillow can still be used as a pillow (your clothes act as the cushion), but you get to smuggle extra stuff on the plane. It does work, though it works best with the neck pillow option—bringing an enormous pillowcase filled with jeans and T-shirts is going to be less successful fooling unamused flight crews.

Mount your phone horizontally

Entertaining yourself on long flights can be a challenge, especially if your whole survival plan involved sleeping for ten hours and you can’t seem to get comfortable. If your plane doesn’t offer convenient screens (I’m very fond of the “tiny screen up in the air four rows ahead of me” arrangement, myself), or the entertainment choices available aren’t appealing, you can always load up a device with movies, shows, and games.

If you find yourself stuck with just your phone for a screen, you can improv a phone holder from the barf bag typically supplied in the pocket of the seat 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 fold-down 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 that bag for, well, other purposes).

What do you think so far?

Pay for everyday expenses with a travel credit card

You’re spending money practically every day anyway—but by putting all those expenses on a credit card that awards you miles or points toward travel (and then paying that card off in full every month) you’re essentially getting free travel coupons. You’re going to buy groceries anyway, so why not get a hundred miles every time you do? Many travel credit cards offer large sign-up bonuses of anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 points (or more) once you spend a certain amount on the account, so by paying your everyday bills for a few months using the card you can fund an entire trip for free.

Reverse-image-search your Airbnb before you book

Booking a place to stay on your trip can be a hassle, and you have to wonder if you’re getting the best deal. An Airbnb might look ideal but put a big dent in your budget—but it may be listed elsewhere, and possibly for less money. You can find out using Google’s “reverse image lookup.” Pick a photo from the Airbnb listing, search for the image on Google, and other rental platforms will probably show up—or a link to a hotel’s direct web page. If nothing else, the image search might identify the apartment building or hotel depicted, which can give you a leg up on the pricing. There are also tools like HiChee that will compare listings across several platforms for you, but where’s the fun in that?

Use a pants hanger to clip your curtains closed

You drag yourself, exhausted, into a hotel room at night and don’t notice that the curtains on the windows are hanging loose. You collapse into bed, and then you’re awakened at 6 a.m. by a vengeful sun, shining through the gaps in those curtains. This hack is so simple, but it can make a big difference in your sleep quality: Take a pants hanger from your hotel closet (the ones with the metal clips) and clip your room’s curtain shut. When the morning sunlight tries to infiltrate your room and wake you up first thing in the morning, the clips will keep it out.

Store one shoe in the hotel safe

If you use the safe supplied in your hotel room to store some valuables or your essential travel documents, the worst thing you can do is forget them when you check out. A quick hack to ensure that doesn’t happen is to put something you can’t possibly forget in there as well. Some folks suggest a shoe, figuring that when you’re getting dressed for the next leg of your journey, you’ll definitely notice if one shoe is missing. But this will work with anything, as long as you choose something you can’t possibly leave without.

Download offline maps before you leave

We once lived in a world where finding your way around a new area meant paper maps and confusing directions from friends that referenced a lot of 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 one hundred feet. That’s amazing when you’re traveling in an unfamiliar place—until you lose your internet connection.

A great hack is to download offline maps of your destinations before you leave on your trip. You can do this with Google Maps or using an app like HERE WeGo. This requires some planning, as you have 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.

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Jordan Calhoun

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The Daily Newsletter Ready to do everything better? Get daily tips, tricks, and tech guides from Jordan and the team.