The 7 tech travel hacks I swear by - after years of

What happened

There's no doubt that tech has made travel so much easier. From mapping on a smartphone to real-time translation, gone are the days of relying on a dead-tree travel guide passed down from your parents. I can remember being in countries where I couldn't speak or read the language. Heck, a couple of times I didn't know what the local currency was (or the exchange rate).

I can't imagine the level of stress it would cause me if I printed off a bunch of AI "guides" and relied on those for my travels. And before you yell at me, I tried free and paid-for versions of ChatGPT and Claude.

Maybe I just like planning too much, or maybe my trips are too weird, or maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but given what I've experienced, AI is going to have to take my maps and guidebooks out of my cold, dead hands.

Bottom line: AI is great for inspiration and good for pulling together information of various degrees of accuracy, but weak when it comes to replacing a blog post, guidebook, or web forum with active users. But if you are going to use AI tools, check, double-check, and then check everything again before you pay for anything like hotels or flights or step foot out of your house.

If you don't like stress, give yourself plenty of time. I don't understand people who cut it fine at airports, train stations, and ferry ports. You never know if you're going to be delayed in traffic or if there's chaos at the airport when you get there. That thing that you paid a lot of money to take you from A to B will leave without you if you're late.

For example, right now there's a new system rolling out in EU countries called EES -- Entry/Exit System -- which is replacing passport stamps. The first time you travel into an EU country, your fingerprints, facial image, and passport details are collected, and this is causing huge queues at some ports, and people are missing their flights, especially since the rollout hit 100% of ports on April 10, 2026.

The general rule of thumb is to arrive 2 hours early for domestic flights, 3 hours for international flights, and 30 to 90 minutes early for trains and ferries. I like to add an extra 30 minutes to those times to cover parking, sorting my stuff out, and generally getting the lay of the land.

Why it matters

Now you have all that information -- and much more -- in the palm of your hand. But despite the fact that we now have more tech power in the palms of our hands than they had to go to the moon, things can still get stressy.

And with a few 2026 trips already in the rearview mirror and a few more lined up, I've become pretty good at keeping travel stress to a minimum. Generative AI is being used everywhere, from Facebook posters to last-minute term papers. It's also increasingly being used for travel planning and booking.

As usual, digging for statistics pulls up all sorts of numbers, with estimates of AI use in trip planning varying wildly, from roughly 40% to figures as high as 80%, depending on how loosely "used AI" is defined. The real numbers are likely to be somewhere in that ballpark. But it's fair to say that a lot of people are ChatGPTing their trip information. ) I love planning trips.

I love getting all into the maps and the guidebooks and creating detailed spreadsheets filled with plans. Last year, I walked the last 115 km of the Camino Frances, a trip that took over two years from planning to execution, and a few weeks after I came back, someone mentioned to me that this could have been planned with ChatGPT "in five minutes".

I tried it, and having just walked it myself, I knew that the output was a confidently delivered hot mess. I've also been section hiking Hadrian's Wall here in the UK, and I thought I could get AI to pull up parking spots for me close to the trail, something I could do easily by eyeballing a map, but if I could get a list, that would be cool.

Well, it would have been cool, but what I got was a word salad filled with maybes, oversights, and car parks miles away from where I needed to be. There were some good nuggets of information in there, but nothing that a web search wouldn't have uncovered. Then, for my Spanish solar eclipse trip this month, someone suggested I try AI for travel logistics.

I tried querying flights and got confident answers that I knew were incorrect, incomplete, or far from ideal. The same happened when I started planning a trip to see another solar eclipse in August 2027. I found that I had to nudge the AI tools to find the right answers, nudging that I could only do because I'd already done a lot of research.

And it ended up taking me more time compared with how I'd normally plan a trip. As for getting deep into details -- like asking for a terrain shadow map for eclipse locations so I could shortlist viewing spots -- that turned up nothing useful.

What to watch

This is general guidance, so it's always a good idea to check your ticket for more specific information. I don't like rushing unless I absolutely have to. I always pack my carry-on gear with the idea that I'm going to have to pull everything out of my bags only to then repack it again.

That means keeping the clutter of cables and tech to a minimum and making sure that any clothing or loose items I have are in bags -- this is one of the reasons why I'm a huge fan of packing cubes.