What to pack, worked out from your trip
Every packing list on the internet is the same list. Passport, chargers, adaptor, "layers". It is not useless, but it is the same for a week in Reykjavik in February and a fortnight in Seville in July, which tells you how much thought went into it.
A packing list is only worth anything if it is derived from four things about your specific trip.
1. The length, in laundry terms
Under five days, pack a change for each day. Past about eight, packing for every day stops being sensible and you are really deciding where you will do laundry. That single decision changes the volume more than anything else.
2. The weather you will actually get
Not the average — the range. A place that is 22°C by day and 8°C at night needs more than a place that is a flat 18°C, even though the averages look similar.
Check the evening temperature for the specific dates, not the month. And check rainfall as days-of-rain rather than millimetres: four wet days matters, one torrential afternoon does not.
3. What you are actually doing
This is the part generic lists cannot do, and the part that matters most.
- Hiking means boots, which means the heaviest thing in the bag, which means wearing them on the plane.
- Anywhere with a dress code — a restaurant, a church, a night out — means one outfit you would not otherwise pack.
- Swimming means a swimsuit and a way to carry it wet.
- Long drives mean things within reach rather than in the boot.
Read down your own itinerary and pack against it.
4. How you are travelling
Hand luggage only is not a packing constraint, it is a liquids constraint and a boots constraint. Trains mean you carry everything up stairs. A hire car means you can be careless, so you will be.
The things people actually forget
Not socks. The forgotten items are almost always these:
- The right adaptor, and enough of them. One adaptor and four devices is a nightly negotiation.
- Medication in original packaging, and more than the trip's length.
- A card that works abroad, plus a second one kept somewhere else.
- Offline maps, downloaded before you leave.
- A warm layer for the evening, in hot countries — the most common single omission there is.
Pack the list, then cut it
Write everything, then remove anything you can buy at the destination for under about £10. Toothpaste is not worth packing space. Sun cream usually is, because it is expensive in hot places.
Doing this in heytripp
Your heytripp trip already knows how long it is, when it is, where it goes and what is planned in each place — so the packing list can be built from that rather than from a template.
Ask Tripp to make one and it reads your actual trip: a week in Iceland in February gets overtrousers and boots with grip, not "layers". Everything it suggests is a tick-off item you can edit or delete, and anything you add yourself is never overwritten when you ask for more suggestions later.