You reach passport control, they ask for your hotel booking or return ticket and… your phone has no data, your inbox won't load and the PDF is "somewhere". It's one of the most stressful moments of a trip, and ten minutes of preparation prevents it.
Which documents to keep on your phone
- Tickets and boarding passes (plane, train, ferry).
- Accommodation bookings, with address and phone number.
- Travel insurance: policy and assistance number.
- Visas or electronic travel authorisations (ESTA, eTA, e-Visa…).
- A copy of your passport and ID card.
- International driving permit, if you're hiring a car.
- Activity bookings with time and meeting point.
- Health card or important medical details (allergies, medication).
A digital copy doesn't replace the original (always carry your physical passport), but it saves you if it's lost or stolen.
How to organise them
Don't rely on your inbox search. Organise documents by type: identity (passports, visas), flights and transport, accommodation, insurance and activities.
In TripBox these folders come ready in every trip, and when you forward a booking email to the trip's address, the document is filed automatically and added to the itinerary with its time.
How to have them offline
This is the step almost everyone forgets: a document "in the cloud" is useless without signal.
- Download everything before you leave home, on Wi-Fi. TripBox has a button to download all the trip's files at once.
- Check in airplane mode that they open.
- Boarding passes: in the airline's app and also as a PDF.
- Take screenshots of the most critical things (ticket QR code, hotel confirmation) as plan C.
Sharing them with your travel companions
In a group, nobody should have to ask "can you send me the booking?". The ideal is one shared folder with everyone's bookings that each person can open on their own phone, offline too. Sensitive documents (passports, medical data) should be visible only to those who need them.