35 "Genius" Travel Tips
 

http://news.distractify.com/dark/tri...e-forever/?v=1

What do y'all think of this? Has anyone ever been the "Airport Hero"? ;-)

As much as I loathe the headline style on list sites, there's a couple of good ones in there (as well as some nonsense).

Carrying straws full of white powder on international flights may not be the best idea.

Muji do a great line in travel bags with refillable containers - very much worth looking into.

Google Maps offline is useful - but Ulmon CityMaps2Go (actually covering lots of areas outside cities) has been a wonderful resource for me when travelling! With GPS, of course.

I am very tempted to try the hanging organiser. When you're travelling to multiple hotels on a trip (I inevitably do - I get itchy feet very quickly) it could make life much easier. Hmm, maybe a stop at Ikea at the weekend...

Some are interesting. I'm very weight-conscious about my luggage. Many of the tips offer organizing/protecting tips that take up more weight than they thing they're organizing and protecting.

For example, that's a pretty big, heavy glasses case to organize your ear buds. And to protect my razor, I'd rather use the tiny plastic cover that comes with it vs. a huge binder clip.

Who has actually taken the time to wrap their clothes in tissue paper. Who takes enough jewellery that they need to put it in a container like a pill one.

I find old amenity cases ideal for cables, etc. Less heavy and easier to fit into an oddly-shaped space in your carry on bag than a glasses case.

For pills as well, if you're the kind of person who has a cocktail of prescription drugs wherever they go... I had an old, hard-shell AF one in that role for years.

Generally, I fold clothes (using the fold-back-in-two-halves-then-sleeves-into-the-middle method for shirts and t-shirts) and put them in poly bags by category - as well as carrying a couple of laundry bags. That way, if I'm moving around, I never really have to unpack - I know I can easily pick out what I want from each bag without disturbing the rest, and then just lob the bags back in the suitcase when I move on, and easily sort out the laundry if I need some done en route.

I don't wear earrings, but 7 necklaces is not a stretch by any means. I often travel for 4 or 6 weeks or more at a time, but even on shorter trips wear different ones each day or change after work etc.

Snack sized ziplock bags (they are about half the height of the sandwich bags) are great for organizing toiletries and keeping loose items grouped together. They're probably better in some cases than the pill organizer for jewelry. Velcro ties such as "Velcro 91140" on amazon.com can keep cables (blow drier, USB, charger...) from tangling.

ok can someone explain the jpg? thing to not pay for wifi?? and yes, some great ideas:)

It seems many on FT will fold their clothes in old dry cleaning bags, which has the same effect as the tissue paper.

And while I don't travel with a power strip, I do use a multi-plug adapter which lets up to 3 people use a single outlet. People love it, until I have to go which leaves 2 people trying to figure out who gets to use the one remaining outlet ;)

Compared to most "super duper travel secrets" articles, this one was actually somewhat useful. No rocket science, but no "dress nicely to get a free upgrade" idiocy - and a few new ones that aren't recycled in all similar articles.


All of my dress clothes stay in the bags in the closet, so packing in them is easy. It absolutely does help.

I use those small Gerber plastic boxes for some small cord and misc supplies management. Also carry a supply of generic plastic zip bags.

The shower cap thing is cool, will have to try that (I'm a sandal guy but wear shoes onboard).

For contact lenses onboard, I pre-fill a case with solution and store it in my glasses case with my glasses, and it's one of the things I store near me. When it's time to take them out, everything is where I need it to be and swap... contacts in case, glasses on my face, and even my Oakleys go into the glasses case.

Have you ever used your hot towel to wipe down the area around you? :eek:

When I don't do the above, I ask keep the hot towel until after meal service... makes cleanup much easier and, er, cleaner.:cool:

bumping this question, I want to know more about it as well

I assume it has to do with how some wifi hotspot portals work. They redirect all request for web pages to the sign-in page until you've signed in. I assume that some of them don't redirect requests for images (for whatever reason) so there's a loophole you can use.

When you have a '?' in a URL, what follows supplies information to the website - but if the website isn't expecting any information it will just ignore it. So if you put in '?.jpg' at the end, it gets ignored by the website, but the theory is that the wifi portal sees the request as a request for an image file, not for a whole website, and simply by-pass the sign-in process.

I doubt many wifi providers work this way these days, but you never know.

(Just tried it with a BT Openzone hotspot visible from my office. It didn't work...)

Yeah this technique used to work a few years ago but very rarely now - it worked in a similar way that using the browser on your mobile didn't work, but requests made through apps (like Facebook, FourSquare) would work. Again you can sometimes get away with this but rarely.

As others have said, this article is actually quite good compared to the normal nonsense you see.