Travel Tips

After our recent trip to Italy and Bulgaria, I thought I would pass along some travel tips that may seem obvious to some and could save you frustration later.

1. Let your bank and credit cards know you are traveling
The banks are trying harder to fight fraud so they will quickly put a security block on your ATM and credit cards. Take the 5 minutes to call the number on the back of your cards (including your ATM card) and let them know your travel dates and destinations. There were 5-6 of us on our Italy trip that had problems with our ATM cards.

2. Consider using a GPS
The Europe maps for our GPS unit were worth every penny of the $150 we spent. Just be sure how to enter the addresses for your destination. They saved us several times when driving through Italy.

3. Get the phone numbers for your credit cards and bank
Get the international calling details for your credit cards and bank BEFORE you leave. We had problems using the toll free numbers from outside of the USA - and of course, when the bank called to alert us to the security block placed on our cards they left the toll free number to call them back.

4. Find out the details of Roaming coverage and Costs for your mobile phone
Find out the roaming costs before you leave and determine if it makes sense to sign up for an International Calling Plan before you leave. Even if you don't plan on using your mobile phone it's good to have the info just in case. And be careful about data charges!!! Just because you can get a data connection doesn't mean it's covered under you plan -- and roaming data plans typically charge per MB which can add up quickly!

5. Understand how to call FROM your destination
This part really made me feel like an idiot. But figure out how to call from your mobile in roaming mode either within your destination country and back to the US. Also how to call from a landline phone.

6. Set up email filters and rules to hide the non-urgent emails
If you are traveling for vacation you probably still want to read email but try to hide the crap from your inbox, especially if you will be using internet cafes or pay for bandwidth connections. I just setup a label (SAVE) and quickly labeled the msgs from my Inbox as I checked email -- I would have rather had them automatically labeled based on rules defined before I left.

7. Get currency before you leave or right when you land
I'm on the fence on this one and will have to do some more research, but I'm starting to like having a small amount of local currency as soon as I arrive. I'm suspicious of the fees charged when exchanging money at the airports, so I'm going to consider getting currency from the foreign exchange desk of my local bank. My bank also charged a Currency Exchange Fee when I used the ATM card for purchases, so watch out for these fees too.