Safe Travels

A biweekly column about travel safety and how to protect yourself when you’re on the road. Safe Travels is sponsored by Travel Guard, which offers broad coverage, including travel medical expense, trip cancellation, and more. Whether across the country or the globe, Travel Guard has you covered.

Traveler at a hotel front desk photographing a long paper receipt with his smartphone

More travelers are losing their insurance claims because of this. Don’t be one of them.

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Something goes wrong on the road. A flight collapses, a bag disappears, you get sick in a country where you do not speak the language. You file a travel insurance claim expecting reimbursement, and then the insurer asks for documentation, and you realize you kept almost none of it. The blurry photos are on your phone somewhere. The confirmation email is buried. The hotel receipt is gone.

Industry experts say the event itself is rarely what sinks a claim. Missing paperwork is. And travel policies do not pay on your account of what happened. They pay on proof of loss, which means you have to be able to show what occurred, when, and what it cost you, in a form an adjuster can accept.

Cartoon of a green-faced traveler clutching his stomach as he rushes toward a restroom door, a palm-lined resort at dusk behind him.

How an airport sandwich could destroy your next vacation

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It starts with a plate of chilled shrimp at the resort buffet. It looks pink and fine, sitting on a bed of ice, and you feel fine after you eat it. Then, six hours later, your vacation is over and you are on the bathroom floor. Late summer is peak season for exactly this kind of culinary hazard, and this year the risk is sharpened by record heat colliding with a travel industry already in meltdown, delayed flights, understaffed hotels, tarmac waits with the air conditioning broken. While everyone worries about cancellations and lost bags, something more dangerous is brewing quietly in galley carts and buffet lines. Your food depends on a cold chain, a temperature-controlled path from farm to fork, and when the heat spikes, that chain can snap. The bacteria that move in when it does are the kind you cannot see, cannot smell, and cannot taste, which is what makes them so easy to eat.

Illustration of a man with a camera on a neck strap crouching to photograph the rear of a white rental car in a parking area, documenting its condition.

Do I still need to take photos of my rental car?

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When Matt Murray rented an Audi A4 in Tampa recently, the lot already had at least four cameras recording the car as it rolled out the gate. An attendant assured him he did not need to take his own photos. He took them anyway, and then started to wonder: in an age of automated inspections, does a renter still need to document the car at all? It is a fair question, because the industry is changing fast. Car rental companies are rolling out AI-powered imaging systems that photograph a vehicle before and after every rental and compare the two sets side by side to flag new damage, with automated systems arriving at roughly 100 large U.S. airport locations. The promise is fewer disputes and the right renter billed for the right ding. The worry, as one industry expert puts it, is that it is too early to tell whether this protects renters or simply becomes a new source of revenue for rental agencies. Damage claims can already stack repair costs on top of service fees and loss-of-use charges, and rental companies do not always get it right.

Cartoon of a frazzled, dirt-smudged hiker waving both arms for help on a wooded shoreline beside her startled terrier, as a fisherman in a small boat approaches across the water.

No more digital detoxes? Why you should keep your phone with you when you travel

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Michelle Girasole thought she knew Rhode Island’s Beavertail State Park well enough to leave her phone in the car. It was a warm summer morning, and she wanted to catch the sunrise with her terrier, Scooter, and enjoy a few minutes without calls, texts, or notifications. Then she followed Scooter off the path and lost her bearings. She spent the next nine hours stranded, with no water, no sunscreen, and no way to call for help, until a fisherman finally spotted her on the shoreline. “If I had my phone,” she says, “none of that would have happened.” Her ordeal is a warning about the travel industry’s latest wellness obsession, the digital detox, which hotels and tour operators are selling as the only way to truly be present. Nearly every traveler says they want to disconnect. But there is a reason a row of security and medical-evacuation experts say that, for anyone without a private fixer, ditching your phone is not relaxation. It is something closer to recklessness.

from leaving the tv on to packing door alarms, travelers are getting innovative about hotel room security. learn how to enhance your safety on the road.

New ways to make your hotel room safe

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Walter Meyer is so concerned about hotel safety that he always brings Dave along. Dave is not real. Whenever Meyer leaves his room, he turns the TV on low, preferably a talk show, so anyone listening at the door hears voices and assumes the room is occupied. On his way out he calls back to the empty room, “Dave, are you sure you don’t want anything? Okay, I’ll be back in a little bit.” The idea is to make a watcher believe someone is inside and will return soon, even when no one is. Meyer is not alone in getting inventive. Safety now ranks at the top of travelers’ concerns, and the strategies people use range from the charmingly low-tech, like Dave, to a small kit of gadgets the savvy traveler never packs without. Security experts and hoteliers say there are specific, simple moves that make a room far harder to breach, starting with the things you can do before you even unlock the door.

Illustration of a worried young traveler sitting inside an airport as smoke, flames, and panicked crowds appear outside the windows.

When your vacation turns dangerous: How do you know it’s time to leave?

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Kate McCulley, a journalist based in Prague, knew it was time to leave Madagascar. Flights were getting canceled, protests had moved outside her hotel in Antananarivo, and the country was on the verge of a military coup. The police blanketed the neighborhood in tear gas. After several days of trying, she finally caught a flight to Réunion. Most travelers face a much harder version of her call. After months of planning and thousands of dollars spent, deciding whether to cut a vacation short when conditions shift is rarely simple. Civil unrest, a natural disaster, a sudden spike in crime, or a slow drift in local sentiment can each push a manageable risk toward a real threat. Government advisories often lag behind reality on the ground, tour operators have an interest in downplaying risk, and standard travel insurance generally will not cover a trip cut short on fear alone. There is no algorithm for the stay-or-leave decision, but security professionals point to clear early triggers that separate a manageable situation from a dangerous one, if travelers know what to watch for.

Editorial cartoon showing a stranded family of four standing next to a broken-down silver Honda SUV with steam rising from the hood and two orange suitcases by the open trunk, while traffic blurs past on a yellow-tinted highway under a sweltering yellow sky, illustrating the common summer road trip breakdown scenario between Memorial Day and Labor Day when heat stresses vehicle cooling systems, batteries, and tires

Summer road trip questions you never ask (but should)

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Drivers face their 100 deadliest days between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Late August is one of the most common times for vehicle failures because cooling systems, batteries, tires, and belts have been stressed all season. Pavement temperatures can exceed 150 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to warp metal and disintegrate tires. Travel trailer blowouts are extremely common because many towable RVs use cheap tires with speed ratings of just 65 mph. 85 percent of drivers have roadside assistance, but only 18 percent actually use that coverage during a breakdown. Standard auto insurance does not cover mechanical breakdowns, and common towing mileage limits are as low as 15 miles before passengers pay out of pocket.