The travel tech a frequent flyer actually packs, and what stays home

My rule is short: if a gadget doesn't get used on at least two out of three trips, it stays home.

I flew 71 times in the last twelve months, mostly domestic, a few to Europe, one very long one to Singapore. I live out of a carry-on and I test travel tech for this site, which means I've dragged a lot of chargers, adapters and "must-have" gizmos through a lot of security lines. Most of them didn't survive the rule.

This summer I kept a log for 14 trips in a row. Every gadget I packed got a mark when I actually used it. Here's what's left in the bag, 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 the size of a paperback. The part that surprised me most was the charger, so let's start there.

One charger instead of three bricks

For years I carried a phone brick, a laptop brick and a watch cable. A single 65W GaN charger with three ports replaced all of them and saved me 11.6 ounces. It charges my laptop at full speed and my phone at the same time, and it's small enough to fit in a jacket pocket.

The 6 ft cable is the unsung hero. 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 was sitting on the floor. With 6 ft, I sit in the chair like a person.

Charging on the ground is one thing. Charging in the air is where the battery comes in, and where most people get the rules wrong.

The power bank, and the rule that matters

In the US, the FAA says spare lithium batteries, power banks included, go in your carry-on and never in checked bags. Anything up to 100 watt-hours is fine 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.

The number on the box is optimistic, though. Mine promised "up to 5 phone charges." In real use it gave 3.4 full charges of my phone, which is normal once you account for heat and voltage conversion. That's still enough for a long-haul flight plus a day of maps and boarding passes on the other side.

The one gadget I never board without

Noise-cancelling headphones are the only thing on the list that made every single trip. I measured cabin noise with a sound meter app on 9 flights and got 79 to 84 dB at cruise, louder near the wing. That's a lot to sit in for five hours. With good noise cancelling on, the engine drone drops to a faint hum, and I get off the plane with noticeably less of that wrung-out feeling.

The small Bluetooth transmitter makes them twice as useful. It plugs into the seatback headphone jack and sends the movie to my wireless headphones. No more cheap airline earbuds, no more cable catching on the tray table. It isn't glamorous, and it's the item people ask me about most on flights.

"Wait, you can do that?" The man in 23C, somewhere over Nebraska

The tracker tag only goes in checked bags, which for me is about one trip in three. On the one trip where my bag took a detour to Denver without me, I could tell the agent exactly where it was. It came back 26 hours later. Everything else on my old packing list had a much harder time justifying its weight.

What stays home now

These are the things that fell below two out of three trips in my log. None of them are bad. 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 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. Only on international trips now. For domestic flights it's dead weight.
• Tablet. My phone and laptop already cover movies and work. The tablet was a third screen to charge.
• Wireless charging pad. Slower than a cable and needs its own brick. Out.
• A second power bank. Used once, on a 19-hour travel day. One good bank is enough for almost everyone.

Leaving these at home 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.

How to build your own list

You don't need my exact seven. Try my log 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 else, weeks of real use before a verdict, as explained on our how we test page. The ones that passed are in our rankings. And if long flights leave your back feeling like a question mark, Daniel's tips in our posture article work in a plane seat just as well as at a desk.

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