Traveling Abroad With Kids? These 13 Tech Hacks will Keep the Whole Family Connected:

Picture this: you survived the red-eye, wrangled two carry-ons and a car seat through customs, and finally collapsed onto the hotel bed. Then your youngest asks for their favorite show, and the app flashes an error message.

Or you get to your destination only to find that you can’t access your digital wallet, let alone your email or the transit passes you thought you set up before your trip. And your teens are racking up international roaming charges left and right while messaging friends back home.

Sound familiar?

Family vacations abroad are supposed to be full of magical moments and memories that last a lifetime. However, tech hiccups have a funny way of showing up at the worst possible time, usually right when everyone is tired, hungry, and cranky. And the time you couldn’t get your youngest through the subway turnstile because an app was glitching is not the sort of memory you want to take home with you.

You know I’m all about being prepared and doing your homework ahead of time when traveling with kids. Thus you won’t be surprised when I tell you this: a little digital prep before takeoff saves a lot of meltdowns later, for kids and grownups alike. This post covers our family’s tech checklist when it comes to family vacations – especially those overseas –  plus ways to make sure your tech works FOR you versus AGAINST you when you’re traveling abroad.

This is a collaboration post. However, please know I stand behind everything written here, and only include links to products/services/resources I’m willing to recommend personally.

But first,

Why Favorite Apps Act Up Overseas:

Traveling overseas is always a challenge to the everyday patterns we take for granted, but this is especially true with kiddos. If your littles are used to chilling with their fave shows or tunes from your at-home subscriptions, you need to make an advance plan for what happens when you’re no longer on your home turf.

Why? Think about it: Many streaming services license shows by country. So a cartoon available back home might vanish once your phone connects to a foreign network. And banking and credit card apps can be even trickier. Since a sudden login from another country looks suspicious, some banks freeze cards or lock accounts until you verify who you are. Which is darn near impossible if you don’t have cell or wifi access.

Hotel and airport wifi adds another layer of frustration. Besides being slow (AND not secure!), public networks often ilter certain sites, or leave personal information exposed to strangers sharing that connection.

That’s why having a family tech plan before you leave home will save you time and frustration later on.

13 Tech Hacks for Smoother Family Travel

These are some of the things our family recommends you consider before setting off on your next family trip overseas:

Travel Tech Tips for Before You Leave Home:

Call your bank and credit card company before you depart.

Let your bank and credit card company know your travel dates and destinations, so purchases or ATM attempts abroad don’t set off their internal fraud triggers. Dear Husband forgot to do this before our trip to rural eastern Germany this past summer, and it took him several trips to various ATMs followed by several phone calls to his bank to get a cash advance sorted out.

Also check your cell phone’s international plans.

Some cell plans have great international roaming options; others will charge you an arm and a leg for each day you’re away from your home country. For a family where everyone has their own cell phone (more on this below), this will add up fast; you DON’T want to be surprised by a sky-high family bill when you get home. 

Even better, look into international eSims before you fly.

There are plenty of companies that sell eSIMS online (the one we use is Orange Travel, but it’s not the only one). You can search for their apps before you leave, download said apps onto everyone’s phone, complete your purchase ahead of time, and just activate your new e-Sims once you’ve landed at your destination.

Build out family members’ charging kits.

For each member of your family, toss a universal adapter, a multi-port charger, and a fully charged power bank into one zippered pouch. Labeling each cable with colored tape also ends the nightly “that’s MY charger” debate.

Download everything at home.

Movies, playlists, audiobooks, and offline maps all work without a signal, which makes long flights and spotty rural connections much easier. We fold this step into our regular pre-trip routine, right alongside my pro packing tips for family travel.

Plan your visits in advance.

As much as you can, figure out where you’re going during your trip and how you’re going to get there. Especially in larger/more popular cities, many tourist attractions book up weeks if not months in advance. Doing your research ahead of time means you’ll get to do the things most important to your family, whether it’s climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower or exploring no-longer-in-service London Underground stations (both of which our family highly recommends, btw). And purchasing/downloading passes ahead of time will save you time, money, and stress.

Also figure out your transit options ahead of time.

Many public transit systems are now going cardless, which means you need to have a plan for how each member of your family will access local subways, buses, and light rail at your destination. This is just one reason to download your destination’s official transit app(s) before you depart, as well as figure out how you’ll purchase your transit passes when you arrive. 

This last part is crucial; when you reach the airport, you’ll probably all be tired, jetlagged, cranky, and just wanting to get to your hotel. And nothing can be more bewildering under the best of circumstances than trying to navigate yourselves around a strange airport, then figure out how you’re going to get from there to your hotel.

For some cities (like Berlin, where we visited last summer while Essie was still 14), children 14 and under travel for free on public transit, and the whole system operates on an honor code anyway. There’s no scanning at subway stations, and the only time anyone asked to see our passes was on our trip to the airport home, which is apparently a popular place to find people who’ve underpaid for their transit pass (the airport is in an outer zone of the city) in the hopes they won’t get caught.

On the other hand, the transit system in other cities (like London, which we visited a few years ago with my mama) want you to tap either a chip-enabled credit card OR a smartphone wallet at every subway station, meaning you’ll need enough smartphones and/or chip cards for each paying person in your group. Still other cities, like Paris (which we visited last winter, when Essie still did not have a smartphone) assume that everyone does have a smartphone, and expect you to be able to scan your individual transit pass on your smartphone with each subway trip. In this case, Dear Husband figured out ahead of time that requesting a certain kind of pass at a transit station window, and providing a passport-sized photo of Essie that we’d brought from home, would save us a ton of time AND money getting Essie around for the week.

Managing Tech While You’re Abroad:

Once you’ve left your home-country soil, here are some tips to keep everything running smoothly:

Have your credit card company and bank international calling numbers pre-programmed into your phone. 

(And make sure that the format you’ve programmed into your contacts begins with a + followed by your country code – for example, +1 for the United States!). Even when you notify credit cards and banks ahead of time of your travel plans, things can and do go wrong; and I wasted a solid half-hour of exhausted-hungry-jetlagged time in Charles de Gaulle airport last December trying to reach one of my credit card companies on the Saturday after Christmas because my card wasn’t working when we landed.

Have a plan for sites that won’t load.

What happens if you can’t get the apps, sites, and other resources you’re used to having at home to work upon arrival at your destination? Should a paid subscription or a trusted website refuse to open overseas, a quick read on how to unblock websites explains safe, legal options such as switching to mobile data, changing DNS settings, or using a VPN. Before relying on any workaround, double-check your subscription’s terms so you stay on the right side of the rules.

Keep parental controls switched on.

Screen time limits and content filters travel with your kids’ devices, so vacation doesn’t mean a free-for-all. If you haven’t already, check out my post on keeping kids safe online for ideas on settings worth reviewing before you pack.

Be careful with public wifi connections.

This should go without saying, but it’s worth repeating anyway: Avoid logging into bank accounts or entering card details on open networks at cafes, airports, or hotels. Just don’t do it. It’s a dumb idea, it’s bad digital hygiene, and it can ruin so much of your vacation in an instant.

Instead, switch to mobile data for anything sensitive, and turn off auto-join so devices don’t quietly connect to random hotspots. And if you haven’t discussed such basic digital hygiene with your children before, there’s no time like an overseas trip to get them started on what should be standard operating procedure in the 21st century. As someone who (despite having good digital hygiene!) has had her identity stolen too many times through OTHERS’ (companies’) poor digital hygiene, believe me when I say that you want to do everything you can to KEEP your personal data from being compromised, especially when you’re far from home.

Tech Troubleshooting Tips While You’re Overseas:

Share locations with each other.

Location-sharing tools like Find My or Google Family Link are essential for family trips, whether overseas or within your own country. If your family members get separated for any reason, these can be super-useful safety tools for reuniting again.

This is another reason (see above) that all family members should carry their own portable power banks on their person when traveling outside the country. Yes, older kids can also carry a card with the hotel’s name and address, just in case phones die – but even better is having a way to keep those phones from dying in the first place!

Another useful tip we use regularly in our family, not just when traveling, is to get in the habit of setting your phone to low-power mode first thing every day, using downloaded resources (e.g. maps) whenever possible, and researching the least power-hungry tools for your needs ahead of time (e.g., my husband once figured out that Apple Maps apparently uses a lot more data to stay up and running than Google Maps). Taking lots of photos and navigating yourself around a foreign city can drain a battery fast, and it’s going to be hard to get back to the hotel if you need to scan a transit card on a dead phone.

Also establish “just in case” meet-up plans.

When five of us were all trying to board the return train to Charles de Gaulle airport from Paris last January, everyone but me was on the train when the doors started to close. (With my suitcase and the rest of my family inside!). If you’ve ever ridden public transit, you know that mishaps like this can happen at any time, especially with a larger party or someone (an older family member, one whose feet are beat after a day of sightseeing, or one with littles in a stroller) who might not be moving at lightning speed.

That’s why it’s important to have backup plans for what to do and how to navigate. One of the best safeguards we have against this is to have ALL family members, including kids (even young ones!), practice reading transit maps and navigating from Point A to Point B with them on a regular basis. At the very least, everyone should know the transit lines/stops to use to return to your hotel or AirBnB, as well as how to walk from the stop to your lodgings. (This is another reason I always try to get lodgings as close as possible to where we’re staying, though making tired feet happy after a long day of sightseeing is a close second!)

Unplugging (a Little) Is Part of the Fun

But even as you juggle all of our family’s best travel tech hacks, remember this: Tech should make travel – and the rest of life – easier, not take over the trip! Once you’ve prepped everyone’s device according to what you’ll need while you’re abroad just to function, remember to build in plenty of screen-free blocks of time each day for exploring, eating, and simply being together.

After all, the best vacation memories rarely happen on a screen. They happen over gelato on a cobblestone street, or during that hilarious moment when someone mispronounces a menu item. With a bit of planning, your family gets the best of both worlds: reliable connections when you need them, and real connection when it matters most.

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