10 Travel Mistakes You'll Never Make Again (and How to Avoid Them)

Every traveller has that moment... standing at an airport carousel hoping your bag magically appears, realising your card’s been blocked overseas, or discovering the “must-see” attraction is completely sold out.

I’ve been there. More than once. And while those moments usually become funny stories after the trip, they’re stressful, expensive, and exhausting in the moment... especially when you’ve used precious annual leave to be there.

In this episode of Tourist to Traveller, I’m sharing ten real travel mistakes I’ve made over the years, and exactly how to avoid them, so you can travel with more confidence, less stress, and a whole lot more ease.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• The biggest rookie mistake travellers still make before leaving home
• Why overplanning can ruin even the best trips
• The jet lag mistake that steals days from short trips
• Why pre-booking attractions matters more than ever
• How to avoid common transport scams
• How to travel smarter without overcomplicating things

This episode is about learning from mistakes without shame, and giving you simple, actionable ways to avoid them so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time actually enjoying your trip.

Helpful Resources & Links

• Related blog post: 10 Travel Mistakes You'll Never Make Again (and How to Avoid Them) 

Connect & Explore

Find destination guides, travel planning resources and more at touristtotraveller.com, and follow along on Instagram @_touristtotraveller for behind-the-scenes planning and future travel inspiration. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to the Tourist to Traveller Podcast, the show that helps you go beyond the guidebook and turn your bucket list dreams into real adventures. I'm Tahnee, a travel blogger, podcaster, and everyday explorer who's been ticking off epic destinations for over 20 years while balancing a 9 to 5. Each week I'll bring you inspiring stories, destination deep dives, and practical tips to help you plan smarter, travel deeper, and capture those unforgettable moments along the way. So, grab your passport, pack your curiosity, and let's get started. Alright, let's be real for a second. Travel doesn't always go to plan. If you've ever stood at an airport carousel watching everyone else grab their bags while yours never shows up, or realised you packed heels you'll never wear, or had your bank card swallowed by an overseas ATM, yep, same. In this episode, I'm sharing 10 travel mistakes I've personally made over the years. The kind that feels stressful in the moment, but end up teaching you the biggest lessons. These are the mistakes that can cost you time, money, energy, and sometimes your sanity. But they're also incredibly easy to avoid once you know what to look out for. So if you want to travel smarter, with fewer hiccups and way more ease, grab a cupper, settle in, and let's make sure you never make these mistakes again. I'm gonna dive in here with a really obvious one, but it is a mistake that most people I know have made at least once. And this is not getting the travel insurance. I know, I know, especially when you're traveling on a budget, you can it can seem really easy just to skip out on the travel insurance and save a little bit of extra money. But one thing that this gives you is peace of mind. So picture this: you're on your dream holiday, you're having the time of your life, you get back to your room and notice that things aren't as you left them. When you dig a little further, you notice that there are things missing. Theft. Now, this can be a really scary, upsetting situation, but it is much simpler if you have travel insurance. The same goes for arriving at your destination when your bags don't arrive. Or, and this has definitely happened to me, traveling when you fall unexpectedly ill. You can't plan for these things, but they do happen. Not every trip, not all the time, and not to everyone. But when they do, you want to make sure that you're covered. And it's not good enough just to get travel insurance. You need to make sure the travel insurance is suited for your needs and for your trip. For example, if you're doing more adventurous activities like like sandboarding or diving, you want to make sure those things are covered. If you're bringing expensive electronics, like expensive camera equipment, you want to make sure those are covered as well. Also consider things like delays, cancellations. It can impact your trip, but also impact your ability to get home, to get back to work. You could be incurring extra costs like pet care, you know, who's looking after your pets while you're away. It could be childcare. What are those things that you need taken care of if there was an emergency, if your flight was cancelled, um, if there was a natural disaster? Um, and that brings me to another point. Many travel insurance policies don't cover natural disasters unless you add this on. So make sure that this is added into your trip. If there is a cyclone or a hurricane or an earthquake or a tsunami, you want to make sure that you're covered. And a really big one that's come up recently is war. Most travel insurance providers do not cover acts of war or any costs that are associated with acts of war. So make sure you choose wisely and read your insurance policy well. The second one is over planning every second of your trip. Now, I have to confess something here. I am a planner. I actually secretly love travel planning. I love doing all of the research and finding all of the best things to do, all of the hidden gems. And for me, I can sometimes get caught up in wanting to plan out every single moment. But I learned this really early on in my travel journey. And luckily enough, I learned this lesson in my early 20s so that I can get to a point where I never have to make it again. And that is where you've planned almost every second of your trip. If you've planned everything down to a T, not only can it really throw you off and upset you when things don't go to plan, but you leave out room for fun and spontaneity. And I found that those are the best travel experiences. There are so many things that I would have missed out on had I stuck to the plan. Things like experiences with locals. You know, experiences that I would have missed out on had I been so rigid would have been uh the time when I was in Fiji and we went to a kava ceremony. Kava is a drink that is used in traditional and ceremonious times in Fiji and a lot of other countries in the South Pacific. It's made from the root of a kava plant. It has a bit of a relaxation sedative type effect. It leaves your mouth feeling numb, tingly. And if you drink a lot of it, it makes your extremities feel numb and tingly as well. Now, after the kava ceremony, the local who led the ceremony invited us to drink kava with him and his mates later that night, which we said yes to. And we spent the night with locals, hearing their local stories, talking about their local life, drinking way too much kava and alcohol, if I'm being perfectly honest. We were incredibly sick the next day, but it is an experience that we will not forget. Another experience that I would have missed out on had I been too rigid was in Egypt, where we had five-star luxury accommodation that was booked, and last minute we had the opportunity to ditch that accommodation and to spend a couple of nights on a falucca, which is kind of like a traditional sailing boat. It's very rustic. It was basically a big mattress laid on the bottom of a boat where I would almost call this camping on the water. But that's what we did. We spent two nights on a falucca sailing along the Nile River, and it was the best two days that we spent in Egypt. So, yes, plan your must-dos, but leave yourself enough free time and flexibility and room for spontaneity. Don't always stick to the plan. Don't forget that sometimes the best experiences are not ones that you can plan for in advance. Three is overpacking. This is something that I was incredibly guilty of in my 20s, where I would pack for everything. I would pack for every occasion. I would have day clothes, night clothes, clubbing clothes, I would have boots, runners, sandals, thongs, heels, multiple versions, by the way. I would have half my jewelry collection, makeup, hairstyling tools. I would have all of the things. And at the end of most trips, I would realize that I wouldn't wear most things, I wouldn't use most things. And over time, I have learned to scale back. So what I pack now is very much more minimalistic, more simple, but I actually have what I need and I use everything that I take with me. And I get to pack and travel so much lighter. It is a weight literally lifted off my shoulders. But it's so much simpler to travel this way. So some of the things that I have avoided packing are I no longer pack a lot of clothes to go out. I might pack one nice dress or one nice outfit. But I've learned over time that typically after a big day out and about, I'll go to dinner and what I'm already wearing. I definitely don't bring heels with me most times when I travel, especially overseas now. I'll take one watch, one necklace. Um, my most simple travel-friendly makeup. I just keep everything so basic.And a lot of my outfits now are um kind of you know one or two colours. I can mix and match them and they're simple and I can lay them really, really well. So I think I've nailed my travel packing nowadays, but it is a mistake that I absolutely made and am often tempted to make. If you're not sure where to start here, at the end of your next trip, I want you to go into your suitcase and have a look at what you didn't use or where and just make note of them. Even just grab a photo of them on your phone as you're unpacking, split your stuff into two piles. One is everything that you've worn and used, one is everything that you haven't. Next time you pack, try and not pack all of those items. If you're really diligent, don't pack any of them. But if you can pack one or two things less and keep doing that until you've really nailed it, um you're gonna be you're gonna be on the right track. The next one really can upset your travel plans. It did mine, and this is not notifying your bank about your travels. If you're traveling overseas and you have foreign transaction fees and you have all of a sudden foreign charges that are coming from random banks in, let's say, Paris, for your bank, that might look like a scam or fraud or theft, and they'll often put a block on your card. This, of course, happened to me whilst I was in Paris traveling with an ex. It was his card, I was in my early 20s, I couldn't really afford the trip. He was paying for the trip as a gift for my 21st birthday and didn't notify his bank. I had my card with me, there wasn't much on there, but I also had not notified my bank. We'd used our cash, we went to get more cash out of the ATM the day that we were scheduled to fly out to Greece, and it was the first day of a long weekend, and the ATM took and kept his card. We had no backup, we'd already checked out of our accommodation for the day. We had flights that were scheduled later that day, we had no way to get to the airport, we had no way to pay for more accommodation. We were screwed. And keep in mind, this is back when I was 21 years old. You couldn't just put in an international sim and contact your family. We're using payphones and internet cafes. So we eventually, using an internet cafe, got on to I think both of our families back home and found ways of transferring money. Actually, I don't think we could transfer money. I think my mum actually booked us a night accommodation and a shuttle somehow. So we could spend a few nights in some pretty rundown accommodation in Paris, get our card after the long weekend, get to the airport, and reschedule our flights. So what did we lose here? We lost a couple of days that were meant to be in the Greek Islands, but hey, it was it's now a hell of a story and a hell of a lesson that we learned. What I what I also do now is have a backup, whether those that is a backup card, backup cash, always have a backup option for money when you are traveling overseas. Number five is taking a drone to the wrong country. I always do my research here when it comes to my drone because I don't want to break any laws or any rules so I know where I can take it and what the laws are. I thought I'd done my research here. I don't want my drone to be confiscated and I don't want to get in trouble. But when I was flying into Vietnam, these are the early days of drones where a lot of people didn't know what they were. They weren't common. They were so rare that when I would fly my drone, I would often attract a crowd of people, often kids around me, looking up at my drone, going, Oh, wow, what's that? Pointing, wanting to have a go, wanting to know what it was. So they weren't common. I was going through security, a security checkpoint in the airport in Vietnam with my family. They were ahead of me and I was behind. And they had scanned their passports and went through, and as it got to mine, they whisked me away out of the line, and I couldn't even signal or call out to my family because they'd already gone through to let them know I was being taken away. Um, so something had been flagged on my passport. I'd been flagged, I was taken away and brought into a room, and they were questioning me. I didn't know why. I was really confused. I couldn't speak their language and they didn't really understand me speaking English. So eventually I worked out that the issue was with my luggage. They brought me my luggage, they opened it, and they pulled out my drone. Of course. Um, this is where I knew that there was an issue. Um, and trying to explain to them what my drone was, they really didn't understand. They weren't sure if it was explosives, if it was spyware. They didn't understand what it was because they'd never seen it before. So I'm trying to explain. They helped me, they were showing me the remote, and I'm like, you know, remote, like toy, like remote. I'm trying to show them that it's for photo and video. They didn't understand, and they were getting more and more angry and aggressive with me. And I thought, I'm in real trouble here. And it wasn't until a young airport worker walked past and he looked at it and he pointed it out and he was kind of laughing and joking around with them, and he he knew what a drone was. I think he actually owned one and he could finally explain to the airport workers what it was that I was traveling with. They finally got it, it was all fine, I wasn't breaking any laws, um, and they finally sent me on my way. My my family, by this stage, had worked out that I was no longer with them, and they were incredibly panicked as to what had happened. But had I been on my own and had this airport worker not come past and explained, this could have turned into a very scary situation for me. And it's a lesson that I've now very clearly learned. Always check the rules and check the laws before taking a drone into any country. Whilst on that note, if drones are allowed, check if you need any permits to fly. The next is not confirming the taxi price before you travel. There are many countries where taxis are meted, but there are many where they are not, and also many where you need to agree on a price. If you haven't confirmed the taxi price before you go in certain countries, locals can take this as or see this as an opportunity to scam you. And this has happened to me more than once. Even if you have agreed on the price in advance, there are certain tip, there are certain tricks that they can use to try and get more money out of you. So a trip that should have only cost you $10 might cost you $110 because you haven't confirmed the fee in advance. This is such a common travel scam. But there are a few ways to avoid it. Always confirm the fee in advance. Always confirm that that fee is for the for everyone, not per person. Confirm, and I know this sounds silly, but it's happened to me. Confirm the currency. Confirm that you are talking in local currency or US dollars or Australian dollars. Confirm the currency and don't assume because it is another way for them to get more money from you. Uh, ask for the meter to be turned on if there is one in the taxi. And always have a backup plan. So if you're being scammed and you're looking just to get out of the taxi, have a think about what is the safest thing for you in this moment. Is it getting out or is it paying? Because there's no easy answer here. You really need to read the situation for what it is. My tip here is to always research the average taxi fare from the airport to your accommodation in advance before you land, so you know what to expect and what you should be in for. That way you're not going to be overcharged and hopefully you can reduce the chances of being scammed. Number seven is napping immediately when you arrive. This is where you are going to experience jet lag. If you've had a long haul flight, especially across multiple time zones, you get there and chances are you've barely slept on the plane, you might have had one or two too many coffees on the flight, uh, you've been eating different food, maybe a lot of sugar. Your energy levels are all over the place, and it can be so tempting to get off that flight and want to nap immediately. It might seem harmless, right? Just a casual 20-minute nap before I get out and about and explore. If you do that, it is game over for you and your jet lag. That is all it takes. So resist the urge to nap. When you arrive at your destination, immediately try and get used to the time zone there. So be awake when people are awake, sleep when people are asleep, even if you don't feel like it. You'll have a long, tiring day, but the whole rest of your trip will be so much better off for it. Because that one 20-minute nap won't only ruin the rest of your first day, it can ruin your first couple of days once you are suffering from jet lag. So push through it and stay awake if you can and if it's safe to do so. I also recommend a little physical activity without overdoing it. Try and get outdoors if you can. And if you absolutely need to nap, limit it to 20 minutes, set an alarm and make sure you get up. Do not oversleep. Number eight is rocking up to major attractions without pre-booked tickets. Now, I'm not saying that you need to pre-book and plan for everything, but you do need to consider major attractions. So, for example, when I was traveling through Rome, some of the major attractions you needed to pre-book for were the Coliseum and also the Vatican. By pre-booking, you can avoid long lines when you get there. But also, if you haven't pre-booked, you may actually miss out altogether because so many of these attractions are actually sold out. How much would it suck to fly all the way to Rome on a dream holiday to tick off these big dream bucket list items to rock up and know that they're actually completely sold out the entire time you're there, and then you go back home again missing out on having all of the experiences that you were excited to do and see and experience. We also saw these when we were in Spain recently. Luckily, we we ended up finding ways to do most of the things that we wanted to do, but there were a few items that booked out a month in advance. Yes, a month in advance. Hot tip if you're going to Spain and you're going to Granada, get your Alumbra tickets really, really early. Now, my hot tip if you get there, you haven't booked a ticket and it's sold out. My hot tips here, have a look to see if there are any combo tickets where it might be uh like a city pass and includes your entry ticket as well as your um on-the-ground transportation and a few other things, because even though tickets themselves might be booked out, you might there might be combo tickets through other providers available. Consider tour groups where the tickets are included, city passes. Uh, and also this actually worked for me in Spain once. Uh, I don't know how it worked, but it did. When we looked at the website in English, all tickets were sold out. But as soon as we went to the website in Spanish and I used my phone to Google translate everything into English, the Spanish version had tickets, the English version did not. It's crazy. I don't know how I worked this out, but I did. I don't know if that will work for you, but it's worked for me. Next up, number nine, is not packing health essentials. You can't assume that every country is going to have all of the things that you use today in your life when it comes to day-to-day health. I'm talking things like painkillers, feminine products, uh, sunscreen, those things that you take for granted to be easily, readily available and also at a price that is reasonable. I've been caught short here. I can't remember what country it was in, but it was around feminine products, and I knew that I was running short, and we looked for about three days, going from pharmacy to pharmacy. We took so much time out of our trip trying to find feminine products. Um it was really down to the wire when I found some that were really incredibly expensive in a corner store, but it was so inconvenient and the things that we missed out on because we were going from pharmacy to pharmacy and the stress, it really just wasn't worth it. Also, recently, when I was traveling to Palau, um bottles of sunscreen that would typically be , let's say $15, $20 Australian here in Australia over there were an average of let's say 40 to 60 Australian dollars for the same size bottle with a lower SPF. So it's just something to keep in mind. Always have those essentials with you. And if you are if you need any kind of medication, it's really important to have what you need with you and also see if you need to actually have a letter from the doctor or your script there to go through airport security. I always pack like pain relief tablets, travel sickness tablets are critical for any kind of um cruise or boat tour that you might be going on. So motion sick tablets, feminine hygiene products, I always carry a few antihistamines with me, and band-aids. Way more than you think you might need. Also, don't forget to include sunscreen and insect propellant. They're two really easy things to forget. And if you're going to a sunny destination, you might also want to pack some after sun as well. Number 10 is supporting unethical animal tourism. I am a huge animal lover. I'm also vegan. Don't judge me for that, but I am. And when I look back in my early travel days, especially my first couple of international trips in my early 20s, I was not fully aware of the way that animals were being treated in some of these places. I was vegetarian and not vegan at the time, but I look back now and cringe at some of the things that I did. There are definitely ethical options out there to interact and experience animals overseas, but so many of them are not that. And I've seen things that have literally brought me to tears because of how animals were being treated. So, for example, my first trip to Thailand, I rode on the back of elephants. I would never do that again. But I did it then because I was young and I didn't know any better. So we learn from these mistakes. I in more recent years, I when I was in Sri Lanka, I was watching this parade down the road, and they had elephants in chains, and the chains had obviously been wrapped around these elephants so tight for so long that they were basically part of their skin. And watching the way that they were tortured and paraded around, I cried my eyes out in the street. I you know, I feel emotional just thinking about the way these animals were treated, and they would walk past and just look me in the eye, and I just broke down. When I was in in Petra in Jordan, um seeing the donkeys there, same thing. They they had chains around their necks, chains around their faces that had been so tight for so long that they were embedded in their skin. Like skin is growing around it, like they're cut, they're bleeding. It was it was a really horrible thing to witness. They're being hit, they're being beaten, and it's just something that I cannot support, and I would encourage you not to support. So it's a mistake that I made in my early 20s. But I now know better, and it's a mistake that I will not make again. Ideally, look for activities where you can observe animals in their natural habitat rather than in enclosures or where they're being forced to perform for human entertainment. So those are 10 mistakes that I've made so you don't have to. At the end of the day, this is about traveling smarter, not harder. By being prepared and knowing these things in advance, you can avoid them and make sure that you have simpler, more seamless travel experiences. But I also want to let you know that mistakes are part of travel. If you've made these mistakes, so have I, obviously. It's okay. It's all about how we overcome them and how we learn from them. And if you're about to travel, you are gonna make mistakes. Things are going to go wrong. This is part of travel. It might not be enjoyable at the time, but how we overcome these things is is part of why we travel and and it's part of it's part of making this shift from tourist to traveler. And at the end of the day, that is what this podcast is all about. Travel mistakes are pretty much a rite of passage, but the good news is you don't have to learn everything the hard way. Even if one of these mistakes saves you time, money, or a whole lot of stress on your next trip, then this episode has done its job. I've also linked the full blog post in the show notes if you want to revisit this list or share it with a travel buddy who definitely needs it. So let's travel smarter, not harder. Thank you for joining me on this adventure, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to the Tourist to Traveller podcast. I hope today's episode has inspired you to travel more authentically and plan your next adventure with confidence. Don't forget to head to touristtotraveller.com for today's show notes, resources, and free guides to help you plan like a pro. And if you love this episode, please hit subscribe and leave a review. It helps more travelers like you discover the show. Until our next adventure.