Most travel problems announce themselves early. You forget the adapter, you misjudge the transfer time, you learn that the guidebook is two years old. The one that catches people out arrives quietly on day one, when the bank app asks to verify you and sends the code to a number that has stopped receiving texts.
There is a short rehearsal that finds all of this while you are still at home, and it takes about ten minutes.
The rehearsal
Put your phone in airplane mode, turn Wi-Fi back on, and log out of the four things you would panic about losing. Bank, email, airline, and wherever your documents live. Then log back in.
Anything that asks for a code you cannot receive, or a document you do not have to hand, is now a problem you have found at your kitchen table instead of in an airport queue. Do the same on any tablet the children use, and actually press play on the downloads rather than assuming they are there.
The five fixes worth making before you go
- Move two factor codes from text messages to an authenticator app, which works with no signal at all
- Print the recovery codes for anything you cannot afford to lose, and keep them somewhere that is not your phone
- Tell the bank you are travelling, then pack a second card from a different bank in a different bag
- Check the expiry date on every download, since most last about thirty days and some far less once you start watching
- Save boarding passes, the hotel address and the first day’s plan as images, because a captive Wi-Fi portal will not let you load anything until you have signed in
Why it happens at all
Almost every one of these decisions comes from one piece of information. Your connection carries an address, that address belongs to a network in a particular country, and services read the country before they build the page. Licensing, pricing and fraud rules are all national, so you get sorted into a country before anything else happens.
It is why some travellers route a specific session through a proxy in the country they left, to reach a service that only works at home. Two exceptions are worth holding to, though. Never do it with a banking app, because fraud systems treat that combination as a serious signal and a frozen account is the last thing you want a long way from a branch. And streaming services all prohibit it in their terms, so for a two week trip, downloads are the sane answer.
Ten minutes at home, or an hour in a hotel lobby with bad Wi-Fi and a support queue in another time zone. It is not a close call.
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