What's worth saving before a trip and what's not?
Twenty-three cards, three piles, about a minute. Decide what has to work offline, what is merely useful offline and what you can look up later, then see where we disagree with you and why.
There is one question that sorts all of this, and it takes two seconds to ask.
Will I need this with no internet, in a hurry, with somebody waiting?
Before a trip most people save far too much and slightly the wrong things. Forty screenshots of restaurant recommendations, an article about the neighbourhood, a photo of the price they paid. Then they land, the phone has no signal, and the one thing they need is the address written in a script they cannot type. The sorting rule is a single question: would I need this offline and under pressure? Everything that passes goes on one page. Everything that fails is genuinely fine to look up later, or to never look at again, which is what usually happens. Play the twenty cards below and see how your instincts line up.
Save it or leave it
23 cards, three piles · about a minute · nothing is sent anywhereThe test: offline and in a hurry
Every decision about what to save before a trip comes down to imagining one specific moment. You are standing somewhere unfamiliar. Your phone says no service, or it says roaming and you do not trust it. Somebody official, or somebody driving, is waiting for you to produce a piece of information.
Hold that moment in your head and the sorting becomes obvious. The booking reference passes. The article about the history of the old town does not, and that is not a criticism of the article. It is a lovely article that you will read on the plane or never, and either outcome is fine.
Saving a lot is not the problem. The problem is that the important details end up buried under the unimportant ones, so the pile stops working at the moment you need it.
Two buckets turned out not to be enough, which is why the game above has three. Some things are not urgent and are still miserable without a connection.
Numbers, addresses, times and contacts. Short, specific, painful to reconstruct, and needed while somebody waits. This is the ten-line list.
The route from the station, a timed ticket, the word for your allergy. You will probably have signal. On the day you do not, these are the ones you would swear at.
Ideas, options, inspiration, anything long. Useful before you go or over a coffee, never needed in a queue, and replaceable by asking a human being.
A word about screenshots
Screenshots are the right instinct and the wrong storage: fast to take, impossible to find later in a roll of nine hundred pictures. Two habits fix most of it.
- Rename them, or put them in an album. Thirty seconds for the whole trip. The name is the entire difference between a picture and a piece of information.
- Copy the actual line out. The booking number is trapped inside the screenshot. Typed into a note it can be searched, read at any size and sent to somebody. Do it for the five or six that matter and leave the rest as pictures.
One page per trip
Everything that passes the test goes in one place, in an order you decide once and reuse forever. Roughly this.
Six headings, about ten lines. It fits on a phone screen without scrolling and on one sheet of paper, and it is the thing to send to whoever you are travelling with. Our trip checklist is the longer version of this, with tick boxes.
Save the address of where you are staying twice: once as you would write it, once exactly as it appears locally. The second version is the one you show to a driver, and it is the one nobody thinks to save.
What to save after the trip, for the next one
Most people skip this step, and it saves the most time on the next trip. Ninety seconds when you get home.
- What you actually used. The transfer that worked, the place you went back to twice. Not the forty options you saved and never opened.
- One line about what went wrong. The taxi rank is a scam, the check-in is really at four, that neighbourhood is further than it looks on the map. This single line is the most valuable thing you will bring home.
- Anything with a number that might be needed later. Receipts you may claim, insurance references, proof you held a ticket.
- Your one page itself. Next time you copy it, change the details and you are done in fifteen minutes instead of an hour.
Then delete the rest, while you still remember which is which. In three weeks you will not, and the whole folder will sit there for two years instead.
The cards people argue with, and why
Six of the cards split readers almost every time. Here is our reasoning, so you can disagree with something specific.
- A photo of your passport. We call it useful rather than critical, and we would not put it in a shared chat. It turns a lost passport into a long afternoon rather than a catastrophe, and it is also the single worst item to have sitting in a group thread that gets forwarded. Keep it somewhere locked, on your own device.
- The route from the station. Sounds like something you can look up, right up until you land at midnight with no data and a queue for the one working machine. Useful offline, one line, costs nothing.
- The phone number of where you are staying. Rarely used, and the day it is used it is the only thing that helps: late arrival, wrong door, a driver who cannot find the street.
- Twenty cafes somebody listed. Look it up later, and we will not move on this one. Twenty options is a decision you will not make while hungry. Three, chosen in advance, is a plan.
- A timed museum ticket. Useful rather than critical, because you will usually have signal. If you do not, the entry time and the code are the two things nobody can guess.
- Medical details. Critical, and the one card where we would ignore your disagreement. It has to be readable by somebody who is not you, in a situation where you may not be explaining well.
What this looks like on four kinds of trip. A work trip needs the receipts and the return leg above everything, because the cost of losing them is paperwork rather than panic. A family holiday moves medical details and consent letters to the top. A road trip cares about the offline map and the number for the hire company, and barely about check-in times. And a trip somewhere you have been five times needs almost nothing except the one thing that changed.
Four moments this is actually for. A border desk asking where you are staying and for how long. A taxi at 1am, where the local-script address is the whole answer. A pharmacy, where the name of the medicine matters more than your accent. And a cancelled flight, where the reference and the insurance line are what you need while three hundred other people need the same desk.
One caution about documents. A photo of a passport, an insurance card or a prescription is worth carrying and is not worth broadcasting. Keep those in something that locks, not in the message thread where you shared the address, and be aware that a screenshot in your camera roll is usually backed up to a cloud account somewhere. Originals stay originals: no photo replaces the passport itself, a visa in a phone gallery is not a visa, and some countries still want the paper insurance certificate rather than a picture of it.
Where people push back
"Storage is free, why not save everything?"
Storage is free. Attention is not. The cost of saving everything is not disk space, it is that the ten important things are now in a pile of two hundred, and you pay that cost at the worst possible moment.
"I like having ideas saved for the trip"
So do we, and nothing here says delete them. It says keep them separately from the ten things you might need offline in a queue. Two piles, different jobs. The problem is only ever mixing them.
"My phone has offline mode for all of this"
Some apps genuinely do, and where they work they are great. The failure is rarely the app itself, it is that the app wants you to log in again and the code goes to a phone with no signal. That is why the plain copy exists, and why it is worth ten minutes.
The most useful discussion of this we found is a thread on the Rick Steves travel forum about carrying documents virtually rather than on paper: community.ricksteves.com. It is a forum thread rather than research, and it is full of people who have been caught out, which makes it worth reading.
Where we come into it
This is the topic where our product fits with the least stretching, so we will be careful not to oversell it. dEssence is somewhere to put a trip's confirmations, screenshots, addresses and notes together, so that the one page has a home. Later you ask Tracy in plain words, along the lines of what time is check-in, and get the line back.
The honest catch, and on this page it matters more than usual: it is a web app, so it needs a connection. For the genuinely critical lines, the ones you might need in a queue with no signal, keep an offline copy as well. A screenshot of your own one page, or a piece of paper in the bag. We would rather tell you that here than have you find out at a border.
Save the numbers. Bookmark the ideas. Never mix the two.
If you would not need it offline and in a hurry, it does not belong on the page you will be reading offline and in a hurry.
Where our answers come from
They are ours, and they are opinions. The recommended pile for each card is our editorial judgement, based on one rule: would you need this offline and under pressure. There is no study behind it, nobody surveyed travellers, and a sensible person can disagree with several of them.
Disagreeing is allowed and sometimes right. If you drive on every trip, the currency and parking details matter more to you than to us. If you never carry paper, your answers about copies will differ. The score is a conversation starter, not a mark out of twenty.
The score is only against us. We do not collect answers, so there is no reader average and no comparison with other people. Inventing one would be easy and worthless.
Nothing leaves the page. No account, no upload, no storage. Closing the tab throws it all away.
Further reading: a Rick Steves forum thread on carrying documents virtually, which is where travellers argue this out among themselves.