Our 5 Favourite Travel Essentials!
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Over the course of a year of full-time, carry-on only travel, we have learnt so much about how to optimise your available space, as well as little knicks and knacks that have helped us out so much on the road. Here are our 5 FAVOURITE travel essentials, that have come in handy while travelling the globe!
Travel Resources
Flights: We love using Skyscanner to search for the best flight deals!
Accommodation: We primarily book all our accommodation through Booking.com. We find they usually have the best prices, they have a great loyalty program, and have a bunch of places with free cancellation, allowing you to travel really flexibly!
Transport: Our go-to for booking transport in Asia is 12Go, while our Europe go-to was Omio! Both have a wide range of transport options you can book, from flights, to trains and buses, and offer really competitive prices!
Activities: Get Your Guide is our favourite place to search for things to do in each city we visit. They have a wide range of activities and tours, competitive pricing, and a lot of reviews, providing you with some comfort before you book!
Disney & Universal Deals: We love booking our theme park tickets through Attraction Tickets. They always have a bunch of promotional deals running that you can take advantage of, and have some amazing longer-stay ticket deals which provide great value.
1) COLLAPSIBLE CONTAINERS
If you’re planning for long-term travel, especially long-term budget travel, chances are you plan to cook a significant amount of your meals. Cooking is such a great way to save money while travelling, especially if you’re travelling through some more expensive destinations such as Europe and North America.
In order to optimise the amount of money you save on food, you really want to be cooking dishes that will provide you more than one meal. This also allows you extra time to explore rather than wasting time in the kitchen cooking meal after meal. If you’re doing this, this means you’ll need some form of storage for your leftovers, and from experience, most AirBnbs and accommodation will not provide any form of food storage.
—-> A FULL breakdown of all our camera gear we use to make our YouTube videos!
We purchased these collapsible containers before our world trip and they have proven to be one of our best purchases. Not only are they affordable to buy, they take up barely any room in your luggage, and you have various size options to suit your needs. We can’t count how many times these have come in handy, plus they’re also microwave and dishwasher safe as well!
2) TRAVEL ADAPTOR
This may have been our single greatest purchase before our year of travel. Travelling around the globe means you are constantly requiring different power adaptors depending on the country you’re in. Bringing multiple different travel adaptors isn’t really compatible with travelling carry-on only, or regular travel really, as it’s just plain annoying.
We purchased this universal travel adaptor which means it is the ONLY travel adaptor we have needed or used on our entire year of travel. Not only does it have every single output, it also allows for any input, meaning it doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, it is adaptable to all countries. Plus, it has three USB slots, and one USB-C slot, allowing you to charge up to FIVE different electronics at once.
Now if you’re not an avid photographer, content creator or gamer, that may seem excessive, but if you are doing any of those things, being able to charge five things at once is so incredibly handy, especially in only ONE PLUG!
As we said, this has been the only adaptor we’ve used on our year of travel, well technically, we’ve travelled with two (we have a lot of electronics), travelling across Europe, North America and Asia, and we’ve had no issues with this being too much power for the power plug, no matter the country we’ve been in. We couldn’t recommend it more.
3) LAUNDRY SHEETS
If you’re only travelling for a short amount of time, you can probably give these a miss, but for long-term travel, these are incredible. If you’re wondering what they are, essentially it’s laundry detergent, packed down into a sheet, just a bit thicker than a piece of paper. Now they come in all different shapes and sizes - you can get super small ones that are around the size of Listerine, or you can get bigger ones that are around the size of a greeting card. We prefer the latter, mostly because our brains can’t comprehend how something so small can actually clean all our laundry.
Laundry sheets are great because they take up minimal room in your luggage (do you sense a common theme here?) and they aren’t liquid, so won’t count towards your liquids limit. We were a bit hesitant to use them but have had zero issues during our travels so far. Obviously, if you stain your clothes, you’re probably going to need something a little bit stronger, but for general washing loads, they’ve been great.
We purchased these laundry sheets before leaving for our trip, however, Amazon also have some options you can check out as well.
4) PACKING CUBES
This may be a controversial one, depending on what side you fall in the packing cubes vs. no packing cubes debate. Personally, we love using packing cubes, especially when travelling with minimal space. It allows us to not only organise our clothes making it very easy to find what we need, but it really helps us maximise space in our suitcases.
We both use three different packing cubes of varying sizes, and generally use one for bottoms, one for tops, and one for underwear/socks/bathers. You can use them however you like, but you’d be surprised how much you can fit in each one of these cubes if you know how to pack them properly!
We made a full video on YouTube on how we travelled carry on only through Europe for 3.5 months, where we show how we use packing cubes, so check that out if you haven’t already.
5) FOLDABLE TRAVEL BACKPACK
This was a last minute purchase for us before leaving for our travels, but we are SO glad we bought one. I personally have never been a fan of foldable travel backpacks - I like a good sturdy backpack so you don’t feel all the contents on your back. However, travelling carry-on only means our travel backpacks are quite big, and not very practical for bringing around as we are out exploring.
We’ve used our foldable travel backpack almost every single day of our travels so far. It has been so handy to have a smaller backpack to bring out with us, that doesn’t actually take up significant space when it comes time for a travel day and we have to pack it away.
Of course, if you are absolutely jam packing the bag, you’ll definitely feel all the contents on your back, but if you’re travelling light for the day, this is really the perfect backpack.
We bought our backpack through Kathmandu, however, Amazon has a whole range of more affordable backpacks to pick from, all with really great reviews, so you really can’t go wrong.
So that’s it - our five travel essentials! There are so many more things we could recommend, so keep an eye out for future posts on our travel must-haves!
