Travel tech essentials after 71 flights: the 7 things I pack and what stays home

The TSA officer at Newark held up my old tech pouch like a fisherman holding up a strange catch. Four chargers, nine cables, two power banks, a travel router, and a small tangle that turned out to be three sets of earbuds knotted together. "Ma'am," he said, "are you opening a store?"

That was two years ago. I test travel tech for this site and I fly a lot: 71 flights in the last twelve months, mostly domestic, a handful to Europe and one very long one to Singapore. I live out of a carry-on, so every ounce in that bag has to earn its place.

That day at Newark I made a rule. If a gadget doesn't get used on at least two out of three trips, it stays home. This spring I tested the rule properly with a log over 14 trips in a row. Every item I packed got a mark when I actually used it, not when I just moved it from one pocket to another. Here's what survived, and what I wish I'd stopped carrying years ago.

What made the bag: seven things, 1.8 pounds

It all fits in one zip pouch about the size of a paperback. The newer TSA officers don't even look twice. The one item that made every single trip is also the most expensive, so let's start there.

The headphones: the only thing I never fly without

On nine flights this spring I measured cabin noise with a sound meter app on my phone. At cruise it read 79 to 84 dB, louder in the seats near the wing and in the back rows. That's roughly a busy city street, for five hours, a few inches from your ears. You don't notice it as noise after a while. You notice it as that wrung-out feeling when you land.

Good active noise cancelling takes the low engine drone down to a faint hum. I use the Sony WH-1000XM6, which lists at $449.99. The Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd gen) at around $429 is the other one I'd happily wear on a red-eye. Both cancel the drone very well. The Sony fold smaller into their case, the Bose feel a touch lighter on the head after hour six. And the Bose go on sale more often, which matters when you're spending this much.

Do you need $450 headphones? No. What matters on a plane is the low-frequency cancelling, and even many $150 to $250 models handle the engine drone well now. What you pay for at the top is comfort over long hours and better cancelling of voices. On a 16-hour flight to Singapore, I was very grateful for both. The headphones are half the story, though. The other half is what you plug them into.

The little dongle people ask me about on every flight

Wireless headphones and seatback screens don't talk to each other on most planes. The screen has an old 3.5 mm headphone jack and that's it. So airlines hand out cheap earbuds, and most of us end up watching a movie with a wire catching on the tray table.

The fix is a Bluetooth transmitter, a small dongle that plugs into the seatback jack and sends the audio to your wireless headphones. I use the AirFly Pro 2 from Twelve South. It runs over 25 hours on a charge, charges over USB-C, and can connect two sets of headphones at once, which made it the most popular item on a trip with my sister. Some newer planes, including a growing number of United's refreshed jets, now have Bluetooth built into the screen. Most of the fleet still doesn't.

"Wait, you can do that?" The man in 23C, somewhere over Nebraska, who then asked for the name twice and wrote it on his napkin

One tip from experience: pair the transmitter with your headphones at home, before the trip. Pairing at 35,000 feet with 180 other Bluetooth devices around you works, but it takes longer than a safety video. Charging it is easy too, because by now everything in my bag charges from the same brick.

One charger, one long cable

For years I carried a phone brick, a laptop brick, a watch cable and a headphone cable. A single 65W GaN charger with three ports replaced all of them and took 11.6 ounces out of my bag. GaN, gallium nitride, is simply a chip material that runs cooler, so the charger can be much smaller than the old silicon bricks. Mine is the Anker 735, about the size of an AirPods case. It charges my laptop at full speed and my phone at the same time.

The unsung hero of the whole kit is the 6 ft cable. Hotel outlets hide behind nightstands, and airport outlets live under seats on the far side of the gate. With a regular 3 ft cable I spent a lot of time sitting on airport carpet. With 6 ft I sit in a chair like an adult. The short cable is for the power bank in my lap, where a long one just tangles.

A single charger works for me because all my devices are USB-C now. If you still have one older device with a different plug, a small adapter tip is lighter than a second cable. Charging on the ground is the easy part. Charging in the air is where the rules changed this year.

The power bank, and the 2026 rules that changed

The basics haven't moved. Under FAA rules, spare lithium batteries, power banks included, go in your carry-on and never in checked bags. Up to 100 watt-hours is allowed without asking the airline. A 20,000 mAh bank sits around 74 Wh, well under the limit, and the rating is printed on the side. If it isn't printed, security can refuse it.

What's new is how you can use it once you're on board. In the last year airlines have tightened up because of battery fires in cabins:

• On international flights, new ICAO rules in effect since March 27, 2026 limit you to two power banks and ban recharging them on board.
• United asks that power banks stay on you, in the seat pocket or in the bag under the seat, not in the overhead bin.
• Southwest, since April 20, 2026, allows one power bank per person, kept out of the overhead bin and visible while in use, and bans charging it from the seat outlet.
• Some foreign carriers, Emirates among them, don't let you use a power bank on board at all.

Rules keep shifting, so check your airline's page the week you fly. The practical takeaway is simple: one good power bank, fully charged before you board, kept where you can see it.

The number on the box is optimistic, by the way. Mine promised "up to 5 phone charges." In real use it gave 3.4 full charges, which is normal once you account for heat and voltage conversion. That's still a long-haul flight plus a full day of maps and boarding passes on the other side. That leaves the smallest thing in the bag, and the one that saved me the most stress.

The tracker that found my bag in Denver

I only check a bag on about one trip in three, and that bag always has an AirTag in it. The second-generation model came out in January 2026 with longer range for finding it nearby, still at $29 each. If you're on Android, Samsung's SmartTag and trackers on Google's Find Hub network do the same job.

On the one trip this spring where my suitcase decided to visit Denver without me, I could show the agent exactly where it was sitting. Many US airlines now accept a shared item location link from Apple's Find My, so the agent could open it on their own screen. The bag came back 26 hours later. It didn't arrive faster because of the tag, but the conversation took four minutes instead of forty.

That's the whole kit. Everything else on my old packing list had a much harder time justifying its weight.

What stays home now

These all fell below two out of three trips in my log. None of them are bad products. They're just not worth the space for how I travel.

• Travel router. Used on 1 of 14 trips. Hotel Wi-Fi has improved, and more airlines now offer free in-flight Wi-Fi to loyalty members. My phone hotspot covers the rest.
• Portable monitor. Lovely in theory. It weighed 1.7 pounds and came out of the bag twice.
• Universal travel adapter. International trips only. For domestic flights it's dead weight.
• Tablet. My phone and laptop already cover movies and work. The tablet was one more screen to charge.
• Wireless charging pad. Slower than a cable and it needs its own port. Out.
• A second power bank. Used once, on a 19-hour travel day. With the new rules, one good bank is also simpler at the gate.

Leaving these behind took 3.9 pounds out of my bag. That's the difference between lifting a carry-on into the overhead bin with one arm or two, and on a full flight with a line behind you, that matters more than you'd think.

How to build your own list

You don't need my exact seven. Your trips aren't mine. Try my log instead: for your next five trips, pack as usual, put a mark next to anything you actually use, and leave behind whatever scores under three. It takes one minute per trip and you'll learn more from it than from any packing list online, mine included.

We score travel gadgets the same way we score everything, weeks of real use before a verdict, as described on our how we test page. The ones that passed are in our reviews. And if long flights leave your neck feeling like a question mark, our physiotherapist Gary's advice in do posture correctors work? includes a few exercises you can do in a plane seat without anyone noticing. Well, almost anyone.

Questions readers asked us