Before you leave for your much-awaited vacation, you must first have a list of pre-vacation guidelines. This will help you better prepare for your long-overdue vacation to ensure everything goes well as expected. After all, you only want upbeat post-vacation blues, and you can better realize this by adequately preparing yourself for your vacation.
But what should you do before you go on vacation? Look no further if you’ve been asking yourself this question, as here’s a look at the four things to do in preparation for your holiday.
1. Prepare Your Home
While you’re undoubtedly excited to go on vacation, you must not forget that you’ll need to get back home. Because of this, you must make proper preparations to ensure everything in your home is safe and clean to avoid too much tidying up after your vacation. Some of the things you can do to prepare your home include the following:
- Clear your fridge by tossing or eating all the perishables and leftovers. If the holiday will be for an extended period, consider cleaning and disconnecting your fridge from power to lower energy use.
- Get a neighbor or house sitter to water your garden plants or houseplants.
- Do some cleaning around the house, for instance, vacuuming, as well as scrubbing the sinks and toilet.
- Program your thermostat to its energy consumption.
- Unplug appliances, for instance, TVs, computers, routers, appliances, and chargers.
- Wash, dry, and fold your laundry.
- Close all your home’s curtains or blinds to regulate the temperature inside and boost security.
After doing all this, your home will be safe even while you enjoy your holiday.
2. Confirm Your Reservations
The last thing you want when on your vacation is unwanted surprises regarding your reservations, for instance, your hotel, flight, restaurant, tourist attractions, and car rental, to name a few. This is why you must double-check your reservations before starting your trip to confirm you’ve made all your bookings. After all, you don’t want to show up with your luggage only to realize that you haven’t reserved a booking in advance.
3. Check Your Packing List
You also need to plan ahead to ensure that you pack all items that maximize your comfort level and minimize any hassles that you may face while on vacation and away from home. The only way you can avoid forgetting an essential item is by writing down a packing list and consulting it while packing. You can then use this list to double-check that you’ve packed everything you wanted for your trip and check things off as you go. This saves you the trouble of manually going through all the bags to check whether a particular item is already in your travel bag or suitcase.
4. Contact Your Bank
If you’re traveling abroad, you should also reach out to your credit card company or bank and inform them about your upcoming trip. Otherwise, they might disable your debit or credit cards during your vacation to a foreign country. And the last thing you want is to be stranded in a foreign country when looking to make purchases and having to reach out to your bank for the funds to be released.
In some cases, your bank might have partnered with a foreign bank so you can easily withdraw your funds without getting charged exorbitant fees.
