Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route! 🙂
Have you ever thought about how many people know WHERE you are on a normal travel day?
I was thinking about it the other day… and it is crazy!
The airline has your itinerary.
The hotel has your card number, a scan of your passport and a hold on your money.
Your phone company knows roughly which neighbourhood you’re sleeping in.
The café where you had breakfast, the taxi app, the museum shop: each of them now has a small piece of your financial life!
Being always connected and paying always with card (I just realized it is 4 months I don’t touch cash and I don’t even know where my wallet was!), we leave digital bits everywhere we go!
Is that bad? In a certain way…yes!
It makes us and our privacy vulnerable if we are not careful!
Nobody in that chain needs to be a criminal for the trail to exist… it’s just there, and it usually lasts much longer than the trip!
When I started digging into this topic, what struck me most is that the real risks abroad aren’t sophisticated hackers…but the ordinary things: a skimmer on an ATM, a seemingly-normal text “from your hotel”, a stolen phone, a Wi-Fi network that isn’t what it claims to be…
When we travel we are usually more alert about uncommon things, but less alert about “routine” travel things.
We might be tired, might be in a hurry, we might be reading a language you don’t speak, and those are exactly the moments when a small mistake might cost us the most!
The good part is that most of the protection CAN happen at home, before you leave, in an hour or so.
Here are the 5 problems you are most likely to meet when traveling, and what you can do about each one if it happens. Let’s dive right in!
In this article:
1. Paying with Cards, Every Payment
Leaves a Trail…DOH!
Think about your last two-week trip.
How many companies ended up with your name, email, card details or passport number?
Ten? Twenty?
Most of us never count, and most of that data stays in databases long after we’ve unpacked.
You can’t travel without leaving a trace, but you can decide how long it is:
- Use a separate email for travel bookings. Your main inbox stays cleaner, and a fake “booking confirmation” stands out immediately when it lands somewhere it shouldn’t!
- Think twice before joining loyalty programs you’ll never use again. Each one is another company storing your travel dates!
- Use CASH for small, everyday things like street food, a taxi or a market stall, and cards for anything you might need to dispute. It’s cumbersome, I know, I don’t like it much too, but it saves you lot of data-sharing!
- Be careful with your passport. In some countries hotels are legally required to register you, and that’s fine. But “it’s required by law” and “we’d like a copy for our records” are two different requests. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask which one it is!
What about Cryptos?
Cryptos might be a way to pay in the future, but as of today they are rarely accepted by airlines, hotels and other day to day shops around the world.
If you want to still carry and use crypto for other things when traveling, notice that there is something many people don’t realise: Bitcoin (the king of cryptos!) is not anonymous.
Every transaction is recorded on a public ledger that anyone can read, forever.
That’s why some travelers look at a Bitcoin to Monero exchanges when transaction privacy matters to them (if you consider it too, be sure to look carefully at the service’s data practices, fees and availability where you are!).
All in all though, keep in mind that privacy doesn’t protect you from theft, and that you’ll rarely be able to pay for dinner with coins like Monero.
A normal, widely accepted card is still your real travel wallet!
2. Your Card Gets Blocked
When You Need It Most…DAMN!
It’s one of the most common travel stories: you arrive in a new country, try to pay for your first dinner, and BEEEEEEP….the card is declined!
Your bank’s fraud system saw a payment from “an unusual place” and blocked it, “just to be safe”.
The irony is that it IS working exactly as intended, they just didn’t expect you to travel to a remote village in Bruinei! (happened to me ahah)
The solution here is redundancy, the same principle engineers use for anything that can’t fail:
- Carry two cards from two different banks, ideally on two different networks (one Visa, one Mastercard). A problem with one bank or one network won’t leave you stuck!
- Keep them in different places. Two cards in the same wallet disappear together. One with you, one in the hotel safe, and the same for your cash!
- Choose your alerts carefully. Online payments, large purchases and logins from new devices are worth a notification. Everything else is noise, and noise teaches us to ignore the alert that matters (and steals our precious attention for nothing too!).
We’ve followed this rule on every trip for years, and it has saved us more than once:)
3. “Would You Like to Pay
in Your Home Currency?”… NO!!!
This is the one that surprised me the most.
You’ve surely seen it: the card terminal (or the ATM) asks whether you’d like to pay in euros, dollars or pounds instead of the local currency.
It looks like a courtesy, so you can see exactly how much you’re spending…but it is not!
In financial jeargon, it is called dynamic currency conversion (DCC), and the exchange rate is set by the shop’s payment provider, not by your bank.
How much does it cost?
When a German consumer organisation Stiftung Warentest tested it in 11 countries, the price went up every single time, by 2.6% to 12%.
Think about how many card payments you make on a trip, and that percentage starts to look like a nice dinner…or a night in a hotel!
What should you do then?
- Always choose the local currency, both at the terminal and at the ATM. If the ATM asks you to “accept the conversion”, decline: the withdrawal still goes through, and your own bank converts it at its usual rate.
- In the European Union, since April 2020, terminals and ATMs must show you the markup compared to the European Central Bank rate before you confirm (here’s the regulation). Next time, take a second to read that number. It’s quite eye-opening.
- When you can, use ATMs inside bank branches during opening hours: they’re better maintained, harder to tamper with, and if one keeps your card, there’s someone to talk to.
A related detail most travelers only discover at checkout: hotels and car rentals put a hold on your card, which can keep that money blocked for days after you leave (card network rules allow up to around 30 days for hotels – it happens to us while traveling in Cyprus!).
Using a credit card for these holds, instead of your debit card, keeps your everyday money free:)
4. Your Phone Is Stolen,
and Your Bank Codes Go with It…FUUUUU!
Here’s a question worth thinking about before you leave: if your phone disappeared today, how would you prove to your bank that you’re you?
For many of us, the honest answer is “with a code they send by SMS”… to the phone that was just stolen.
That’s the trap!
And even worse: if your lock screen shows message previews, whoever has your phone can read those codes without even unlocking it (so deactivate this feature right away!).
We learned how much preparation matters when someone broke into our van in November 2025 and took our laptops and my passport…
What you set up before a trip is the only thing that helps you after.
A short checklist for the evening before you leave:
- Move your most important accounts (bank and email) from SMS codes to an authenticator app or passkeys, and actually test your backup method. Recovery options tend to fail stupidly: an old email you no longer check, codes saved in a note you deleted…
- Hide message previews on the lock screen!
- Remove saved cards you don’t use and log out of old devices, like that tablet from a few years ago.
- Update your phone and banking apps.
- Write your banks’ emergency numbers on paper, somewhere other than your phone.
And if it happens, the first hour matters most:
- lock the phone remotely (Find My / Find My Device);
- freeze your cards from the app or by phone;
- change your email password first, because email is the key to resetting everything else;
- file a police report and keep every reference number.
The screenshots and timestamps you collect in that first hour are what make a dispute easier weeks later;)
5. Fake Wi-Fi and the
“Bank” That Calls You…
PHISHERS SHOULD BURN!
Have you ever connected to “Airport_Free_WiFi” without a second thought? Of course yes. Like most (all) of us have!
The problem is that anyone can create a network with that name: even you with your own smartphone!
These “evil twin” networks copy the real one, and everything you type passes through someone else’s device.
The second risk tends to arrive right after something has gone wrong.
Your card was blocked, or your phone was stolen, and then “your bank” calls about suspicious activity. Except it isn’t your bank. Caller ID can be faked, and scammers know that a stressed traveler is more likely to say yes, yes, yes…
A few habits make a real difference:
- Ask the staff for the exact network name, and be suspicious of any login page that asks for your email password.
- Never install an app just to get online. A legitimate network doesn’t need one.
- For banking, use mobile data instead of public Wi-Fi. With an eSIM it’s cheap. A good VPN adds a layer of protection, but it won’t make a fake website safe, and free VPNs often raise privacy questions of their own.
- If “your bank” calls, hang up and call the number on the back of your card. No real bank will ask for your full PIN or for a code it just sent you.
- Pay attention to urgency. Being pushed to act right now, without time to think, is the clearest sign that something is off.
Conclusions 🙂
And here we come at the end of this article! 🙂
In this post we’ve seen how to leave a shorter data trail, why two cards in two places can save your trip, why paying in local currency is almost always the smarter choice, how to stop a stolen phone from becoming a stolen bank account, and how to recognise fake networks and fake calls.
Most of it takes an hour at home, and it lets you enjoy the trip with your head free.
- Did any of these surprise you?
- Have you ever paid in your home currency without realising what it cost?
Let us know in the comments below! 😀
If you want to travel smarter with money, read what traveling teaches you about money, and before leaving check our simple guide to international travel insurance.
Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂
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