Round The World Tickets

Subscribe to the RTW Newsletter

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Home » RTW Travel Deals » Keeping Your Belongings Secure

Keeping Your Belongings Secure

When you are traveling, hopefully you don’t have too much in the way of valuables with you. The more you take, the more you can lose. You are, of course, going to need or want to bring some things that are somewhat precious: camera, iPod, phone, money, passport, credit cards. Keeping your stuff safe while traveling doesn’t have to stress you out, but it is something to think about. With a little thought and a simple strategy, you can focus on your travels and not worry about making it home with everything you started out with – minus most of your money, of course.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

For starters, the money belt is a pretty important piece of equipment in the traveler’s security arsenal. There are all different kinds available, from ones that you wear around your waist to ones that you hang around your neck. Wear whatever you prefer, but you should wear something. It’s a good place to store your passport, plane tickets, cash, traveler’s checks, and credit cards. Your wallet could get lost or stolen pretty easily, so you should only keep enough money for the day in there.

When walking around with a money belt, try your best to completely forget about it. Over time this will become second nature; after eleven months of traveling it felt strange to not have it on. Try not to draw attention to it in public. If you need something from it, don’t just reach in there and get it. If anyone is paying attention, they’ll now know where you keep all of your valuables.

Hotels and hostels usually have some kind of safe you can store valuables in. Make sure they give you a detailed receipt of what you put in there, otherwise if it goes missing you won’t have any recourse. I also recommend bringing a small padlock with you. Some hostels have lockers you can use, or sometimes rooms will use a padlock for the main locking mechanism. It’s always more secure when you are the only person with the key or combination. This does mean you have to be careful with the key, or make sure you remember the combination, though.

Don’t ever leave cash or other expensive belongings in your hotel room. It is much safer to carry them on your person. The chances of being robbed are small, but the chances of something going missing from your room are much higher. If you are robbed, as long as you have some money in your wallet, the thief will likely be satisfied and not think you are concealing the majority of your valuables in a money belt.

You should also make copies of everything that goes in your money belt, and put them in a separate location. It’s also a good idea to keep some emergency cash in a completely separate location. I found that keeping it in a hiding spot in my pack, like in my toiletry bag, made me not worry so much about leaving it in the hotel room unattended.

There are a few more security measures you could take that I will go into in my next article. Do you have any security tips you’d like to share?

« A Vacation From Your Vacation | Home | Picking the Right Travel Gear »