travel guide

What happens when your partner handles the visas—and gets it wrong? This travel horror story explains what to do if you’re denied entry at the airport while your boyfriend walks straight through immigration.

Every year, stacks of federal and state reports quietly tally up incidents that most people would rather not think about. Burglaries, assaults, theft, and other unpleasant run-ins all get counted, standardized, and turned into rates per 100,000 residents. When those numbers are lined up side by side, a clear—and sometimes uncomfortable—pattern emerges.

Before we dive into the chaos, picture this: you booked a great hotel deal through a third-party site, felt like a bargain-hunting genius, and then—disaster. Your dates are wrong, your room type isn’t available or maybe the system thinks you don’t exist at all. You call the website…they blame the hotel. You call the hotel…they blame the website. And somewhere along the way, you realize you’ve entered the hospitality version of a ping-pong match, except you’re the ball.

Some countries simply make backpacking easier, cheaper, and more rewarding. Using community insights from travelers, hostel-availability data, and affordability metrics, we’ve ranked 20 of the best backpacking countries in the world, ending with the country that backpackers overwhelmingly rank as the planet’s #1 destination.

You book an all-inclusive vacation to relax, indulge, and maybe make questionable choices at the swim-up bar—not to spend quality time examining the tile pattern on the resort bathroom floor. Yet foodborne illness strikes thousands of travelers every year, and when it happens on vacation, the stress doubles. Suddenly you’re wondering if that buffet shrimp was plotting against you and, more importantly, whether the resort can be held accountable. Here’s what you need to know before you point any fingers.

Nothing kills the joy of planning a European getaway faster than suddenly noticing your passport expires sooner than you remembered. One moment you’re dreaming of gelato, fjords, and tiny cobblestoned streets; the next, you’re spiraling down an internet rabbit hole about mysterious “passport validity rules” enforced by shadowy airline gate agents. Five months left might feel like plenty of time, but depending on where you’re headed, your trip could be smoother than French butter or end abruptly at the check-in counter.