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.