Arriving somewhere unfamiliar is the part of a trip where money and time leak fastest, and almost all of it is decided in the first hour by people who are tired and have no information.
Twenty minutes before you leave home removes most of it.
Sort the airport transfer before you land
Every major airport has an official public transport route into the city, and it is almost always dramatically cheaper than the alternatives and frequently faster.
The thing to look up before you go is which one, where it leaves from, what it costs, and when it stops running. That last one matters most on late arrivals, when the train that would have cost a few pounds has finished for the night.
This is also where the classic airport scam lives — an unofficial “taxi” in the arrivals hall at several times the metered fare. The rule that avoids it everywhere: use the official rank outside, or a booked ride, and never accept an offer from someone who approaches you inside the terminal.
Download the map offline
Every major mapping app can save a city for offline use, and it works without any data connection. Doing this at home, on wifi, means you can navigate from the moment you land without a working SIM.
Save the accommodation as a pin before you travel. Searching for an address in an unfamiliar alphabet, on a phone with no signal, standing in an arrivals hall, is a bad time to find out the address you have is ambiguous.
Work out how the transport is paid for
This is the single biggest source of confusion, and cities differ more than people expect.
Some use a contactless bank card directly at the gate. Some require a local travel card bought at a machine. Some sell paper tickets that must be validated in a machine on the platform — and in those cities, an unvalidated ticket is treated as no ticket, with a fine, which is a common and expensive tourist mistake.
Look up which of those three applies before you arrive. It is one search and it prevents the most frequent unpleasant encounter of any city trip.
Day passes are usually worth it if you plan more than about three journeys; a lot of cities also have a cheaper multi-day version that is not advertised at the machine.
Have a little cash, even where you do not need it
Cities that are functionally cashless still have exceptions: a market stall, a small café, a locker, a public toilet, a bus that predates the card readers.
A modest amount of local currency covers those. Withdraw it from a bank ATM inside the terminal rather than a currency exchange desk, and decline the machine’s offer to convert to your home currency — that conversion is almost always worse than your own bank’s rate.
Decide about a local SIM before you need one
Roaming charges vary enormously and the difference between a good decision and a bad one is substantial over a week.
Three options. Your existing plan may include roaming in the country — check, because many do within certain regions and not outside them. An eSIM bought online before you travel activates on landing and needs no shop visit, which is usually the least friction. A physical local SIM is often cheapest for longer stays but costs an errand and sometimes identification.
Whatever you choose, do it before you fly. Doing it in an arrivals hall means paying whatever the airport kiosk charges.
Walking is usually faster than it looks
In dense old city centres, the metro map distorts distance badly — two stations that look far apart on the diagram are frequently ten minutes on foot, because the map is a topology, not a scale drawing.
Before taking a train for one or two stops, check the walking time. It is often shorter door to door once stairs, waiting and interchange are counted, and it is how you learn the shape of the place.
Learn the shape of the city, not the streets
You do not need to know the street layout. You need three things: roughly where you are staying relative to the centre, which direction the water or the main park is, and the name of the nearest transport stop.
That is enough to recover from being lost without a phone, which is the actual failure case.
The safety basics, once
Check your government’s travel advice for the country before you go — the UK’s foreign travel advice and the US State Department’s country information pages both cover local risks, scams and emergency numbers per country.
Know the local emergency number. It is not the same everywhere, and it is not something to look up during an emergency.
The twenty minutes, listed
Look up the official airport transfer and its last departure. Save the offline map and pin the accommodation. Find out how transport is paid for. Note the emergency number. Get a little cash on arrival at a bank machine.
Everything after that is the trip rather than the logistics.
More in Travel, including what to photograph before you go.
