30 Must-Pack Travel Essentials Under $25
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Packing for a trip usually requires specific items, whether you’re heading on a beach vacation , checking out a city’s thriving food scene, or just visiting family and loved ones. But no matter where you’re headed, there are some items that should always be in a traveler’s bag to ensure they’re not caught shorthanded. From ways to stay comfortable on a long flight to tools to keep your items organized, you’ll want to have these products on hand before you book your next journey. Read on for the must-pack travel essentials under $25 you should have in your suitcase.
Prices are current at the time of publication but are subject to change.
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30 Travel Essentials Under $25 to Pack for Your Next Trip
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You may have managed to get everything into your suitcase before leaving for the airport, but how organized will it stay when you get to your destination and start digging in? These packing cubes will keep your clothes organized while also maximizing your space.
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Staying comfortable on a long flight involves more than just finding the right pair of comfy pants. Compression socks can help reduce the swelling that comes with traveling at high altitudes, reducing the pressure you may feel in your lower extremities when you fly.
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A trip is only successful if both you and your luggage make it to your destination and back without getting lost. Attaching one of these durable silicone tags to your suitcase will not only increase the odds of it finding its way back to you if it ever goes missing, but also makes it easier to spot at the baggage carousel.
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Your toothbrush is likely one of the first items you grab when you pack. Why not use one that’s designed to stay clean while it’s in your bag? This pair of travel toothbrushes fold into themselves as a built-in case and have soft bristles that work for even the most sensitive teeth and gums.
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Unfortunately, there is no way to fit your entire medicine cabinet into your suitcase. But you can keep your vitamins, OTC medicines, and prescriptions organized with this handy case that fits right into your carry-on. It also features multiple compartments and comes with labels, making it easy to arrange by day of the week or type of pill.
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Need a backup for your noise-canceling headphones ? These compact earbuds offer great sound and long battery life, perfect for watching movies during a flight, answering calls on the road, or listening to music while you walk around a new city.
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One of the hardest parts of traveling is remembering to pack all of the individual charging cables that come with your everyday devices. Fortunately, this handy charging station is a compact way to keep your most important gadgets juiced up while you’re on the go—all without the fuss of multiple cords.
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No matter where you’re sitting on the plane , if you’re in economy, it’s a challenge to find space to get work done and take advantage of the drink cart when it passes by. This innovative item can be a traveler’s best friend, turning that coveted window seat into a place where you can stash your drinks and phone while taking the burden off your tray table. It also folds flat for easy packing and is compatible with most commercial aircraft models.
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Trying to get some sleep on a long flight ? This 3-D eye mask is designed to keep light out without pressing against your eyelids and is breathable, making it easier to get comfortable and doze off while you’re en route. You’ll also be able to catch some shut-eye in a bright hotel room once you arrive.
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Getting comfortable in your seat on a long trip requires some creativity. This memory foam travel pillow offers the literal flexibility to fit any situation thanks to its pose-able design that contours to the shape you need. It also snaps to your carry-on luggage for easy portability and features a removable cover for quick washing between uses.
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Having a carrier to organize your vital documents and IDs is one of the best ways to avoid one of the worst kinds of travel emergencies. This passport holder and travel wallet provides just that, complete with pockets for credit cards and other important items.
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Just because you’re on the go doesn’t mean your skin shouldn’t look and feel its best. Dry airplane cabins and harsh conditions at your destination are no match for this travel-sized moisturizer, no matter how sensitive your skin is.
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Research has shown just how dirty airplanes can be—including your seat and tray table. Wipw down your area with these large and sturdy sanitizing wipes, which will easily fit in your pocket or bag.
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Even with your aircraft’s limited options, you can still enjoy your favorite drink as you fly. This handy cocktail kit comes with all the ingredients you’ll need to turn an order from the beverage cart into that Manhattan or Mai Tai you’re craving. It even includes the necessary hardware, such as muddlers and a linen napkin to really elevate the experience.
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Keeping your charging cables from becoming a tangled mess is a challenge. This simple organizer makes it easy to stash your cords, plugs, battery packs, and more in one convenient and coherent space so you’ll never be rummaging around for them.
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Being on the road doesn’t make staying hydrated any less important. From super dry airplane cabins to quenching your thirst while taking a walking tour, this insulated bottle will ensure you always have a drink within reach on your trip. It’s also leakproof and will keep your beverage cold for up to 24 hours.
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If you’re taking a trip abroad, a plug converter is an absolute travel essential. This model will convert your cables in over 200 countries. The small device also conveniently includes multiple USB ports to easily charge several devices at once.
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No matter how well you pack, wrinkles are practically unavoidable when you’re on the road. Fortunately, you can still look your best thanks to this packable steamer and iron. It’s especially ideal if you’re traveling for a formal event or plan on doing laundry on your trip.
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With this gadget, you can keep an eye on your bag even when it’s not in your sightline. Travel experts say stashing a small Apple AirTag in your luggage is one of the best ways to avoid the frustrations of losing your bags. The small disc sends up-to-the-minute updates on its location right to your phone.
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There’s nothing more important than peace of mind when you’re traveling. This portable door lock immediately adds an extra layer of security to your hotel or lodging. It’s also designed to be easily installed and removed, making it safe even in an emergency situation—especially for solo travelers .
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Don’t fret about clearing a TSA checkpoint with your favorite products—these toiletry containers can be used for creams, serums, and other liquids, making practically any item compliant with the agency’s carry-on liquid rules.
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Your devices take on an extra level of importance while traveling, serving as your roadmap, guidebook, boarding pass, and more. Make sure you’re never stuck with a dead battery by bringing along a reliable power bank. This slim, lightweight option holds enough for more than two full charges of an iPhone and one charge of an iPad.
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Whether you’re trying to get to sleep on a flight or accidentally booked a hotel in a bustling part of town, the right earplugs can be true saviors on the road. This comfortable option even includes a handy carrying case for bringing a pair wherever you go.
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A portable fan can be the difference between staying comfortable and feeling miserable on a trip. This model conveniently flips shut for ultimate portability and can run for up to 19 hours on a single charge. It also doubles as a backup battery charger for your phone and other devices and features a handy flashlight.
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Long travel days can leave you feeling less than confident about your hygiene. These chewable toothpaste tablets will freshen your mouth without a sink and a toothbrush.
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No one wants to deal with rain on their trip, but it’s always best to be prepared for the elements. This travel umbrella is compact and packable, designed to withstand strong wind and keep you dry during any downpours.
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Depending on which airline you’re flying, seatback in-flight entertainment might not be an option. Stay entertained on your next flight with this handy mount that conveniently turns your phone into a screen and frees up your hands. It can also attach to luggage, which is handy for passing time in the airport during a delay or a long layover .
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Make unpacking your toiletries a breeze with this well-designed case, which can hang for easy use once you’re at your accommodations. It also features vinyl pouches for storing any products that might leak, potentially saving you from a luggage disaster.
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There may not always be access to running water and soap on the road, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep your hands clean. These convenient sprays are slim enough to fit into your pocket while also smelling great. And most importantly, they kill 99.9 percent of germs while moisturizing your mitts.
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No matter where you’re headed, having good sunscreen on hand is absolutely essential for travelers. This formula goes on silky smooth, providing 40 SPF without stickiness or a chemical odor. This version also happens to be perfectly sized to fit in your pocket or bag for maximum portability.
This story has been updated to include additional entries, fact-checking, and copy-editing.
30 Travel Movies to Help Inspire Your Next Trip
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One of the great things about movies is that they can take you places without you having to squeeze into an uncomfortable airplane seat or with all the other hassles that real-life travel entails. There are lots of great movies about people setting out to see the world , so let the big screen scratch your wanderlust by checking out these 31 films.
Some of the movies on this list are romantic, following two people as they come together in that special way that happens when you’re away from home. Others are about journeys of self-discovery, showing what can happen when you hit the road solo. Some movies are uproarious comedies that will transport you away from your troubles as you laugh along to the antics on screen. There are also movies that are less of a vacation than they are an adventure, sure to get your blood pumping. And there are some scary movies about travel—the sort that might make you think, “You know, actually, maybe let’s make this one a staycation.”
Don’t bother packing your bags. All you need to do is hit “play” to embark on any one of these 30 great travel movies.
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Romantic Travel Movies
Diane Lane stars in this charming 1996 movie as a recently divorced woman who travels to Italy in an attempt to break out of her post-divorce funk. (In her defense, her husband was cheating on her and he got to keep the house, so she’s right to be miffed.) Once in Tuscany, though, she somehow becomes the owner of a villa, and as she begins to make a new life for herself, the potential for new love emerges amidst some of the most beautiful scenery and delicious-looking wine ever put to film. It’s the type of movie that will have you looking up flights to Florence.
A destination wedding counts as travel, and the breakout comedy of 2023 was shot on location in Australia. Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney play two people who left on bad terms after a one-night stand only to have to make nice when their mutual friends get married. Anyone But You is enough to make you want to take a trip Down Under, although perhaps without all the rom-com shenanigans.
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play lovelorn women who swap homes so that they can get away from their respective heartbreaks over Christmastime. When Winslet’s Iris and Diaz’s Amanda get to Los Angeles and London, respectively, they find new love in Jack Black and Jude Law’s characters. The 2006 movie, from the great Nancy Meyers , works extra well as a travel movie because, thanks to the house-swapping premise, it’s a reminder that everyone’s home is somebody else’s trip.
The first of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy introduces audiences to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline as they meet on a train from Budapest and decide to spend the night together wandering Vienna. Widely regarded as one of the more romantic movies ever made, Before Sunrise will also make you want to explore Vienna with someone you’ve just met—someone who maybe you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.
Technically, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a travel movie (because Owen Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams ) and a time travel movie (because he goes back in time to 1920s). It’s a romantic movie both because of the relationship Wilson’s Gil strikes up with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana and because of how it romanticizes Paris and nostalgia—and deftly interrogates that romanticism.
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Movies About Traveling Solo
Dev Patel stars in this 2016 film, which is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley , who was separated from his parents in India at a very young age and adopted by an Australian couple. Once he grew up, he went back to his birth country in an attempt to find his biological parents. Saroo’s trek through India and into his own forgotten past is a tear-jerking, emotional travel story, and Lion was rewarded with six Oscar nominations.
This 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed sets out to hike from Southern California to Washington State in an attempt to find herself. The tour of the West Coast’s trails is a tour-de-force for the actor as her character remakes her life one hiking boot-clad step at a time.
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a nine-month journey across the unforgiving Australian Outback with her dog and four camels. She later wrote about her adventure in National Geographic and in her memoir Tracks . In 2013, her story was adapted into a film with the same name. Mia Wasikowska plays Davidson in the movie, which features stunning cinematography of the Australian desert in all its harsh beauty.
A lot of solo travel stories are tales of self-discovery where the voyager has learned something by the time they reach their destination. Into the Wild offers no such catharsis, instead telling the true story of Christopher McCandless , a man who hiked across America and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness—an environment he was not prepared for. It’s a poignant, tragic counterpart to the more common celebrations of wanderlust you tend to see in pop culture.
Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in this 2010 adaptation of her memoir of post-divorce travel and self-discovery. Feeling her life is aimless and without purpose, Liz elects to travel around the world, stopping in Italy, India, and Bali where she eats, prays, and well, you can probably guess.
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Travel Horror Movies
Ari Aster’s supremely disturbing folk horror movie stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who is begrudgingly invited by her not-great boyfriend and his friends to go to Sweden to observe a commune’s midsummer festival. Upon getting there, Pugh’s Dani soon learns that the Hårga are not all sunshine and flowers, and that there are dark rituals and sinister plots. It’s the type of movie that will make you think twice about a Nordic vacation, and you’ll never look at a taxidermied bear the same way.
This 2005 horror movie, from director Eli Roth , is one of the biggest examples of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre, but there’s more to Hostel than just blood and guts. (There are a lot of blood and guts, though.) The film follows some American backpackers who, while traveling in Eastern Europe, become the victims of a shadowy organization that lets the ultra-rich live out their most depraved fantasies by torturing and killing unsuspecting tourists. Let’s just say that Hostel is not exactly a great promotional tourism campaign for Slovakia—something that the country was actually pretty upset about .
This 2022 film, released by the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, follows a social media influencer who, when traveling in Thailand, meets and befriends a young woman. It’s the type of movie that lives or dies on its twists, but let’s just say that Influencer is what you would get if The Talented Mr. Ripley were set in the social media age and a full-on horror film instead of a thriller.
The Creator director Gareth Edward’s 2010 debut follows a photojournalist as he tries to escort a young woman through Mexico, which has been taken over by kaiju-sized alien monsters. There are moments of beauty and discovery along their journey, as well as high-stress moments of terror when they encounter these creatures, which Edwards brings to life on a shoestring budget—though you can’t tell that by watching.
It’s right there in the title: John Landis’ 1980 comedy horror is about an American in London, although he’s not a werewolf when he first arrives in the UK. No, that happens after he’s mauled by a strange beast in the moors of Yorkshire—and that same beast kills the friend he was backpacking with. When he recovers in London, things get gnarly in the light of a full moon.
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Comedy Movies About Traveling
If you like the misadventures of the Griswold family’s first vacation attempt, great news: There are five sequels to this 1983 Chevy Chase comedy. Before the European , Vegas , or Christmas Vacation , though, Clark Griswold tries to drive his family from Chicago to southern California. Their journey makes for some classic comedy, though it might hit a bit too close to home if you’ve had to endure a family vacation that went awry.
A lot of Wes Anderson’s movies are about travel, including his most recent film, Asteroid City , and The Grand Budapest Hotel . His ultimate travel movie, though, is 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited , which stars Owen Wilson , Adrien Brody , and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers who agree to make a trip through India together in the hopes of reconnecting after their father’s death.
Lots of movies are about travel, but are they about a big adventure, the way Tim Burton’s directorial debut is? Paul Reubens stars as his Pee-wee Herman character, who hits the road in an attempt to recover his beloved bicycle, which has gone missing. Following a psychic’s totally legit vision of his bike in the basement of the Alamo, Pee-wee encounters a ghost trucker, biker gangs, and all the madness of a Hollywood backlot.
Netflix’s Oscar-nominated animated movie has a setup that’s not too dissimilar from that of National Lampoon’s Vacation . Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell can’t wait to get away from her family and start film school. Her dad, voiced by Danny McBride , feels his daughter slipping away and opts to have the whole fam drive her across the country rather than take a plane to school. At the same time, an A.I. gone rogue has started a robot uprising. Oops!
In addition to featuring a hall-of-fame cameo from Matt Damon as the singer of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” Eurotrip is a classic, if not especially intelligent, teen sex romp. It’s not the movie to watch if you want to get a feel for Europe, but it is what you put on when you want to enjoy some good, dumb laughs.
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Adventure Travel Movies
Ben Stiller directed and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , an imaginative adaptation of a 1939 short story about a mild-mannered man who gets lost in his daydreams. When circumstances force Walter to embark on a trip around the world, he starts living his daydreams for real, going to Greenland and the Himalayas. Featuring a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography of some truly beautiful, off-the-beaten-path places, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the type of movie that might make you stop just thinking about taking a trip and actually buy a ticket.
William Friedkin , best known for directing The Exorcist , also helmed this 1977 thriller about possibly the worst road trip of all time. When four people, all on the run from their various sordid pasts, find themselves trapped in a remote oil village in Colombia, they are desperate to get out by any means necessary. The opportunity presents itself when the bosses need people to drive boxes of dynamite that are extremely unstable and could blow at any minute across miles of rainforest. There is one sequence in Sorcerer that’s some of the most unbelievably tense filmmaking you’ll likely ever see. (Note that it’s a remake of another classic film, Wages of Fear , should you want another movie that’ll keep you on edge.)
Johnny Depp stars as an average man who finds himself smack in the middle of an international criminal incident when on vacation in Europe after a woman, played by Angelina Jolie , tries to trick the authorities into thinking Depp’s the fugitive they’re looking for. Thrills, laughs, and a little romance ensue.
Charlie Hunnam plays real explorer Percy Fawcett in this adaptation of the book by the same name from author David Grann , who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon . The film follows the British explorer in the early 1900s as he tries, time and time again, to prove the existence of a mythical city deep in the jungles of Brazil. Think of it as a somber, reflective take on a real-life Indiana Jones, one whose obsession with traveling to hostile environments in search of knowledge may prove to be his undoing.
This gripping survival drama about the infamous 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, as documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, is the type of film that will probably make you consider an all-inclusive beach resort for your next vacation rather than mountain-climbing.
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Movies About Roadtrips
This biopic follows the man who would become the Che Guevara when he, as a young man in the early ‘50s, travels across South America with his friend Alberto Granado . The film, which is based on Guevara’s trip diary, is both a road movie and a coming-of-age film about an important historical figure, as we see him become radicalized by the poverty and inequality he sees on this journey.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Ethan Coen’s romp from earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Drive-Away Dolls “ The Big Lebowski , but just the silly parts.” Set in the late ’90s, it follows two lesbian friends who learn that the car they’ve rented has a human head and a briefcase in the trunk—and that some shadowy types really, really want whatever’s in that case back.
Burt Reynolds stars in this 1977 classic, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of its release year after the original Star Wars . He plays a legendary bootlegger who accepts a job to smuggle 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Along the way, he encounters a runaway bride played by Sally Field , and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who wants to stop the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit also features an incredible theme song, “ East Bound and Down ,” and while the lyrics describe the plot of the movie almost beat-for-beat, you’ll find that it’s a fitting song to blast on your own car stereo when you’re on the road.
Il Sorpasso , which is sometimes given the English title The Easy Life , is a masterpiece of 1960s Italian cinema. It follows a boisterous middle-aged man who decides to take a timid, bookish college student he meets under his wing for a good time out on the road—whether or not the younger man actually wants to tag along or not. Hilarious and poignant when you might not expect it, Il Sorpasso ’s well worth the watch.
This seminal adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as they drive to Sin City under the influence of an absurd amount of drugs. In that way, it’s the ultimate travel movie. It’s about a trip, but it’s also about a trip .
