Travel-Tech

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The carry-on that didn’t close — until it did Porto airport, 5am, gate already boarding. My bag would not zip. I was doing the thing everyone does — kneeling on it, swearing quietly, pulling the zip a centimetre at a time — when the woman next to me, watching far too closely, said: “You need cubes.” She unzipped her own identical carry-on and it was a grid of neat little blocks, like a printer’s tray. Mine looked like a tumble dryer had exploded. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The night a $200 earbud saved a $4 bowl of noodles A side street in Hanoi, just past 9pm, rain starting. I was pointing at a bubbling pot, the woman behind it was shaking her head, and somewhere in the gap between my zero Vietnamese and her zero English was the simple question of whether the broth had shellfish in it — which, for the friend standing next to me, was not a small detail. I’d almost left the translation earbuds in the hotel. Gimmick, I’d thought. I’ll just point. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The power bank that got taken at the gate — and the one that didn’t Keflavík airport, 6am, and the man at security was turning my friend’s power bank over in his hands looking for a number that wasn’t there. No printed watt-hour rating, a suspiciously round “30000mAh” sticker peeling at one corner, bought off a marketplace listing for the price of a sandwich. Into the bin it went. Mine — boring, brand-name, 74Wh printed right on the side — got a glance and a nod. Same queue, two very different mornings. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The hotel that let me connect “two devices per room” Lisbon, a month of working remotely, and the front desk slid me a Wi-Fi card with the catch printed in small type: two devices per room. I had four — laptop, phone, tablet, a streaming stick for the evenings — and a video call in forty minutes. The “obvious” fix was paying for a premium tier I didn’t want, per device, for a month. Instead I pulled a box the size of a deck of cards out of my bag, logged it into the hotel Wi-Fi once, and let everything I owned hide behind it as a single device. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The gadget I almost left at home — and used in the first hour My phone hit 6% somewhere over Siberia, fourteen hours into the longest day of my year, with a boarding pass, a hotel address and a Doha layout I hadn’t memorized all living behind that dying screen. I’d packed the power bank as an afterthought — do I really need this? — and shoved it in the seat pocket. By the time we taxied to the gate in Tokyo it had already saved the trip once, and it hadn’t even been a full day. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The €30 gadget that found my bag before the airline did Lisbon, last October. My bag didn’t come out on the carousel, and the man at the lost-luggage desk gave me the shrug every traveler dreads — the one that means we have no idea where it is. The thing is, I did. I pulled out my phone, opened Find My, and watched the little dot pulse 1,500 km away on a baggage cart in Frankfurt, where my 40-minute connection had clearly been a fantasy. I turned the screen around and said, “It’s in Terminal 1, gate Z.” ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The £4 adapter that nearly killed my laptop I bought it from a kiosk at Gatwick because I’d forgotten mine — a flimsy £4 block with four flags printed on the side. By the second night in London it had stopped charging my MacBook, and when I wiggled the plug there was a faint smell of hot plastic and a spark I felt in my teeth. I spent the rest of that work trip nursing one bar of battery and writing emails in cafés purely to borrow their wall sockets. ...