When it comes to travelling, safety often takes precedence. While marvelling at landmarks, meeting the populace and eating well are likely high on your agenda, this must all be served and backed by a grounding of safety and awareness. If you make the correct arrangements, a safe vacation is for sure yours for the taking. We’re here to help you achieve this, to the degree where you safety becomes something you practice so well that it doesn’t overtake your daily ambitions and interests in the location you have made the effort to see.
Without further ado:
Financial Safety
You must always be concerned with your finances while abroad. It is the lifeblood that keeps you going from place to place. For that reason, it’s almost as important to protect them as you would your person. We’d recommend that bringing the best credit cards for travel will help you keep an emergency cash reserve if your physical funding is stolen or lost. Some of these also offer competitive travel rewards to help your funding go further. We’d recommend being well versed in the language to the degree where you can understand the relative cost of things, allowing yourself to identify and avoid rip-offs or scams more easily.
We’d also recommend lessening your obvious standing as a tourist. Scam artists can identify if you’re a tourist by how you act, not what race you are. For example, a white English person may have lived in China for thirty years, and be fluent in Mandarin. They don’t use these parameters to target you, but how clueless you may be presenting yourself as. For this reason doing your research on a location not only helps you fit in from an experience standpoint, but it wards off people looking to take your environmental novicehood as a means to fill their pockets.
Social
Groups will always be safer than those who are isolated. Even if you’re the most season traveller this is true. Always travel in a party of two at the very least. Consider your size, ability and prowess. For example, women are always best suited travelling in groups, particularly at night. If this is true in your home city (which it is,) then it’s certainly true abroad. Make some contacts in your local environment, particularly during a long stay. This means that your absence will be noticed more profoundly, or you will have a solid contact to help you if you become injured. We are always, always, always stronger in groups, meaning that the development of your general safety is also always dictated by how strong your social links are. Develop these before, during and after your vacation to keep them strong no matter how much you choose to travel.
Medical
If you suffer from some form of medical issue, then always make sure you are overstocked for medication. Declare this well when moving between borders and you should have no problem. Even if you have a mild condition, you should always consider wearing a bracelet or other visible medical safety gear which can inform someone of what you suffer from and how to help you. This is obviously useful for those who experience seizures, but sometimes it can be even more widely practical than that. Always go the extra step in planning your medical help, as this can potentially save your life.
