My Favorite Nomad Travel Tools Of 2022

by A Purple Life, posted in Travel
This post may contain affiliate links. For more info read my disclosure.

Somehow I’m going into the 3rd year of my retirement and my nomad travel life. During that time, I’ve amassed an arsenal of tools to help me on the road.

Previously, I discussed general tools I love to use in my day-to-day life that help it seem like I have my shit together 🙂 , but today I want to focus on things that help me be a more effective traveler. So let’s get into it!

TRAVEL PLANNING

City Overview: Nomad List

Nomad List is helpful in giving a quick overview of a city including things like the cost, temperature, wifi speed and other important things like how tolerant they are of women, different races and LGBTQIA+. I find it helpful to visit this site when I’m choosing a new country and city to visit just to get an overview of what’s going on.

This site also usually includes what electric sockets a city uses, but I also find this site super helpful to clarify the most used sockets in different countries.

Covid Travel Requirements: Sherpa

I learned about this site from the Geekstreamers and while it might be less relevant these days when a lot of countries are open, but I’ve still found it helpful to double check any entry requirements. For example without this site, I wouldn’t have realized that Argentina says they require insurance that covers covid to enter the country during this time.

Time Zones: WorldTimeBuddy

Throughout my marketing career I dealt with clients all over the world and I don’t think any scheduling tool has been more helpful to me than WorldTimeBuddy. I would be asked to schedule interviews with someone in Australia and include our client on the east coast and one that is vacationing in Europe. How the fuck am I supposed to figure out a time that’s not completely unreasonable you ask? WorldTimeBuddy for the win!

Outside of work 🙂 , this site comes in handy when I’m trying to figure out reservations across the world and also when several of my friends in different time zones can all hop on a call to chat. It’s awesome.

Check this shit out:

Weather Planning: Time and Date

This website is absolutely amazing. It has everything from day counters (it was helpful when counting down to my retirement date), to awesome world clocks. However, what I use it for is to be closer to the world around me.

I use their weather section to understand the average temperature of anywhere on Earth before planning our nomad travels. I also check out the Sunrise and Sunset information so I know how much light to expect before going somewhere new. I had a goal in retirement of being a sun child and so far it’s working really well 🙂 .

Weather Predictions: Dark Sky

At my last job in New York, someone asked if it was raining. My boss turned towards the window and I turned to my screen. DarkSky told me that it wasn’t raining, but it would be pouring in 10 minutes. I relayed this with (I assume?) robot like intensity based on the reaction I got 😉 . Needless to say, my colleague was happy for my weird premonition app when he didn’t get caught in a downpour unprepared.

I absolutely love this app. Not only does it give you minute by minute expectations of what will happen, such as rain, but it also breaks days up into their weather patterns. For example, any other weather app I’ve ever used just says “this day is sunny, this day is cloudy etc” but Dark Sky shows that actually that day is sunny from 10am to 4pm and then cloudy from 4pm to 8pm so it’s a perfect day to get my walk on before those clouds close in.

However, just a heads up that if you’re interested, you should check this website out soon. It’s sadly going away in March 2023 after Apple bought it and stripped it for parts.

Transportation Planning: Rome2Rio

I blame my silly American brain, but it never really occurred to me that there are many different ways to get from one place to another. This site lets you input two destinations and it will tell you all the ways you can get between them including cost and time spent.

As a result, I have taken several train and bus trips across Europe instead of flying (my assumed default). There is always another way and Rome2Rio taught me that, while providing all the information and links I needed to book the trip.

Airline Timing: Calendar 12

Many airlines have a limit for how far in advance you can book tickets. Since I’m currently trying to get rid of my airline miles before they expire and because travel hacking is becoming more difficult, I want to book my tickets as soon as possible. In order to check dates and count backwards I use this easy tool to do that.

Airline Seat Choices: SeatGuru

Crowdsourcing to the rescue! I absolutely love when we get together to help each other and this site is a testament to that. SeatGuru lets you input any flight or route and you can see if there are any bad seats, such as ones without windows or the ability to lean back. This website has saved me more times than I can count by pointing out downsides to seats that I was literally about to drop thousands on. I love this site so much. Here’s an example of what you see on there:

NOMAD NEEDS

Packing: Eagle Creek Pack-it Specter Compression Cubes

I’ve been using these packing cubes since the beginning of our nomad travels and I find them super helpful. Not only do they allow you to pack way more into a bag than usual, but they also make unpacking super easy. Just grab them out of your bag and plop them into a drawer until you’re ready to grab some clothes.

I’ve started organizing each cube based on activity, such as running, sleeping and my dressier clothes. That also makes it easy to grab what I need without throwing clothes everywhere.

Travel Adapter: BESTEK Universal Travel Adapter

I use this Travel Adapter Dock when I go to other countries that have different electric sockets. It’s extremely helpful because it’s easy to use with any type of socket and can charge 7 things at once from 1 plug. It’s also fairly small for all that it does so it’s worth its weight in my bag – an important nomad consideration 🙂 .

Cord Organization: Avantree Cord Organizers

Basically, this:

The fact that these cords are also now color coded has been helpful for me. It’ easy to spot when I’ve left a cord behind because of those bright colors. It’s also easy to see what cord I’m about to pull from my bag based on the color 🙂 .

International Phone Service: Google Fi

I started using Google FI in 2021 in preparation for my global, nomadic lifestyle and have stuck with them since. I’m super happy with the service – it was easy to set up and I haven’t had any issues having cell or data service. I even wrote a whole review here once I hit 1 year with them: Review: Google Fi – The US & International Cell Service

No ATM Fee Debit Card: Charles Schwab Investor Checking Account

This debit card reimburses you for ALL ATM fees worldwide. I’ve been using it for over a year in multiple countries and have always received all the fees I paid back by the end of the month. It’s basically magic 🙂 .

Also heads up: I recently learned that cash transfers from other banks happen the next business day, BUT you can’t withdraw that money for 5 business days. That’s a nice safety measure, but something I need to plan around since I don’t keep much money in this account and usually plan to withdraw it shortly after I transfer it.

Deliveries: Amazon Lockers

I have a complicated relationship with Amazon. I do not agree with how they treat their warehouse workers, but I do buy things from them on occasion (I’m obviously not perfect – just always trying to be better) . As a result, I wrestled with if I should mention this service from them.

However, I didn’t know it existed and it’s possible that other people don’t know about it either and that it could help them in some way if there are no other options. So I’m here to talk about Amazon Lockers.

They’re an interesting concept for nomads because you have your items shipped to a specific locker location near where you’ll be staying, but if the items are late and you’ve already moved on, Amazon will ship them back to the company at no additional cost to you while also sending you a refund for your items. It takes a lot of the stress and guess work out of deliveries when you’re moving around frequently especially in the time of pandemic delays. Anyway, if anyone knows of a similar service that doesn’t feed into Amazon, please let me know 🙂 .

Printing: Print With Me

Back in the beginning of the year when airlines were requiring all kinds of pandemic related paperwork, I ran into a bit of a snag because these airlines were asking that all passengers bring PRINTED versions of this paperwork. What is this? 1999?!? I’ve never had a printer in my adult home and I’m not planning to start now.

Back when I lived in Seattle, it was easy to pop into a FedEx, UPS or a pharmacy and print things as needed from a USB drive, but for some reason, I wasn’t able to find any of those places easily when we needed them most right before going to Thailand. Enter: Print With Me!

My partner went to a coffee shop to grab some coffee beans and saw that they had a sign about Print With Me. You just email the address the shop provides, and they can print things for you for a fee. The website lets you find what random businesses have this feature in an easy to use map and that totally saved us leading up to our first international trip during the pandemic.

COVID Tests: BinaxNOW

Based on recently travel requirements this might be less of an issue, but when negative tests were required to board planes and enter countries, BinaxNOW at-home tests saved my ass. I wrote about the whole experience in this post: How To Easily Meet Entry Testing Requirements: A BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag At-Home Test Review, but in summary, they are tests that you can do while getting on a tele-health call with a doctor who confirms your results so they are accepted as an “official” test to enter the US and other countries.

Glasses: Zenni Optical

I’ve been using Zenni Optical for my glasses for years and have been raving about them so much that my Mom and all of my partner’s family now use them. They are an online glasses store that has prescription glasses for as little as $20. You just enter the information your optometrist provides at your eye exam into their site, and they ship you the glasses wherever you are.

After paying hundreds of dollars for the same glasses, I was blown away by this company and am so happy to see them continuing to thrive. One heads up though: make sure when you see your optometrist that they measure your pupillary distance (or as my mom calls it “poopilary distance” 😉 ) because you need that for your glasses.

However, if you forget (like I did 🙂 ) Zenni has easy to use instructions on how to measure it yourself at home. They also let you upload a photo so you can virtually try on any glasses you’re interested in before buying them. I love it 🙂 .

Period Cup: Saalt

Basically this: Saalt Cup Review: Period Cups Are Life Changing!

After lugging my preferred brand of pads and tampons around the world, I learned about period cups and have been using a Saalt cup for over a year now and it’s completely changed my life.

Noise Machine App: White Noise Lite

White Noise Light app on Android (iPhone too?) for white noise,

My partner and I used to travel with an actual white noise machine that was bigger than basically anything else in our luggage, until All Options Considered mentioned an app they had been using to serve the same purpose while keeping their packing light, so I had to check it out. And I LOVE IT! I replaced our big white noise machine with this app for the past year or so and have never looked back. It has a variety of sounds you can choose from, but my preference for sleeping is the Box Fan.

TRAVEL TRACKING

Trip Tracking: TripCase

And finally, the big daddy reason I seem on top of shit while traveling constantly: TripCase. I love them because all I have to do is forward any confirmation email I have to them from an airline, hotel, train, anything, and they automatically compile it into an itinerary and then alert me to any changes to that route.

Years ago my Mom and I were flying to Fiji and the airline ended up delaying our flight 12 hours. The first time I heard about the delay was from TripCase – not the airline. That heads up allowed us to plan accordingly and I’ll never forget it. Especially for something like my European itinerary to visit my friends where I only stayed in each city 2-4 days, knowing what was up in an organized fashion was necessary and TripCase allowed me to do that years ago and still does to this day.

SUPPORT

Speak With A Human: GetHuman

If you’re human, I assume you’ve experienced the hell that are large company phone trees. You call a number, talk to a robot for 5 minutes and then wait for (at times) hours to get your question answered. Well, I discovered an amazing website a few years ago, GetHuman, that makes that a much quicker process.

You do still have to call someone, but if you go to this website and enter the company you are trying to contact, they will tell you which of their million numbers is best to do so and the average wait time. They even offer a free service that will call you back when any company picks up instead of having you wait on the line forever. I LOOOOVE them.

Over the last few years with the use of this service, I’ve contacted companies within minutes instead of hours to get my issues resolved. Here’s an example:

Get A Response ASAP: Twitter

I swear I’m not getting a kickback from any of these sites, especially Twitter, which is often called the “Damned Bird App.” However, I must recognize what Twitter is good for. Second to connecting with awesome people like yourselves, I have learned that Twitter is amazing for customer service, airline customer service in particular. For example – this was a fair response when I asked a question directly to an airline earlier this month…#Burn 😉 :

I have done several experiments when I tweet a question to an airline from my Purple account or even my personal one that has no followers, and they respond to either, way faster than when I was on the phone on hold asking the same question.

For example, I once had a flight out of Seattle airport at 7am, so I went through security at 6am and was bummed to discover I didn’t have TSA Pre-Check despite inputting that info and having that service.

Once I got through security, I tweeted Delta and before I walked up to my nearby gate, they had changed something about my return ticket so that it would acknowledge my Pre-Check status. Amazing!

CONCLUSION

And those are the tools I use to make my nomad life more efficient and awesome 🙂 . I hope this was helpful as you embark on your next adventure!

What are your favorite travel tools?

20 thoughts on “My Favorite Nomad Travel Tools Of 2022”

  1. Great recommendations. I’ve used Rome2Rio loads of times, it’s so helpful. GoogleFI is only available for North Americans; there are various international SIM options that people from other countries who travel a lot may be interested in. You can also get cheap local SIM cards for particular countries (if I were to ever visit China, this is what I would do + a burner phone) though that’s also a hassle. Tripcase is new to me and looks great! Same for Nomad List, I’ll definitely be checking that. A lot more convenient than going to government websites and checking official travel advice on a country by country basis. Thank you for sharing!

    Reply

  2. Thanks for the great list! I am excited to try out White noise app and the timeanddate for weather.
    We were Google Fi fans too but we received the dreaded termination email recently. We were aware of the termination after being outside the US for 6 months but we received the email just after 3 months. Heads-up for anyone who may not be aware of it and may plan to stay out of the country for a longer duration.

    Reply

      1. I am sharing the message they sent in case it helps the readers. We don’t feel like its worth contesting since we have now decided to be outside the US for more than 6 months. After doing a bit of research, it seems like there are a couple of good alternates out there that we plan to explore in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed that they work!

        “As a reminder, Fi’s Terms of Service require you to use our service primarily in the United States (territories not included), and it looks like you’ve been predominantly using Fi abroad. In 30 days, we’ll need to suspend your international roaming data capabilities unless you start using Fi in the United States again (territories not included). Your calls and texts will not be impacted.

        We may grant exceptions for military members and state department workers who are serving abroad. Please add your dependents to your group plan and complete the following steps to request an exception.
        Go to goo.gle/fi-sheerid
        Fill out the verification form (make sure to use your corresponding Fi email address)
        Submit the required documents
        Once SheerID verifies your status, Fi will process your exception and you’ll be notified via email. This process usually takes 20 minutes, but up to a day in some cases. You will need to re-verify your status through SheerID after 9 months. Visit our Help Center for more details.

        Your phone number is safe on Fi until you cancel service or move it to another provider. If you believe you received this message in error, please contact Fi support.”

        Reply

        1. Thank you so much for sharing that! I hope your alternative work out. I’ve been reading more about the Fi limit and it seems that they have stopped defining it and that if someone uses a lot of data outside of the US and it no longer makes financial sense for them they cut the person (even before 6 months). Good to know as I continue using this company and plan to spend more time outside the US. If you find a great alternative please let me know 🙂 .

          Reply

          1. I am so glad Google Fi kicked us out because we found that the alternative(s) are so much better and significantly cheaper for our use case. I was a little intimidated initially but the process was so easy.

            1. We transferred our numbers from fi to google voice using this link. Very easy, took about 48 hours and there was no service disruption during this period.
            https://fi.google.com/gvtransfer

            2. We cancelled our google fi service after the transfer was over.

            3. The phone calls on google voice are very cheap. Free – if we call a US number because it considers it as a US to US charge and to other countries is also cheap a few cents for most. We now use Google voice as our default phone app.

            4. For data, we found so many Esims. The pricing for Airalo is great. E.g. 30 days in Malaysia for $9. FLexiroam also has great reviews. It seemed expensive at first but their global plans are often discounted by 80% which would make 13GB for 360 days to be $65. By trying to download stuff offline, using Wifi, this would be a great option.
            That’s it!

            Another thing to note, Google fi has some bug where even wifi calling which should be free (e.g. to the US) is being categorized as cellular call. This only happened when we called from Indonesia and Malaysia. We went on airplane mode before every call and the phone log also shows wifi symbol next to the call but fi charged us 20 cents for each min. Even after reaching out to the customer service, they are only providing a $9 refund out of over $55. Just wish we had made the switch earlier!

            Reply

            1. Great to know!!! I looked into Google Voice for a hot second, but obviously not enough. I didn’t know it could do all that. As for E-Sims does that mean you need to buy one in each new country?

              And I’m sorry you encountered that Google Fi bug. That happened to me for about $10 while in México and I contacted their support via the app and they resolved and refunded it quickly. That sucks their customer service doesn’t always do that.

              Anyway, thank you SO much for updating us – I really appreciate it!! Safe travels!

              Reply

              1. My pleasure! I learned a lot from your blog so happy to help!

                For Esims, there are a variety of options, you can get one for each country or get regional bundles like Europe or even get global ones. Generally, I have found that going by country is cheaper unless you get a discounted package such as the global Flexiroam one which is sometimes 80% off. I am in Malaysia for a couple of months so I just went with the country one for now. I plan to do a bit of hopping around in Europe next year so will likely get a regional or global one.

                I was a bit concerned about not having a single plan and getting a new ESIM for every country especially since we travel to at least 10 countries in a year. However, after trying it, I am happy to say that it is quite easy. I have the Airalo app on my phone. I search for a plan, checkout and click on “Install Sim.” Flexiroam and others work the same way so we are also not stuck with one SIM provider and can test multiple ones. We will be in Brunei for 4 days so I will also get to experience how switching between different ESim plans works this month.

                Reply

  4. TripIt is a great option to bundle up all your airplane and reservations for trips. That service was also the first (not the airline 😤) to let me know of a cancelled flight! I then rushed to the airline portal and behold! (This was an AA from Paris back to the US) my flight had been cancelled! Then TripIt was the first (again not AA) to let me know I had been rebooked on another flight- this was while I was madly researching alternatives and if I wanted to stay 3 more days in Paris. Darn! They (evil AA) rebooked me for the same day a couple hours later…. Oh well it was time to come home ☺️🤷🏻‍♀️

    Thanks for all the list! Pretty cool!

    Reply

    1. That is WILD – I’m glad you got the updates somewhere and got home in a timely fashion (even if that messed up your new plan to stay in Paris 😉 ).

      Reply

  6. I remember some of these from that first post you wrote, about general tools you use for life in general. 😉 I think my favorite is still World Time Buddy. I use it now to schedule my meetings.

    I hope you’re enjoying Argentina!

    Reply

    1. You’ve been paying attention 😉 . I debated mentioning those tools here a second time, but I wanted to so that the travel stuff is all in one place. I hope the repeats weren’t annoying 🙂 . 

      And woohoo World Time Buddy! Argentina is lovely – the perfect temperature and wonderfully sunny 🙂 .

      Reply

  7. Thank you so much for this invaluable post. This is my first time commenting. As a first time traveler I truly appreciate this information. Many blessing to you.

    Reply

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