Free tools for travelers

Travel is one of those areas where five minutes of planning routinely saves hundreds of dollars, yet most people plan the fun parts and wing the expensive parts. I have paid the $10-a-day roaming tax, I have overpaid for the last-minute campsite, and I have landed in a country on a public holiday with everything closed. These tools are the checklist I now run before every trip.

Connectivity first, because it is the most common budget leak. Your carrier will happily sell you international roaming at $10 a day, which is $300 on a month-long trip. A local eSIM with 10GB of data typically costs $15 to $30 for the whole month. The eSIM calculator compares your trip length and data needs against both options. For almost every trip over three days, the eSIM wins by a landslide. Buy it before you board, install it on WiFi, and land connected.

For domestic road trips, the free campground directory is the difference between a $15-a-night trip and a $150-a-night trip. Free sites across 9 states, with enough detail to plan a route around them. Pair it with the public holidays dataset when planning: traveling the week of a holiday without knowing it means crowds and surge pricing, while deliberately traveling around one can mean empty trails.

Business travelers have their own math. The GSA per diem calculator gives you the official federal lodging and meal rates for any destination, which is useful whether you work for the government or just want a reality check on what your employer's reimbursement should cover. And for international coordination, the time zone overlap tool finds the actual workable meeting hours between zones instead of the usual 6 AM guesswork.

My pre-trip checklist, refined over years of doing it wrong: eSIM installed before boarding, first-night lodging booked, holiday calendar checked for the destination, per diem looked up for the expense report. Twenty focused minutes at home eliminates the entire category of expensive decisions made tired in airports.