You’ve planned the holiday of your dreams, you’ve spent hours ogling Instagram for trip Inspiration and you’ve organised a tonne of cool excursions. It’s the final few days before your vacation and now it’s time to pack – don’t panic! Packing can be super stressful, but it’s important to remember that most things can be purchased abroad (unless you’re visiting Timbuktu). It’s nice to have a well-rounded packing list, so with the help of travel experts Compare and Choose we’ve rounded up five things you’ll need on your holiday!
1 – Chargers and plug adapters
Landing in another country and realizing that you can’t charge up your phone is annoying – but what’s even more annoying is buying a suitable charger using the local plug layout, only for it to become useless when you get back home. This is especially frustrating for companies that insist on using specific sizes for their chargers, since you might not be able to find them easily abroad.
Adapters and chargers are vital if you want to keep in contact with friends and family, but they’re also really easy to overlook while packing. This goes double for caravan holidays in other countries – the charger design of the caravan might not match the design used elsewhere in the country, depending on where it was built, so you’ll need to carry twice the amount of wires if a suitable adapter isn’t available.
2 – Varied clothing
It’s all too common to see people go abroad with only one kind of clothing, depending on where they’re going –summer clothing in somewhere like Spain, for example. It’s a great idea on paper, and usually works out, but no country will have consistent weather all the time.
Say you’re staying at a tourist hotspot, like a beach resort: if bad weather rolls in, it’ll be hard to find somebody selling warm clothing since that isn’t normally a big money-maker, and the clothes you do find will likely be much more expensive than usual. Even if it’s only one outfit, make sure you have something to wear should the weather turn against you.
3 – Plasters and bandages
It can be surprisingly tedious to find good-quality plasters in even the largest shopping districts, no matter whether you’re abroad or at home – bandages are even more rare, unless you’re visiting a dedicated pharmacist’s shop.
You never know what’ll happen on a holiday, and even if you do your best to keep things running smoothly, there’ll sometimes be accidents you can’t avoid. Having a little box of bandages and sticking plasters lets you handle small cuts with ease, and they’ll hardly take up any space at all. Plus, since they don’t “spoil” or become unusable, you can actually leave them in your suitcase until your next holiday.
4 – Bottle Openers
Having a quick drink during your holiday can be a great way to relax, but without a bottle opener, any bottled alcohol you buy becomes essentially useless until you can track another one down.
This isn’t a problem if you remember to buy one when you’re out shopping, but if you get back to your room (whether it’s a hotel, caravan, holiday house or boat) and realize you don’t have one on hand, it can sometimes be a pain to track down another.
5 – A phrase book or slang guide
A lot of people forget that, in many foreign countries, not everybody will know their language. This doesn’t just apply to overseas – different areas of the UK and US use different dialects with their own slang, speech patterns and sentence structures, for example.
Not knowing how to ask for something important is vital, especially if you’re used to using slang that’s exclusive to your home country. Not only could you be misunderstood, but you might end up asking for something you didn’t want, or even accidentally insulting the person you’re asking. A little book of basic words and phrases, as well as a quick overview of local slang, can go a long way to making your holiday as easy and mistake-free as possible.
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