What fifty well-travelled Canadians actually carry, actually use, and actually rely on — and the one thing nearly everybody gets wrong
I ran our 6th Kaffee Klatsch from a hotel room in Krakow, which felt appropriate for a session about travel technology, since I spent the first ten minutes of it disappearing from my own screen. Several of you told me so in the chat, with admirable patience. Technology, as we shall see, is a subject best approached with humility.
Nearly a hundred members signed up. The subject was travel technology, and I want to repeat the thing I said before we began, because it shaped everything that followed: this was never going to be a session about the newest and the cleverest. There is an enormous amount of that information that floods your social media pages and your inbox. Much of that is generic, designed to get you to buy something or just plain crap. That’s why we did this session about what works, from your peers, to try to get to some info that’s actually useful.
We asked you. What came back, across 6 chat storms and 4 polls, was the accumulated practice of people who have been solving these problems on the road for decades, often without realizing they had solved anything at all.
This is the Wheel & Anchor Collective Toolkit. It belongs to the members who built it.
The principle underneath all of it
Before the tools, the rule I suggest you to carry into every decision that follows:
Good travel technology removes the friction you already feel. It does not hand you a new hobby. If a tool requires an arduous tutorial before you leave home, it will not survive the trip.
Every single thing in this document earns its place by that test, or it does not belong here.
And everything below falls into one of three “jobs”. Your phone is there to keep you connected with the people at home. It is there to help you find your way and be understood. And it is there to help you keep what you saw. That third one is the one we all underrate and it turned out to be the richest part of the session by a considerable distance.
Job One: Staying connected
What do you actually do about your phone abroad?
We began here on purpose, because this is where the money is, and where a confident wrong answer costs real money.
The poll surprised me a bit…
| I buy an eSIM online | 41% |
| I have a roaming plan from home | 26% |
| I use only WiFi | 17% |
| I buy a physical SIM when I arrive | 9% |
| I don’t know what to do | 7% |
I had braced for “I don’t know what to do” to win. It came last. Four out of ten of you are already buying eSIMs online before you fly, which puts this room comfortably ahead of where the travel industry assumes our generation to be, and I think that deserves saying out loud.
What does it actually cost?
The full tables present every major Canadian carrier, the daily rates, the travel passes, and the eSIM providers side by side. They will be in the companion piece to this article, because carrier pricing moves and that page is maintained. Here are the three numbers that matter, as they stood in September 2026, for two weeks in Europe:
- Do nothing at all and simply use your phone as you would at home: roughly $250.
- Spend ten minutes buying your carrier’s Europe travel pass: roughly $60.
- Spend five minutes buying an eSIM online before you fly: roughly $45.
The difference between doing nothing and making one phone call is about two hundred bucks. Per person. Which over 2 weeks buys you a phenomenal dinner in Rome. I’ll take the Rome dinner, please.
One observation that surprises people every time: the discount brands are not discounted here. Koodo’s Europe pass is Telus’s Europe pass, to the dollar, because Koodo is Telus. Whatever you pay monthly, we all pay roughly the same to roam. Do not assume your provider is the cheap one.
And a word of permission, because this is not a competition. If you travel abroad once a year for ten days, your carrier’s travel pass is a perfectly good answer. No new app, no account, no fiddling around. You press one button and it works. Sixty bucks for simplicity is a legitimate purchase, and I would far rather you bought it than spent your first evening in Florence troubleshooting.
The thing nearly everybody gets wrong
This was the hottest thread in the chat by a distance, and it deserves its own space, because several of you have changed your behaviour over it and some of what circulated in the chat, in good faith, was not quite right.
Susan F. told us she has stopped buying eSIMs online, because she cannot keep her phone number with most of them, and she needs that number for the two-step verification her bank insists on. Cheryl C. is in the middle of switching back from an eSIM to a roaming plan for exactly the same reason. Katharine W. put the problem precisely: the bank sends a code by text to your mobile number on record, and if you are running an eSIM, you don’t receive it. Diana J. reported that Bell had advised her to switch her verification to email instead and Susan F. was quite right to push back, because not every institution allows it. She mentioned Tangerine and as far as we can see, she’s bang on.
Every one of them has identified a real problem. It is one of the genuine hazards of modern travel, and it can lock you out of your own money in a foreign country on a Sunday. So let me set out what is actually going on, because the fix is simpler than the confusion suggests.
An eSIM is a second phone line, and it is almost always data only. It does not carry your Canadian number. That is not a flaw in any particular provider – it is what the product is. So when you read that a provider “lets you keep your own number,” what is actually meant, in nearly every case, is that you keep your Canadian line running alongside the new one. No eSIM provider reaches into your phone and preserves your Rogers number. Your Canadian carrier does that, by continuing to be your Canadian carrier.
Which means the arrangement that suits most of us is both at once:
- Leave your Canadian line switched on. It keeps your number alive, so texts from your bank, your family and your airline still arrive.
- Turn data roaming off on that Canadian line. This is the setting that otherwise downloads 2 weeks of email at a dollar a megabyte while your phone sits in your coat pocket. It is the single most expensive setting on your phone.
- Add the eSIM, and let it carry all your data. Maps, messaging, email, everything.
Modern phones handle two lines comfortably and have done for years. This is not an advanced manoeuvre. It is two switches.
One caveat worth checking with your own carrier before you fly: on most Canadian plans, receiving a text abroad does not trigger a daily roaming charge, while sending one or making a call does. But the terms vary, and they change. A five-minute phone call to your provider before departure will tell you exactly where you stand, and is worth making.
And one piece of news that catches people out. If you have bought an iPhone recently, you may have no choice in the matter. All four Canadian iPhone 17 models: the 17, the 17 Pro, the 17 Pro Max and the 17 Air, ship with no physical SIM tray at all. They are eSIM-only. The iPhone 14, 15, 16 and 16e sold in Canada all kept theirs. Sue G. mentioned in the chat that she had just upgraded to a 17 and was still learning its features; this is one of them. It is not a cause for alarm because eSIMs are genuinely way easier once you have done one. It does however mean the old habit of buying a physical SIM at the airport is no longer available to you and will undoubtedly soon go the way of the VHS tape.
Your hard-won rules
I asked for your one rule about staying connected abroad, and you gave us a properly considered set.
Cheryl C. does not use public WiFi at all, instead she buys data. From a security standpoint this is the single best piece of advice in the section, and it is the reason a data plan is worth more than its price suggests. Lynne M. agrees, and adds: connect to your SIM before you leave. Katharine W.’s rule is two words: use a VPN, always.
Susan L-P. offered something rather lovely that has nothing to do with equipment: she stays connected to home only for short periods each day. Janet J. does something similar by telling family and friends in advance that she is travelling, so that contact becomes emergency-only rather than constant. Both are, I think, rules about the quality of a holiday rather than about technology, and they may be the most valuable things said in that round.
Angus S. uses the Telus Snowbird international package, which is worth knowing about if you are away for a long stretch rather than 2 weeks. Susan M. reported buying 3 GB for eight dollars, which lasted her the two weeks which is a useful reality check on how little data most of us actually need.
On that question: unless you are streaming video, about a gigabyte a day is generous. I would personally take 10 GB for two weeks in Europe and expect to have some left.
Which messaging app?
The second poll settled this comprehensively.
| WhatsApp or similar, to reach family | 82% |
| A translation app | 47% |
| Something that backs up my photographs | 47% |
| Offline maps | 41% |
| None of these yet | 8% |
Eighty-two per cent. Whatever else is true about travel technology, messaging has been settled by the market and the market is WhatsApp. It works on data alone, so an eSIM serves it perfectly well, and your friends and family at home continue to reach you on the number they already have saved.
Susan C. prefers Telegram, and so, for what it is worth, do we. It is what we use for our own groups on trips, precisely because it is not as ubiquitous, which keeps the group chat feeling like the group rather than like everything else in your life. Signal and Facebook Messenger do the same job. Any of them will do. Having one is what matters.
Does it actually work? Two honest answers
Marilyn A. gave us her point of view. She has travelled a great deal with us, and has used Airalo in Turkey, in Spain, throughout Europe, and has never once had a problem with it.
But it would be dishonest to leave it there, because two other members had a rather different couple of weeks.
Terry C. could not get her eSIM working on arrival in Greece and spent hours on the phone with the provider, into the night. Susan C. installed hers incorrectly the first time, though she was quick to say their online help was excellent, and it took her about half an hour to sort out.
Both were eventually fine. Both would do it again. But the lesson is unambiguous and it is the reason I put it this way at the session: buy and install your eSIM at home, on your own WiFi, before you fly. Not in the arrivals hall. The technology is genuinely easy; the arrivals hall is not the place to discover otherwise.
A promise about VPNs
Eric H. asked, straightforwardly, what a VPN actually is and how it works. Katharine W. swears by them. Cheryl C., Laverne W., Judy S., Susan F., Lynne M. and Marilyn A. all named it, unprompted, when I asked at the end what we should cover next.
I deferred it twice during the session, which I now regret, because it was plainly the thing the room most wanted. It is properly its own subject, and it sits naturally alongside the money questions: how you protect your banking, your cards and your accounts while you are away. We will cover it at the next Kaffee Klatsch. Consider it a commitment.
Job Two: Finding your way, and being understood
The best advice given all session
This came from Janet J., who gave a great explanation for an option which is free, requires no new app, and will improve every trip you take from here on.
Janet uses Google Maps for the simple reason that she already uses it at home, so she is fluent in it. Before she travels, she sits down at her own kitchen table and puts everything onto the map: the hotel she is staying in, every site she wants to see, and where the train station is. Then, and this is the part that matters, she looks at the directions. How long does it take to walk? Is it a tram or a bus? How many changes?
And then she lets that decide where she stays.
She was planning Barcelona for January as we spoke. She wants the Maritime Museum and she wants the Sagrada Família. So the question becomes: is this hotel worth it because I can walk to both, or is the cheaper one genuinely cheaper once I am taking a bus and a subway every day of the trip?
Mark it all on your maps before you go. Then you can use it offline if you need to, but of course you don’t have to.
What Janet has understood is that the real work of travelling well is thinking, and thinking is far easier in an armchair in Canada than on a street corner in Catalonia with a suitcase. Technology’s best use is not to help you in the moment. It is to move the hard part of the trip to a time when you have all the time in the world.
I do exactly this and recommend it constantly, particularly for the free days in our itineraries. Members often ask what they should do with them. The answer is that you should decide before you leave, with a map in front of you and work out whether the thing you want is a 45 minute tram ride or a ten-dollar Uber. Here in Poland this week I nearly spent 45 minutes on a tram before discovering the taxi was ten bucks.
Christina M. adds the refinement that makes it bulletproof: once you have plotted everything, take a screenshot of the map. A screenshot needs no signal, no app and no battery-hungry background process. It is the most reliable offline map there is.
Offline maps, and the step almost nobody takes
This was the lowest-scoring option in the poll at 41%, and I suspect the true figure is lower still, because there is a step people miss.
Google Maps can work offline, but only if you download the area you need while you still have WiFi, before you leave home. It is not automatic. Almost nobody does it, and then they blame the app when it fails them in a valley with no signal. If you take one action after reading this paragraph, make it that one.
There are also apps built for offline use from the ground up, of which Maps.me is the best known. And I will note in passing that a number of members have been asking me about alternatives to the large American technology companies lately, for reasons that are entirely their own business. Those alternatives exist and they are perfectly good.
For translation, Angus S. named the one that earns its place: Google’s photo translation for signage and menus. You point the camera at a menu and it renders it in English, live. It is the closest thing to magic in this entire document, and it turns a slightly anxious dinner into an ordinary one.
The apps you told us about
Organised by what they actually do for you, rather than alphabetically.
For managing the trip itself. TripIt is my own personal favourite. I held it up to the camera, which those of you who could see me will recall. It takes your flights, your hotels, your trains and anything else you forward to it, and arranges the whole lot chronologically so you stop hunting through your inbox at check-in. The paid version adds flight notifications and alternatives. Laverne W. uses Wanderlog for itinerary building, which does flight notifications too. Janet J. uses Visit A City for planning, hotels, sights and food. Cheryl C. named Rome2Rio, which answers the question “how do I actually get from here to there” across trains, buses, flights and ferries in one screen, invaluable when you are piecing together a route yourself.
For arriving in decent shape. Catherine P. and Diana J. both named Timeshifter, and it deserves explaining properly, because jet lag is the tax we all pay. Timeshifter is not a supplement or a pill. Jet lag is largely a function of your circadian rhythm, and the app gives you a schedule, of light, darkness, and when to sleep, beginning in the days before you fly, continuing through the flight and after you land, to shift your body clock deliberately rather than leaving it to sort itself out. Aerolopa, for aircraft seat maps, tells you which seat on your specific aircraft is worth having, which on a 9-hour flight is not a small thing.
For finding things to do. Katharine W., Lynne M. and Jeanne F. all named GetYourGuide; Susan M. named Viator; Diana J. named Tours by Locals for private guides. All three do much the same job: finding a reputable local tour or guide, particularly on a free day. I would add Airbnb Experiences, which people forget exists because they think of Airbnb as accommodation. And Keri R. offered the most civilized recommendation of the session: Via Michelin, filtered to Bib Gourmand, which lists Michelin-recommended restaurants that are explicitly not the starred ones. Good food, sensibly priced, chosen by people who know. We do not all want fine dining every night.
For money. Wise was named by Cheryl C., Jaquelyn C. and Diana J., and it is the one we recommend to our own travellers. It holds balances in many currencies, converts at rates the banks cannot match, and works as a debit card abroad. Diana also uses XE for checking rates. Angus S. named Splitwise for travelling with friends, which tracks who paid for what across a whole trip so that nobody has to divide a restaurant bill at the table in front of a weary server. Judy M. offered the fair caveat: at the end of it, you may find yourself e-transferring somebody seven dollars.
And the tip that drew the most agreement in the chat. JoAnne E. pointed out that recent iPhones have a currency converter built into the Calculator app. Just tap the convert button and it will turn Euros into Canadian Dollars at the live rate, with no additional app, no account and nothing to download. Several members replied immediately to say they had no idea. If you have an iPhone updated in the last year or so, go and look for it now.
On AI, briefly
JoAnne E. told us she uses ChatGPT and Claude for maps and planning, that they will find and buy tickets for her and route her to the event, and that they have recommended which seats to take on a boat tour. Judy M. named ChatGPT as well.
This is a genuinely large subject and we will give it a session of its own. For now, two honest observations. It is improving very quickly, and it is already useful for the tedious middle part of planning: comparing options, working out sequences, answering the questions that would otherwise take six browser tabs. And it is confidently wrong often enough that you should verify anything that costs money or involves a departure time. Treat it as a well-read friend who has never actually been there.
That being said… and I say this with considerable personal experience. AI is far from perfect and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown up at a business that isn’t there or taken a route I would NOT recommend. Nothing beats firsthand knowledge from trusted confidants.
And now the counterweight
Because a section about navigation apps that does not include this would be dishonest.
Sharon M. gave us the line of the session: her GPS sent her to a farmer’s field in France, and, as she put it, “the failure is to trust GPS when you obviously shouldn’t.”
I have my own. Driving a rental car through Cortona, in Tuscany, following Google Maps down streets that were very plainly not built for cars, I came within inches of wedging the thing permanently between two medieval walls. The map was not wrong, exactly. It was just answering a different question from the one I needed answered which in that case was “SHOULD I actually be driving down this road”.
Katharine W. raised the deeper version of the same point: we are losing the capacity to read a paper map, because we no longer have to. And Pamela R. still buys a folded paper road map, not from Canada, but on arrival, when she is crossing a country or a region and wants to see where she is going without staring into a telephone.
I think she is right, and not only for practical reasons. A paper map shows you the shape of a place. A phone shows you a blue line.
Job Three: Keeping what you saw
Here is the most interesting thing about this session.
We sent out a survey beforehand asking what app or gadget you would tell every traveller to get. Dozens of you replied, generously and in detail. Not one person mentioned photos.
Then I asked the room, live, what they do with their pictures when they get home and the chat would not stop. It ran for the rest of the session. It was, by some way, the warmest and most generous subject matter of the hour.
I think the reason is that we do not think of this as technology. We think of it as remembering. But it is the job our phones do for us that we would miss most if it stopped.
Where it all goes
iCloud dominated: Eric H., Susan M., Laverne W. and Carole M. all use it, Carole in folders. Gillian C. backs up to Google Drive. Francine D. transfers everything to an external hard drive. Judy M. downloads to her laptop and saves to iCloud, which is the belt-and-braces approach and the correct one.
Danielle B. summed up the modern arrangement with admirable candour: “Trust in the cloud and keep paying more monthly.” Quite.
But Eric H. named the universal problem, and named it honestly: “iCloud mess of photos – need to organize them.” Every one of us has this. Thousands of pictures, backed up perfectly, and completely unfindable.
Staying on top of them
The members who have solved it have solved it with habits, not apps.
Susan M. sets up an album for each trip and backs that up. JoAnne E. saves into collections organised by year and subject. Susan F. labels photographs as she goes, so she has the specifics about what she was photographing while she can still remember them which, as anyone who has looked at an unlabelled church three years later will confirm, is a narrow window.
And then the culling, which is where the real discipline lies. Lynne M. culls constantly through the trip, whenever she has a few minutes. Susan L-P. uses the flying time to clean out photos, which strikes me as the single best use of a long-haul flight I have heard. Janet J. is the most ruthless: before the next trip, she deletes a great many and keeps only the best.
The photographs you will actually look at again are the ones you chose. The rest are storage or for the Trashbin. You’ll thank us later.
Sharing them
Diana J. described what I think is the cleverest system in this document, and it took the room a moment to appreciate it. She posts to Instagram daily, with the account set to private and visible only to family, with the location function switched on. Her family always knows where she is. It is automatically backed up. It is organised chronologically by definition. And when she comes home, she has a complete, searchable, illustrated history of the trip that she can pull up any time, without having built anything.
Susan C. and Cheryl C. both made the same point about group albums: everybody on the trip adds their photographs, because we all see different things. Cheryl added the benefit nobody thinks of until it happens: sharing photographs is how you finally end up with pictures of yourself. On any trip, the person holding the camera vanishes from the record of it.
Cheryl C. also sends a daily blog home to her family by WhatsApp, with the best photographs of the day and that, she says, is her journal. Which is rather elegant: the thing she does to stay in touch turns out to be the thing that keeps the record.
Janet J.‘s family uses Facebook. Sue G. posts to Facebook only after she gets home, not while travelling and Judy M. explained exactly why that is wise: “But nefarious people also know you’re away.” If you do post live, Diana’s private-account approach solves it neatly.
Making something of them
This is where the room came alive.
Shari N. and Katharine W. both use Shutterfly for photo books, and Katharine’s method is worth setting out in full, because it is the most rigorous system anybody described:
Before she leaves, she creates a folder for each day of the trip on OneDrive. Each day, she writes for that day. When she gets home, the writing and the photographs are already sorted, and she builds the journal from them. And she always journals.
Pauline Z. scrapbooks hers, and writes the interesting facts the guide told her underneath the relevant pictures which means the story survives alongside the image, and the story is the part that fades. Judy M. is planning a hard-copy memory book to be called Judy’s Excellent Adventures, a title I hope she does not change.
And Danielle B., who has been to a hundred and thirty countries, prints the single best photograph from each one and arranges them in collage frames on the walls of her home. A hundred and thirty countries. She reports that they make for good conversation, which may be the understatement of the session.
And the journals
Yes, people still keep them.
Laverne W. uses an app called FindPenguins, which is a travel journal that also draws a map of where you have been, can be kept private or shared, and will print the whole thing as a book afterwards. Cheryl C. and JoAnne E. both use the plain Notes app on their phones, daily, for the itinerary and for the details they would otherwise forget. Terry C. adds her own notes directly to the Wheel & Anchor itinerary, which I rather love. Sharon M.‘s husband keeps a daily journal at home and simply keeps it up while they travel — and she says she is very glad he does.
My own method, for what it is worth, is dictation. Those of you who have travelled with me have seen me muttering into my telephone and drawn your own conclusions. But typing on these things with adult fingers is a misery, and speaking into the Notes app is not. It does not even matter greatly if you stumble over your words — the transcription usually sorts it out, and if it doesn’t, you will still know what you meant.
One question we did not answer
Nancy Y. asked, at the very end, how to share photographs at their actual size so they can be used in a travel book. It is a real problem and a specific one: most sharing methods compress images, and a compressed photograph printed at full page size comes back grainy and disappointing.
She is right, we did not answer it, and it is the reason photographs will get a session and an article of their own. Watch for it.
The last word on all of this
It belongs to Judy M., who typed it into the chat while we were talking about backups and albums and books:
“Take photos but don’t live your trip through the camera. Experience the trip.”
I was walking around Krakow with our group that morning, and half the tourists in the square were looking at their screens rather than at the thing on the other side of them. The best memories are still the ones in your head. Everything in this section is in service of those, not a substitute for them.
The kit
A word before the list. A good deal of what came up here: AirTags, power banks, adapters, lanyards, cross-body bags, waterproof cases, the paper map, also came up in the Collective Suitcase, our companion article from the Kaffee Klatsch 5. I am not going to go through all of it again. What follows is what the room added this time, viewed through the technology lens.
Adapters, which were the runaway winner
The most common answer in the entire pre-session survey was the travel adapter. Not an app. Not a gadget. The humble adapter.
I held up two of mine on the call, a European one with two round pins that will accept North American and UK plugs on the other side, and its British equivalent. Ray W. carries a five-in-one universal adapter with multiple plug configurations. Carole M. named the Dash adapter with a built-in power bank, which she has carried to 150 countries, a figure I found genuinely impressive.
Susan made the dissenting case, and it is a good one: if you are only going to one or two countries, skip the bulky universal unit and buy the specific converter for where you are going. Smaller, lighter, cheaper, and it will not fall out of the wall at three in the morning.
The upgrade that solves the real problem is the one JoAnne E. and Susan F. both named: a small multi-port extension cord with both USB and USB-C ports. One adapter into the wall, and then everything else including phone, watch, tablet, camera, hearing aids charges all at once. Hotel rooms have precisely one accessible socket and it is always behind the headboard.
Power, and the length of cables
Power banks came up repeatedly, and Lynne M., Judy S., Elaine C., Susan F., Cheryl C., Susan L-P., Pauline Z. and Janet J. all named one. Susan M. carries a single Apple portable charger that handles watch, phone and iPad together.
Mine is frankly oversized and it will charge my laptop twice or my phone about four times, because I am paranoid about running flat. You do not need that. A decent power bank costs twenty or thirty dollars and will do the job. Whatever the manufacturer claims about battery life, I have never once made a modern phone last a full day of travelling.
And then Pamela R.‘s contribution, which is so simple it is almost annoying: a 9-foot charging cable. Susan C. carries a long one too. The socket is never near the bed. A long cable costs a few dollars and solves a problem you have had in every hotel room you have ever stayed in.
Knowing where your things are
The AirTag, and its equivalents, is the piece of kit I would put in every bag.
Danielle B. told the best story of the session. At the end of the Camino de Santiago, the hotel told her group their bags were missing. They were not missing. They were in a van a few streets away, with the driver asleep in it. She knew, because of an AirTag.
Mine did something similar in Helsinki. I had missed a connection, the airline assured me my bag would be there, it was not, and they told me they did not know where it was. I told them it was in that airport, about 50 yards from where we were standing. I showed them the app. They walked me to the luggage storage area, I pressed the button, the thing started beeping, and we found the suitcase in the pile.
It does not find your bag for you. What it does is give you the conversation with the airline, and that is worth the price on its own.
Some practical notes. The standard AirTag is a little thick for a wallet; there are now credit-card-shaped equivalents, SpotMinders among them, that slide straight in. Louise S., who is on Android, uses Tile. The honest position is that Apple is ahead here, because any Apple device that passes near your AirTag reports its location; the Samsung and Tile networks are smaller, and Google’s needs several devices to pass by before it will place your tag. If you are on an iPhone, I would strongly recommend one. JoAnne E. adds the reminder that will save somebody a trip: change the batteries before you go.
And Sue G. supplied the cautionary version: she bought an AirTag and discovered her phone was too old to use it. Check first.
Keeping hold of the phone itself
Sharon M. described the best small object in this article: a clip that fits between your phone and its case, allowing you to attach a neck strap or wrist strap. Her reasoning was exact — it saves you losing the phone when you lean over a railing to take the best picture. Which is, of course, precisely when you lose phones.
Nancy Y. uses a leather lanyard; Diana J. uses one so that she does not put the phone down or drop it. Francine D. carries a waterproof sleeve for boating and the beach, and Terry C. a waterproof case for her camera, worn around her neck, so that it stays dry, stays with her, and lets her photograph in the rain.
Diana J. also named a cross-body bag with a locking hook against pickpockets, holding wallet, phone and insulin. Terry C. recommends Pacsafe, bought at the CAA store.
The small things
Patricia H. named noise-cancelling headphones, and I swear by them, not only for flights but for trains, thin hotel walls, and the twenty minutes of quiet before dinner. Katharine W. carries a Bluetooth speaker.
I showed you my own small indulgence: a clip-on reading light that attaches to a book, charges by USB, and cost about five bucks. Travelling with a roommate, it means you can work late without inflicting it on anybody. JoAnne E. prefers an around-the-neck light, which she finds comfortable on the plane.
And then the odds and ends that earn their place: Jeanne F.‘s 2 bungee cords. Fran D.‘s collapsible travel hangers and clothes pins. I carry clothespins too, for sink laundry and for pinning up notes. Gillian C.‘s do-it-yourself first aid kit. Susan F.‘s small rolls of toilet paper, which need no explanation to anyone who has travelled. And a compact Swiss Army knife with carabiners, named in the survey “for purposes I never would have anticipated” with the standing warning that mine now lives somewhere in India, having gone into my carry-on by mistake.
The failures we will not repeat
I will be honest: our session ran long, and this round did not get the time it deserved. I suspect this room has far better stories than it had the chance to tell. But here is what we gathered.
Mine is running out of juice which is why I carry that absurd power bank and, relatedly, the adapter left in the wall. It has happened to me more than once, and it is now a permanent item on my hotel checkout list. You arrive at the next hotel, reach into the bag, and it is three hundred miles behind you in a socket.
Sue G. bought an AirTag without checking her phone could use it. Lynne M. has left things in the hotel safe, as have I, repeatedly and Susan L-P. supplied the antidote, which is the finest piece of lateral thinking in either of these articles:
Put one shoe in the safe the night before you leave. You will not leave the room without discovering it.
Terry C.‘s night on the telephone to Greece belongs here too, as does Sharon M.‘s farmer’s field. And Terry C. offers the underlying discipline that prevents most of these: put things in the same place, always. Or, as Katharine W. replied: never change my systems.
Your five minutes before you fly
Everything above, reduced to the things worth doing before you leave the house. Download the printable list.
- Decide: carrier pass, or eSIM, or both.
- If eSIM – buy and install it at home, on your own WiFi. Not in the arrivals hall.
- Keep your Canadian line switched on for texts. Turn data roaming off on it.
- Check what your bank sends verification codes to, and sort it out before you go.
- Download your offline maps while still on WiFi at home.
- Plot the hotel, the sights and the station on the map and check the journey times.
- Confirm your photo backup is switched on, and that you have space.
- Pack the adapter, the long cable and the power bank. Put “adapter out of the wall” on your checkout list.
This belongs to you
Reading back over my detailed notes, what strikes me is how little of the good material was about products at all.
The best advice of the session was a woman at her kitchen table in Canada working out whether a hotel was worth the walk. The second best was a shoe in a safe. The most useful system was a folder for each day, made before departure. The wisest thing anybody said was to put the camera down.
The gadgets change every year. What does not change is the habit of thinking ahead, and the willingness of people who have done it a hundred times to tell somebody who has not.
To Marilyn, Janet, Diana, Katharine, Susan F., Susan C., Susan M., Susan L-P., Susan S., Cheryl, Terry, Eric, JoAnne, Judy M., Judy S., Laverne, Sharon, Danielle, Francine, Lynne, Angus, Pauline, Jeanne, Jaynie, Jackie, Jaquelyn, Nancy Y., Nancy K., Carole, Christina, Shari, Gillian, Sue, Donna, Ray, Rosemary, Patricia, Pamela, Keri, Diane R., Elaine, Louise, Lori, Kathleen, Joanne M., Claudia, Dianne, Zoia, Michelle, Marie, Ursula, Kimberly, Catherine, Diane K., Laura, Clement, Margaret, and everyone else who typed into that chat box, thank you. This is yours and your fellow members appreciate it.
The Wheel & Anchor Collective Toolkit is compiled from the sixth Kaffee Klatsch, held on September 15, 2026, together with the pre-session member survey. Member contributions are reproduced with light editing for length and clarity. Connectivity costs were checked in September 2026; see the companion article for current figures.