I’ve spent enough years on the road to have made most of the travel admin mistakes going. None of them completely ruined a trip, but all of them wasted time I’d rather have spent on the beach.
A few years ago I did something very out of character for my Type B self, and set up a separate email inbox purely for travel. Think flights, accommodation, tour confirmations, insurance documents, the lot.
It’s among the least exciting things I’ve ever done for my travels, but it’s saved me so much hassle.
Benefits of Keeping Your Travel Mail in One Place
If you’re like me and tend to book lots of small, independent guesthouses and tours rather than one big package deal, it can get messy very quickly. In this post, I’m going to go over the benefits of having your travel mail in a separate inbox, because some of them aren’t so obvious!
1. Everything lives in one searchable inbox
The main benefit is being able to find things easily and quickly. When a guesthouse owner asks for your reservation number and the Wi-Fi is hanging on by a thread, the last thing you want is to wade through a decade of shopping receipts and newsletters you don’t even remember signing up for.
With one account dedicated to that trip, everything is much less cluttered, and also appears in the order you booked everything.
2. Scam messages become obvious
Travel is a favourite target for fraudsters, partly because people book in a rush and partly because a message about a booking feels urgent by nature.
If you receive an email that appears to be from a hotel you’ve booked asking for your credit card details, you’re probably not going to be as suspicious as you would if it came from a totally random place.
The British Transport Police’s guidance on holiday fraud describes the pattern well: fake adverts, stolen photos of real properties, and pressure to pay by bank transfer.
This actually just happened to my friend Tanya when we were in Kyrgyzstan for the World Nomad Games – a scam company had used fake photos to create a listing for a hotel that didn’t even exist, just to take her money.
When your travel mail sits in its own account, a message about a booking you didn’t make sticks out immediately, and if you choose an email provider with no trackers, companies are unable to monitor what you’re reading and clicking on, leaving you less vulnerable to unscrupulous fraudsters.
3. It survives a lost or broken phone
Anyone who’s had to deal with a lost or broken phone abroad knows the very specific panic of realising your documents only ever lived on that device.
This isn’t necessarily related to having a separate email inbox, but it’s still worth mentioning that having an email account you can access from any browser or device prevents a lost or stolen phone from becoming a trip-ending disaster.
It’s important to have your password memorised or written down on paper so that you don’t find yourself unable to access your accounts, and also change your two-factor authentication settings so that they don’t depend on receiving an SMS to your phone.
When I travel, I typically enable a push notification on the website I’m trying to access from a trusted device (like my laptop, or the phone of the person I’m travelling with), or a code sent to an alternative email address.
4. Set-up takes minutes
You don’t need to be some tech wizard to do this. Simply create a new email account, forward your existing confirmations across, then update the email address on the booking sites you use (Skyscanner, Booking etc.).
After that, everything looks after itself. You don’t need to continue forwarding things manually, and everything stays tidy because nothing else is allowed in.
Final Thoughts
If you already plan properly, this is an easy hack that will save you so much time.
My piece on the common mistakes that ruin trips covers the bigger ones (like not checking whether you need a visa!), but this is a quick and simple way to ensure your trip goes smoothly, and can even prevent you from making some of those bigger mistakes (when you can see everything you’ve already arranged all in one place, the things you haven’t sorted out will stand out more!).
I’m not a naturally organised person. My packing gets done an hour before I head to the airport, my itineraries are non-existent, and I’ve never once used a spreadsheet for a trip.
However, keeping travel admin in its own corner means that when something goes wrong at 3am in a country where I don’t speak the language, I can find what I need in seconds. That’s worth twenty minutes of setup.
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