Figuring out how to stay safe while traveling abroad should be a top priority.

While visiting a new country is an exciting adventure, you should also take some simple and quick precautions to make sure your trip isn’t spoiled.

While we’re not security experts or law enforcement personnel, we have picked up a few tips over the years.

Here’s what we do.

Free Tools to Stay Safe

1. Before leaving home, travelers can sign up on the US State Department’s website for STEP: Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. In an emergency or civil unrest, this will give the local US embassy the ability to reach out and give you a warning or key logistical details to get out of harms way, if time permits. Travelers can sign up here.

Users then log in before each trip, click “Add a Trip/Residence Abroad,” and provide these details: country of travel, dates of arrival and departure, purpose of visit (e.g. tourism, business, study abroad, etc), phone number where the US embassy can reach you in-country in an emergency, and address of lodging while there.

A user then receives an email like the one below confirming their travel has been noted.

Once registered, you’ll also receive any cautions, advisories, or warnings about a country or region or any worldwide travel alerts that have been issued by the US State Department.

In an uncertain world, this program provides your own personal security briefing. (click here to learn the difference between the State Department’s Travel Warnings and Travel Alerts)

Travel Notifications

2. Call the number on the back of your credit cards and ATM cards to put a “travel notification” on your account.

This is painless and helps ensure access to your cards is not cut off when you need them the most. Some credit card company voice mail systems will let you do this through recorded prompts, meaning you don’t have to wait on hold for a live person.

Take Photos of Key Items

3. Using our smartphone, we take a picture of the following items: our driver’s license, passport (both front and the inside, laminated page with the face picture), and credit cards (front and back).

Then we email them to ourselves.

This ensures that if these vital items are stolen while we’re abroad, we can access them afterward to help local authorities and to assist the US embassy in getting a new passport. We also like to print out a paper copy and keep this in a safe place—somewhere other than where you’d keep your passport. It’s the ultimate backup.

Don’t Carry Passport (Unless Required)

4. Don’t carry your passport with you while sight-seeing unless it’s specifically required by local law.

Some countries do make it mandatory, but in such circumstances you can generally satisfy the requirement by keeping a paper copy with you, instead. Be sure to check local rules before you go.

When you do carry your passport with you, consider putting it in a protective sleeve that’s meant to block an RFID scanner from swiping personal information from the RFID chip in your passport. We’ve bought Secure Sleeve from Identity StrongHold for the past five years.

With a lot of travel and use, we replace them every third or fourth overseas trip because they will wear out.

Learn Local Version of ‘911’

5. Learn the number of the local version of 911 and figure out what a local police station looks like.

In some countries, it’s advisable to alter your routes to/from your hotel or place of lodging and leave a piece of string, dental floss, hotel business card, or strips of paper near the door so that if someone enters, this will be disturbed.

Also, consider putting tape over the peephole in the hotel door to stay safe while you sleep.

And do not travel with weapons unless allowed by local law.

ATM Limits

6. Set ATM withdrawal limits before you leave. This way, if your ATM is stolen, the thief cannot drain your entire account.

Some people find a daily limit of $200 or so is sufficient; others prefer more or less. If you’re only using traveler’s cheques or you already have a foreign currency, you may want to lower the daily ATM limit even more.

Backup Smartphones

7. Backup your smart phone before you leave. And, to ensure those once-in-a-lifetime photos you take on your trip will be backed up, consider enabling your phone’s automatic backup feature, which sends the photos to the “cloud” after you take them.

CAUTION: This feature will use data and/or wifi, so make sure you know the difference so that you don’t rack up huge international data roaming charges. Some operating systems do allow you to only backup photos when wifi is available, thus saving you a bundle on cell service (to learn more about hanging up on those outrageous international data roaming fees, read “How to Avoid International Roaming Charges“.

Backup Photos

8. If you’re taking photos with a traditional camera, like a Canon or Nikon, consider using both an SD and CF card at the same time and concurrently saving each photo to each card, rather than just having one card act as overflow. Then, keep each card in a separate place when you travel to your destination and back home.

That way, if your camera is stolen or seized you’ll still have a backup of your photos.

We follow that advice every time we travel.