Troubleshooting your travel plans can help you save money, stress, and time, especially if you make sure you have your tools ready in advance. A disruption can ruin your entire trip, but flexibility and forewarning might just save your day.
What are your options?
Know in advance what you might need to do to change your ticket, or if you catch COVID and can’t fly home when you planned. Know what your travel insurance and airlines offer in emergency cases. Check with your credit card company too – many offer travel disruption insurance.
There’s an app for that.
Most airlines have an official app these days. They can streamline a lot of things. Notifications if something changes, contacts to customer service, advance check-ins, baggage tracking. They’re a free resource you shouldn’t ignore.
Also, find out in advance if your destination has any apps for public transit or local hotels. If a cab or a booking falls through, it helps to have those instant troubleshooting resources on hand. A weather app is also recommended, no matter where you’re going.
If time flies.
Those airline apps have status screens so you can obsess over your incoming flight in real time. Some even have live trackers, so you can see if your plane is over Newark when it should be landing in Philly. Being forewarned is forearmed – if you see your plane is going to be so late you’ll miss a connection, you can be first out of the gate to rebook.
If you’ve skipped the apps, you can also live-track any flight in the air by entering the flight number and airline into a search engine.
No plan is foolproof, but having a few tools on hand can kickstart your troubleshooting and keep you moving towards solutions, instead of losing the joy of your travel.
Find more tips, and more links, here.
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