Most travel safety advice falls into one of two camps. Either it's so obvious it's useless — "keep your passport safe" — or it's written to frighten you, as though every holiday is one wrong turn from disaster.
This is neither. It's the practical middle ground: the things that genuinely reduce the odds of a trip going wrong, that take five minutes each, and that people routinely skip because nobody ever told them they mattered.
Work through it the week before you fly and you'll have covered nearly everything worth covering.
Your passport
Check the validity properly — not just the expiry date
This catches people out more than anything else on this list, and it's got worse since Brexit.
Many countries require at least six months' validity beyond your return date. That means a passport expiring in four months is effectively useless for a lot of destinations, even though it hasn't expired and looks perfectly fine. Some countries also want blank pages, which surprises people who travel a lot.
For UK passport holders travelling to the EU there's an additional wrinkle: rules apply to both the issue date and the expiry date. Passports issued before a certain point can carry extra months that don't count for entry purposes. It's fiddly, and it's genuinely worth ten minutes checking the specific requirements for where you're going rather than assuming.
Check everyone's passport, not just yours
Children's passports are valid for five years rather than ten, which means they expire on a completely different schedule to the adults'. It's an extremely common oversight, usually discovered at the worst possible moment.
Keep a copy somewhere that isn't your phone
Photograph your passport, your travel insurance policy and your booking confirmations, then email them to yourself. If your phone is lost, stolen or simply dies, that email is what lets you prove who you are and what you're covered for.
Money
Four things, all quick:
- Carry two payment methods, kept separately. One card in your wallet, one somewhere else entirely. If a wallet goes missing you're inconvenienced rather than stranded.
- Tell your bank you're travelling. Many still flag a first foreign transaction as suspicious, and a blocked card is a genuinely difficult problem to resolve from abroad.
- Take a small amount of local cash for arrival. Taxis, transfers and small shops aren't always card-friendly, and the airport exchange desk is the worst rate you'll see all trip.
- Always pay in the local currency. When a card machine offers to charge you in pounds, decline. That's dynamic currency conversion, and the rate is consistently poor. Choosing local currency lets your own bank handle it, which is nearly always better.
Your health
Two things people forget until they need them.
Carry medication in its original packaging, with the pharmacy label intact. Loose tablets in a plastic bag can cause genuine difficulty at some borders, and having the prescription details to hand makes replacement far easier if a bag goes missing.
Check whether you need a GHIC. The Global Health Insurance Card replaced the EHIC for UK travellers and gives access to state healthcare in EU countries on the same terms as a resident. It is not a substitute for travel insurance — it won't repatriate you or cover a private clinic — but it's free and worth having alongside a policy.
Your car
If you're leaving a car at the airport, a short routine at handover prevents most of what goes wrong:
- Photograph all four corners with the mileage visible on the dashboard
- Remove anything valuable, and anything with your home address on it — a V5C in the glovebox alongside a spare set of keys is a genuinely bad combination
- Take your house keys off the ring you're handing over
- Note the fuel level
- Keep the booking confirmation reachable without wi-fi
Choose a car park holding the Park Mark Safer Parking Award, which means police have physically assessed the site for perimeter security, lighting and surveillance. It's the clearest signal available that a compound is properly run.
What it doesn't cover is the service side — key handling, driver insurance, what happens if there's damage. If you're using meet and greet, ask about those separately. We've gone through the questions in meet and greet parking: what actually happens to your car.
Your home
An empty house advertises itself in fairly predictable ways, and most of them are easy to avoid.
- Cancel deliveries or have a neighbour take them in. Parcels accumulating on a doorstep are the clearest possible signal that nobody's home.
- Put a lamp on a timer. Cheap, and it changes how the house reads from the street after dark.
- Don't post your dates publicly before you go. Share the photos when you're back. Worth the small amount of restraint it takes.
- Leave a key and your flight details with someone you trust. Useful for the boiler, the cat, and the small chance something needs dealing with.
- Turn the water off at the stopcock if you're away more than a week or two. A slow leak discovered on your return is a considerably worse holiday souvenir than a burgled shed.
Your luggage
One decision matters more than everything else here: pack a change of clothes, essential medication and your chargers in your hand luggage.
Delayed bags are far more common than genuinely lost ones. A bag that turns up a day late is a minor annoyance if you've got a clean shirt and your tablets with you, and a ruined first day if you haven't. Medication in particular should never go in the hold — replacing a prescription abroad is difficult, expensive, and occasionally impossible.
Photograph your checked bag before you drop it off. If it goes astray, showing someone a picture is considerably more effective than describing "a black suitcase, medium sized" to a room full of black suitcases.
Put a name and mobile number inside the bag as well as on the outside tag. Outside tags come off, and a bag with contact details inside it stands a far better chance of finding its way home.
At the airport
Allow more time than the airline's stated minimum, particularly during school holidays. Security queues are the least predictable part of the whole journey, and the difference between arriving comfortable and arriving frantic is usually about forty minutes of planning.
Have your liquids and electronics somewhere you can reach without unpacking the whole bag. It sounds trivial; it's the difference between thirty seconds at the tray and three minutes with a queue behind you.
If you're on a genuinely tight schedule, this is where heathrow meet and greet or an equivalent service earns its cost — it removes the shuttle transfer, which is the step most likely to go wrong when you're already behind. The practical trade-offs are in meet and greet vs park and ride.
The five-minute version
If you only do five things:
- Check every passport's validity against your destination's actual rules
- Buy travel insurance when you book, not the week you fly
- Tell your bank you're going
- Pack medication and a change of clothes in hand luggage
- Photograph your car and your suitcase before you part with either
None of it is dramatic. All of it is the difference between a story you tell later and a problem you're solving at the time.
Travelling with children
A few extra things worth doing if you're not travelling alone.
Check every passport, not just yours. Children's passports run for five years rather than ten, so they expire on a completely different cycle to the adults'. This is one of the most common reasons a family gets turned away at check-in.
Carry evidence of your relationship if you and your child have different surnames, or if you're travelling without the other parent. A birth certificate and, where relevant, a brief letter of consent from the other parent will save a difficult conversation at the border. Some countries ask; most don't; it costs nothing to have it.
Photograph the children in the clothes they're wearing on the morning of travel. It sounds morbid. It takes five seconds, and in a crowded terminal it turns "he's wearing a blue top, I think" into something you can simply show someone.
Agree a meeting point at each airport as you arrive, and make sure children old enough to understand know what to do if they get separated — stay put, or find someone in uniform.
