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We move into a new place every few weeks, and even the lovely ones start out as somebody else’s.
A good rental or hotel room gets you most of the way there. The bed is comfortable, the neighborhood is the one you picked on purpose. What no place can hand you is the feeling that you live there. That comes down to a handful of very small things you bring yourself.
None of it takes much space in my bag. It’s just what I’ve stopped traveling without, and what each one adds once I’m there.
Feeling safe enough to sleep
In October 2021 we were in a ground floor apartment in Paphos, Cyprus. On the last night we packed our carry-ons, locked up, set an alarm for an early flight and slept soundly. In the morning Matt got up to make tea and came back into the bedroom looking pale. Someone had pried open a locked window while we slept in the next room with the door shut, and taken both our laptops, our cash, my earrings and my wallet.
I want to say the honest thing about that before I recommend anything: no product on this page would have stopped it. They came in through a window. What it changed is how seriously I take the room I’m sleeping in, and a portable door lock has been in my bag ever since.
It braces the door from the inside, so even someone holding a working key or keycard can’t open it while it’s engaged. Ten seconds to install. It doesn’t fit every door, though, and older European frames defeat it fairly often, so I carry a wedge alarm as well and use whichever one the room allows. The set I link is both of them in one pouch, and between them they cover nearly every door I meet.
Whether the rest of the safety gear out there is worth buying is a longer argument, and I’ve made that one over at Travel Safety Gear: What’s Worth Buying and What Isn’t.
The floors are an adventure
Hotel and rental floors are, and I’m being generous, an adventure. We each pack a lightweight pair of slippers that only ever touch inside surfaces. Mine fold flat into their own pouch and weigh nothing, and putting them on is the moment a room starts feeling like mine instead of somebody else’s.
Matt’s are memory foam with a sole that works outdoors too, so the walk down to the breakfast room or the pool doesn’t mean putting real shoes back on. They also wash in a machine, which matters more than it sounds after a few weeks of rental floors.
Grip socks do the same job if you’d rather have socks, and they’re warmer for curling up under a blanket. They’re also what I put on for hotel room yoga.
Nothing explodes, and nothing waits for a laundromat
Silicone bottle covers go over my toiletries so they don’t explode all over my clothes in transit. I use them constantly, in the carry-on and in anything that gets checked. If you’ve ever opened a bag to find lotion on everything you own, you already know why they’re on this list.
Paper soap sheets are for the rental that supplied exactly one bar of soap, or none at all. One sheet plus water is a proper hand wash, and a hundred of them fit in a case the size of a matchbook. Mine live in my day bag too, for public bathrooms that have run out.
SinkSuds is liquid detergent in TSA-sized bottles, made for washing clothes in a sink. It rinses out fast, which is the part that actually matters when you’re wringing a shirt over a basin at ten at night. It’s not glamorous. But being able to do a quick wash in a hotel bathroom is one of those small things that makes a long trip much easier, and it’s most of the reason two weeks of clothes fits in a carry-on.
If you want the longer version of this, everything I use for washing on the road is on my travel laundry list.
When the room is loud, or bright, or the wrong temperature
You find this out at midnight. There’s a bar downstairs, or construction starts at six, or the streetlight outside comes straight through curtains that don’t meet in the middle.
Silicone earplugs are the ones I use, because foam has never stayed put for me. These mold over the opening of your ear rather than pushing into it, and they stay where you put them. If you’d rather turn the noise down than shut it off completely, Loop do that, and you’ll still hear your alarm.
For the light, a contoured sleep mask. Mine is made for side sleepers, so there’s a little dome of space over each eye and it stays on when I roll over.
Temperature can be tougher. An Airbnb without AC. Or a hotel room with a finicky thermostat. Plenty of rooms have no fan and windows that don’t open, so I carry a small rechargeable one that stands on a nightstand and actually moves air. Going the other way, a compact blanket stuffs into a pouch the size of a water bottle and solves the bed that came with one sad blanket. My cashmere wrap is the splurge on this list and the thing I reach for most, because it’s a blanket in the room, a scarf on the street and a layer over a dress at dinner.
The rest of what I carry for sleeping in strange places is on my travel sleep list.
The kettle, and the part I didn’t expect
Plenty of rentals have mugs and nothing at all to heat water with. Mine folds down to about the height of a hockey puck, so it goes in the bag on any trip where I’m not sure what the hotel provides. Tea, pour-over coffee, instant oatmeal, a noodle cup at eleven at night when you’ve landed late and everything nearby is shut.
That one isn’t really about the tea. It’s the ritual. Making a cup of something in the morning without leaving the room is what makes a random room start to feel like ours for a few days, and I didn’t expect a kettle to be the thing that did it.
The same goes for electrolyte packets, which sound like sports gear and are really just how I get myself to actually drink water instead of meaning to. They pour into any bottle and a handful covers a whole trip.
What I don’t try to fix
I’m not trying to turn a hotel room into a spa. A lot of what makes a place good is the light, the bed and the street it sits on, and that part is decided when you book rather than when you unpack. That’s a different job, and I’ve written about it separately in How to Spot a Bad Airbnb Listing Before You Book.
What the kit covers is the handful of things no listing can promise you either way. Rooms are loud sometimes. Floors are floors. The bathroom might have one bar of soap and a hand towel. None of that’s worth a bad night, and none of it has to be, because the whole answer fits in a pouch.
The whole list, every item with a link, is on my make any rental feel like home page. And if you want the part that comes before all of this, the walk-through you do the moment you get the keys, that’s The First Ten Minutes in an Airbnb.
Frequently asked questions
What should I pack to make a hotel room feel like home?
Slippers, a door lock, earplugs and a sleep mask, and something to heat water. That’s the short answer. Everything else on my list is a nice extra on top of those four.
Are portable door locks worth it?
Yes, with one caveat. It braces the door from the inside so a working key won’t open it, and it takes ten seconds. But it doesn’t fit every frame, and older European doors beat it often enough that I carry a wedge alarm as a backup.
How do you wash clothes in a hotel sink?
Use a detergent made for it rather than shampoo or hand soap, because the thing that matters in a sink is how fast it rinses back out. Then roll the item in a towel to get the worst of the water out before you hang it, or it’ll still be damp in the morning.
What do you do about a noisy hotel room?
Earplugs first, and ask to move second. Silicone ones that mold over your ear stay put better than foam does. If the noise is structural rather than one bad night, a bar downstairs or a road outside, it’s worth asking at the desk early in the stay rather than after three bad nights.
Do I really need to bring slippers?
Need is a strong word. But they weigh almost nothing, they fold into their own pouch, and they’re the single item that most changes how a room feels within a minute of walking in.
Is a travel kettle worth the space?
On a trip where the kitchen is a mystery, yes. On a week in a hotel that has one in the room, no. Mine collapses down to almost nothing, which is the only reason it earns its place at all.
