A vacation is meant to reduce your stress and increase your happiness, but unless you plan it properly, it can become a headache and a nightmare. Before you leave on your vacation, you should make sure that you do these three things to prevent difficulties and mishaps.
- Reconfirm All Reservations
Before setting out on your vacation, you will want to call all of the places where you’ve made reservations to reconfirm the date and other details. The reason you want to do this is that sometimes the computer systems of hotels, airlines, and other businesses can experience digital malfunctions that can cause your reservations to be deleted or corrupted. You don’t want to get to your vacation destination only to discover that your lodging reservations don’t exist. Most vacation areas experience high tourist traffic and can run out of vacancies quickly for days at a time.
- Call Your Credit Card Company
This may seem like an odd thing to do before your vacation, but your credit card company is designed to be hypervigilant with regards to odd spending habits or spending occurring outside of your area of residence. This is due to the prevalence of credit card fraud. When your credit card company detects suspicious spending, it will either send you an alert to confirm that you authorize the purchases or they could freeze your credit card account until you check in to confirm that you’re the one using your card. This sudden freeze to your account can cause issues if you’re trying to pay for a meal or gas, so to prevent a delay in your plans or a declined purchase, call your credit card company before you leave for vacation and let them know where you’ll be vacationing and for how long so they’re aware of incoming strange purchases.
- Negotiate With Your Cell Phone Company
Depending on where you plan on vacationing, you may experience difficulty in making and receiving calls. Worse still, you may find that you can access your normal cellphone services but will be subject to roaming charges. Call your cell phone company before you leave for your vacation and ask them if you’re getting ready to vacation in an area where you will be subject to roaming charges. If they inform you that there will be roaming charges, ask them if you can make temporary changes to your cellular service plan in order to reduce or avoid the charges and ensure that you can remain in contact with friends and family.
