Our top ten essential travel hacks everyone should know

1. Keep your shoes in hotel shower caps to stop them getting everything else dirty. Or, you know, you could use a carrier bag.

2. Take some elastic bands with you. Use them to keep your clothes rolled up in your bag, secure your flipflops together to take up less space, or make sure all your postcards and tickets don't fall out of your journal. You can also use them to make an emergency washing line, where you can poke the clothes through the holes without needing pegs.

3. Keep one of those tumble dryer laundry sheet things in your case to keep it smelling fresh. Failing that, pinch the hotel soap and put that in instead.

4. I've cut myself SO many times by putting my hand into a washbag and slicing myself open on a razor. Use a bulldog clip to prevent unnecessary blood loss.

5. Pound shop contact lense cases make great little pots for a weekend's worth of gunk. By which I mean moisturiser. Or Marmite.

6. Request a “Fragile” sticker for your luggage. No, it's not Italian for "kick me". Bags marked with this sticker are generally put on top of the rest of the pile, and end up being among the first to hit the baggage claim conveyor belt. That means you can get out of that human bingo game and to the taxi line a whole lot quicker.

7. Keep taking photos of road signs, place names and restaurants. Guaranteed in a year's time you won't remember any of them, let alone the country you were in when you go back over your pics.

8. Best thing I've found for keeping earphones untangled is a bulldog clip... then you can clip it on your top when you're going through passport control etc. 

9. Stop worrying about broken glass in your suitcase; keep your holiday bottles in pound shop swimming arm bands.

10. Keep your earrings on buttons; saves you scrabbling around under the hotel bed trying to find the one you've just lost.

Hotel room essentials

It’s funny to think that when we look back on our past holidays, what often sticks out most in our minds are not the good times, but those moments when we had a holiday nightmare!

From cancelled flights to lost passports to finding that your hotel is actually a building site, there’s a host of challenges to navigate when holidaying, and more often that not it’s the simple hotel room that can contain the most problems.

THE BASICS

How hard can it be to get a decent night’s sleep when you’re on holiday? Fairly hard apparently! What should be the basic requirements of a good mattress and clean sheets can all too often turn into a bit of a headache.

While we’ve all been survivors of that hotel bed that feels like you’re trying to sleep on a pile of coat-hangers, it’s important is to remember that you are perfectly within your rights to complain and try and resolve the situation.

You’ve paid your money, and more often than not, the hotel staff will be happy to appease your needs. And failing that, Which magazine has a handy online guide to your consumer rights when holidaying.

WHAT TO TAKE

Sometimes prevention is the best cure. Thanks to a variety of online travel sites such as TripAdvisor, the majority of hotels and B&Bs are listed with a review section where customers get chance to rate or slate the booking in question. Definitely worth checking out before making your holiday booking!

However, you should always expect the unexpected when heading off to exotic locations and that’s why packing a few emergency items like earplugs, insect repellent and even a robust pillow can make all the difference between the holiday of a lifetime and one that you’d rather forget!

WHAT TO BRING BACK

Thankfully, when we go on holiday it’s often not just the pleasures of escapism that we enjoy. It’s also the experience of being in different cultures and strange new situations that enables us to really make the return to our homes all the better!

So whether it be a particularly stressful holiday that makes you appreciate your bed a little more, or whether a luxurious hotel room has meant that you’ve come back with the urge to upgrade your own mattress to the likes of the particularly swish new Bedstar range, holidays will always give you something new to think about!