Having your travel documents organized is a simple but important activity. Organizing yourself and your travel companions (whether it be family or friends) can be stressful. Making sure you have all the essential documents for travel organized in an easy, useful, and efficient way can take away that little bit of stress.
We have 5 great tips on how to organize your travel documents, which we’ll delve into deeper below:
- Always have pens handy
- Save and print the documents as soon as you receive them
- Save your documents electronically
- Send your full set of travel documents to your travel companion
- Use handy travel organizers for your paper documents
Staying organized with travel documents is super important. We really believe these simple but effective tips can make your travel run more smoothly and most importantly you can concentrate on having an amazing holiday than stressing about trying to find a ‘misplaced’ document when exactly when you need it.
Which Travel Documents to Remember?
So, first thing’s first, which travel documents do you need to remember? Of course, this can be very specific to the trip you’re taking, but of course the essential ones we’ve listed below:
- Passport
- Driving License (if applicable)
- Visa (if required for the country you’re visiting)
- Record of vaccinations (if required for the country you’re visiting)
- Boarding Passes
- Flight Details
- Airport Parking Documents
- Lounge Card (if applicable)
- Rental Car Documents (if you’re hiring a car in the country you’re visiting)
- Hotel Reservations
- Itinerary
- Transfer Information to your Accommodation
- Pre-booked Excursion Documents
- Travel Insurance
- Emergency Contact Information
If you’re going to experiencing something specific on your holiday, such as going diving, remember your diving certificates.
1. Always Have Pens Handy
This tip is probably the most simple tip but easily forgotten. In this advanced world of technology we live in with more and more things being transitioned to online, it’s easy to forget something so simple.
If you’re traveling internationally, you will almost always be required to fill out an arrival card on the plane just before you are due to land. Surprisingly, the airport crew never seem to hand out pens for you to actually be able to complete the forms.
You never know when you’ll need it. But it’s useful on the plane journey as well if you want to make a note of anything, complete puzzles etc.
And it goes without saying to keep at least two pens on you, just in case one decides it’s not gonna work. Especially with the arrival cards, they can take some time to fill out if you’re traveling with a big family and you only have one pen between you, it’s a bit inconvenient. Take a few and you can spread this task out.
2. Save and Print the Documents as Soon as you Receive them
When you’ve booked a holiday, you’re likely to receive some travel documents, such as flight details, travel insurance, itinerary by email. As soon as you receive them, SAVE and PRINT them! We cannot recommend this enough!
Your personal emails can get so clogged up with junk very quickly. Then trying to find the emails just before you’re about to travel or even on the spot when you need them can be a nightmare. Not to mention, electronic copies on devices can be great, but it’s always great to have a backup paper copy. What happens if your device runs out of battery or you lose your device?
As you receive the documents, once printed, keep them aside in a pile until you receive everything, then they’re ready to ready to organize.
3. Save your Travel Documents Electronically
So, as mentioned above, a lot of the travel documents you’ll need will likely be sent to you electronically. As well as having a paper copy, it’s useful to have an electronic one too. We suggest to keep these super organized to do the following:
- Create a folder for your trip in your email account, for example, Sri Lanka – October 2020.
- Then create subfolders within this category, such as ‘Flight Details’, ‘Travel Insurance’, ‘Hotel Reservations’.
- Move your emails into the relevant folder.
- That’s it! Everything is super organized and easy to find when you need it in under 30 seconds.
If you’re planning a long trip, for example, a month or so and you’ll be staying at many different accommodations and taking several flights, we’d recommend naming your subfolder by dates. Then you know exactly where to go to when you need to, without making the search harder if you have too many emails in one category.
So, another great thing about technology is the number of great travel apps out there. Specifically, for keeping your travel documents organized all in one place, we recommend TripIt, as our travel organization app of choice. It’s fantastic at keeping all your important travel documents in one place. Why do we choose TripIt?
- FREE
- Simple – simply send your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and it will create a master itinerary
- Flexible – as you book further items, continue to send to the email and it updates accordingly to keep your plans up to date
- Easy to use and doesn’t take up a lot of your time
- Sync with your calendar
- Share your itinerary – you can share your itinerary with others through the app, email or texts
- Upgrade option – if you want additional features, you can upgrade to TripIt Pro which costs $49/year
If you want to find out more, check out the TripIt website here.
4. Send your Full Set of Travel Documents to your Travel Companion
If you’re not traveling alone, we’d recommend sending all your travel documents to your travel companion. Get them to setup up the email folders as described above. This works great for a couple/family. It’s just another step to ensure a backup plan in case the main person with the travel documentation loses their device or their device runs out of battery.
5. Use Handy Travel Organizers for your Paper Documents
After you’ve printed out all your documents, you realize you may have a lot, especially if you’re planning to go away for more than a week. Rather than just shoving all these items into a folder, there are some great items on the market to help organize your paper documents better.
We tend to use two items. One that includes documents we will need at the airport and another that holds all the other information we will require from leaving the destination airport onwards.
Know when you need your travel documents, If you have an idea of what you need when you need it, it’s going to make your life easier. Here’s a guide anyway.
At the airport
- Passport
- Visa (if required for the country you’re visiting)
- Record of vaccinations (if required for the country you’re visiting
- Boarding Passes
- Flight Details
- Airport Parking Documents
- Lounge Card (if applicable)
We use the Vemingo Travel Wallet – RFID Blocking Passport Wallet. It’s compact, light, and easy to organize your travel documents we mentioned above. If you want to check out our review on this item, click here. We’ve also reviewed some other items which are great for organizing your travel in other ways. If you want to read out reviews of these, click here.
Leaving the destination airport
- Rental Car Documents (if you’re hiring a car in the country you’re visiting)
- Hotel Reservations
- Itinerary
- Transfer Information to your Accommodation
- Pre-booked Excursion Documents
- Travel Insurance
- Emergency Contact Information
As these tend to just be A4 size paper documents, there are so many options available that would be sufficient for organizing these easily. There are many folders that offer separate compartments and tabs to be able to label each compartment. We’d recommend getting one of these!
And the great thing is, they’re relatively inexpensive but super useful and you can use them time and time again. As they’re usually made of plastic, they’ll be waterproof too, so you don’t have to worry about your documents becoming damaged.
We would recommend dividing the documents by topic and chronological order. This can easily fit into your hand luggage along with your travel wallet (described above) and ready for whenever you need it.
We also recommend throwing away your paper documents when you no longer require them. That just makes it easier to find items that you actually need. Make sure it is something you definitely don’t need before throwing it away though!
It’s also one less thing to sort out when you return home from your trip. There so many other things to do like unpack, one less thing on your to-do list definitely helps you a little along the way!
So in Summary…
We hope these simple but useful tips will help you with organizing your travel documents. Some of these may be obvious, but with everything else you’re trying to organize at the same time, they can easily be forgotten.
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