Open-source and digital tools for planning an overseas trip

Planning an international trip is, underneath the excitement, a data problem. Flights, documents, bookings, addresses, time zones, currency and a dozen small deadlines all have to stay consistent — usually across a laptop and a phone, often offline, sometimes in a language you don't read. It is exactly the kind of mess a deliberate, mostly open-source toolkit is good at taming.

Here is the setup I keep coming back to.

1. One source of truth for the itinerary

Everything starts with a single plain-text or Markdown document — not a fragile chain of emails. I keep a trip.md with sections for travel, lodging, contacts and a day-by-day plan, synced with Syncthing so it is on every device without a cloud account in the middle. Plain text means it opens anywhere, forever.

2. Offline maps and documents

Download offline map regions before you fly (Organic Maps and OsmAnd both do this well), and keep PDFs of every confirmation in one encrypted folder. A reservation you can't open because there's no signal is not a reservation.

3. A real checklist, not a vibe

This is the part most people improvise and later regret. The trips that go smoothly are the ones with an actual pre-departure checklist — documents, health prep, local logistics, money — written down and ticked off.

The most thorough example I have seen recently came from a friend planning a medical-tourism trip, where the stakes for getting the prep right are obviously higher. They were working from this pre-trip planning guide, and the structure translated almost perfectly to an ordinary holiday: confirm documents early, sort health and insurance before you go, research local transport and payment, and build in buffer days. I copied the skeleton straight into my own checklist.md.

4. Money and comms

A travel-friendly card, an offline currency converter, a local eSIM arranged in advance, and a password manager (KeePassXC or Bitwarden) so you are not typing credentials into airport Wi-Fi. None of this is exotic; the value is in deciding it once and reusing it.

The point isn't the apps

It is the habit. Put the trip in plain text, sync it everywhere, work from a real checklist, and keep last year's version around. The tooling is mostly free and open source; the payoff is a trip where the logistics quietly take care of themselves and you get to pay attention to the actual journey.

$ cat ./next  minimal dotfiles that survive reinstalls