International travel can be a lot of fun, but make sure you take the time to protect yourself against trouble along the way. A little prep work goes a very long way towards keeping your overseas holiday entertaining and stress-free.
1. Take care of passports early
Make sure you’ve secured passports for everyone going on the trip well in advance, just to be safe. Especially for the passports of any children; a child passport photo can be quite tricky to get through regulations. Consider using an online passport solution so you can use your own camera and handle things on your own schedule.
2. Read up on expected weather
Weather isn’t necessarily going to be like what you see in movies or travel brochures about your destination. Warm climates get chilly or rainy, hot climates get cold, etc. Make sure you know what sort of clothes you should REALLY be packing before you get there, or you’ll spend your trip miserable.
3. Know what can and can’t cross borders
There are a lot of treaties, customs officers and travel safety rules out there between you and your destination. Make sure you don’t get caught up by any of them along the way; rather innocuous items can be a big problem (and things you’d expect to be problems can be totally fine).
4. Make sure you have embassy information handy
If you’re contacting an embassy during an international trip, things aren’t really trouble-free, but it’s better than needing to contact the embassy and not being able to figure out how. Write it down, save it in the phones of everyone traveling with you and do whatever it takes to make sure if anyone needs them, they can reach them.
5. Check up on phone service and other details
It’s easy to get used to certain services being available everywhere – but not every service travels well. Whether it’s your phone service, certain aspects of your health insurance, or any of a dozen other little things you take for granted, not all of them are going to work the same way you expect them to when you start crossing borders. Make sure nothing you’re dependent upon is going to fail you.
