Accessing your travel documents, after you’ve lost everything

Whenever I travel, I take one very simple step to make sure that I can have access to all of my travel documents, even if everything I own is misplaced by an airline, lost on a train, or stolen by a sticky fingered entrepreneur. I photograph everything, especially important things like passports, identification, traveler’s check receipts, and more. And then I email them to myself, at an account that I can access anywhere, anytime, as long as I can find an internet connection.

There are some backwater areas where internet and computer access can be a little hard to come by, but those areas becoming fewer and farther between. Embassies and consulates are guaranteed to have working internet, and if you need to have a passport replaced, they can pull up all of the information right then and there, right at the place where you need copies of those documents the most.

Also, make sure you have all of your itineraries and flight information in a single email to yourself. That way, you won’t have to search through every email in your account before you find the one you are looking for. Keeping all of this just on your smart phone doesn’t always work out, if that smart phone goes missing. It’s harder for an entire email account to go missing. Just make sure you don’t accidentally delete those important emails.

For a similar trick that will hopefully get a lost camera returned to you, check out this post on my blog- Simple security for a lost camera