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Traveler

The Best Budget-Friendly Travel Gear

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Preparing for travel opportunities can seem like a prohibitively expensive endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. Savvy travelers have an abundance of resources at their disposal for limiting the cost of their journey, most notably on the Internet, where one can find heavily discounted and high-quality travel equipment like backpacks, luggage, and more.

For instance, the Venture Pal Lightweight Hiking Backpack, available on Amazon for $20.99, features an average customer rating of 4.4/5 stars and is celebrated for its spacious interior, durability, and portability. The backpack weighs less than a pound and can be folded into just a fraction of its size for convenience during transport and storage. While the backpack is marketed towards those who would use it while hiking, its large storage capacity and strong materials make it suitable for all sorts of travel, as the backpack can serve as a replacement for traditional luggage. What’s more, the backpack features a total of six separate compartments, making it easy to organize your things, and the nylon, elastic, and mesh material is both comfortable and water-resistant.

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One of the best ways to save money while traveling is to minimize the number of things you travel with, making the most of what you choose to bring with you. As such, you can save money and space by investing in multi-functional products. One such example is a multi-purpose travel towel, such as the Youphoria Outdoors Microfiber Travel Towel, available on Amazon for $9.99 – $19.99, depending on size, and available in a variety of colors. Like many travel towels, this towel is made of microfibers that can absorb more water than traditional towels and dry quickly, making them ideal for travel. Additionally, these towels come with a convenient carry bag for easy transportation, and can be used on the beach or on picnics, as it is designed to wick sand and debris. The towels can be used in the gym as well, making them a perfect companion for workouts during your travels.

One of the most important considerations while packing is your choice of clothing. While it is easy and convenient to pack your normal clothing, it may be a good idea to invest in clothing that is specifically meant for travel, as these clothes tend to be more compact and easy to clean. When travelling, it’s generally best to keep your wardrobe choices simple, as this not only reduces weight when packing but also allows you to mix and match your clothing items during your trip. It’s probably a good idea to avoid clothing made out of cotton, as this material tends to take a long time to dry, and will wick heat away from the body when wet. Instead, it’s often best to go for clothes made of wool, as wool is moisture-wicking and breathable, keeping you comfortable in both cold and hot weather. Brands like Merino Wool and Aviator manufacture clothes that are specifically designed for travel, featuring durable, lightweight, and stylish materials.

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Many of us like to take pictures during our travels, and thanks to advancements in technology, smartphone cameras can take photographs matching the quality of dedicated point-and-shoot devices. However, the handheld nature of smartphones means that photos can often come out blurry. As such, a cheap smartphone tripod can make for an excellent addition to your travel gear. Not only will a portable tripod allow you to produce images free of camera shake, but it will also allow you more flexibility in framing your shots and enable a longer shutter speed, improving the quality of pictures taken in poor lighting conditions. Portable tripods are also useful for self-portraits, as it may be unwise to hand your smartphone to a stranger to take a picture of you and the people you travel with. As it’s important to stay organized while travelling, it’s a good idea to pack a set of travel organizer cubes, which help you to separate and categorize your items for your trip.

When preparing to travel, it can be easy to over-pack, as you may include things in your luggage in the off-chance you may need them, which accumulate rapidly. As such, perhaps the most important consideration when packing is making sure you only bring what’s absolutely essential. By making informed choices about your travel gear, you can save both money and space by choosing products that are multifunctional and specifically designed for travel.

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Is the Urban Millennial Lifestyle Sustainable?

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If you walk into any major urban center in America, you’re bound to find young people glued to their smartphones. But they’re not always just texting or checking up on social media — they’re also taking advantage of a wide range of lifestyle apps, which offer everything from ride-sharing services to online shopping to rewards for engaging with local businesses. Most of these apps, which are generally available cheaply or for free, are created by businesses started in Silicon Valley, where implementing a unique idea and cultivating an audience is often considered more important than generating profits. These consumer tech companies are generally funded by wealthy investors looking to capitalize on the explosion of technology present in the everyday lives of millennials, effectively subsidizing the products in question and enabling an artificially low cost for the consumer. But the venture capitalists who make this app-centric lifestyle possible are effectively placing a bet on the long-term financial viability of the innovative businesses they invest in, with potentially disastrous consequences for everyone involved.

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Any number of examples of these apps, produced by businesses that are not currently making a profit and perhaps never will, come to mind. Casper, a mattress company that operates online and ships compressed mattresses directly to customers’ homes, is expected to lose money this year, as are the tremendously popular Uber and Lyft ride-sharing platforms. DoorDash, a service that delivers food from a variety of eateries, is not profitable, and neither is Seated, which gives discounts to restaurant-goers. Perhaps most notably, the platform WeWork, a business that rents out office and living space to small businesses, recently attempted to go public, a disastrous decision that resulted in financial turmoil for the company after potential investors raised concerns about the company’s path to profitability and its’ CEOs questionable antics, which included smoking marijuana on a private jet and serving tequila shots to employees after discussing layoffs. Amidst this controversy, Adam Neumann stepped down from his role of CEO of the company, and WeWork’s future remains unclear.

In general, companies such as these provide non-essential goods and services, offering their customers convenience for an affordable price rather than the necessities of life. This convenience is made possible by technology, as smartphones are always connected to the internet and provide companies with information such as a user’s location and other details that are used in innovative ways. Nevertheless, they are built upon attractive and enticing ideas, which capture the attention of investors who rely upon their trust that the companies’ ingenuity and creativity will eventually lead them to make a profit.

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Ironically, the most popular online businesses tend to be the least profitable, in what is likely to come as a surprise to their millions of daily users. The well-known Blue Apron, for instance, spends roughly $460 to recruit each of their customers, despite making only around $400 on each customer, as they are likely to cancel their subscriptions after only a few months. As a result, investors quickly realized that the meal-kit company had no viable path to profitability, and the company’s valuation dropped by over 95% since they went public. Because Blue Apron refuses to increase the price of their services, they are unable to demonstrate value to investors, leading to serious financial problems for the company. While Blue Apron may be considered an extreme example, the underlying business model, wherein companies supported by venture capitalists reduce their prices in order to generate an audience, is prevalent throughout entire industries.

The artificially low prices of these new businesses perhaps explains the extremely-connected and online relationship millennials have with tech-savvy startups. But, as companies like WeWork and Blue Apron fail spectacularly despite their large audiences, business leaders are starting to take note. One of the solutions to this inherently problematic business model is simply to raise prices for services in an attempt to generate profits for increasingly impatient investors. But competition is fierce, and millennials are a fickle demographic. Companies that raise prices of services, even if just to break even, risk alienating their base of consumers, who may be drawn to particular products or services for their low prices rather than for their practicality. For instance, if a company that lets customers rent bicycles with their phones raises their prices, consumers may realize that it becomes more economically viable for them to simply purchase their own form of transportation. As income inequality rises and wages remain stagnant, particularly among the millennial class of workers, companies are faced with the difficult choice between continuing to operate at a loss by benefiting from increasingly-wary investors, and raising prices for non-essential goods and services that their consumer base may increasingly be unable to afford.