My Top Essential Travel Gadgets and Accessories Gift Guide

Last Updated on 5th May 2023

This post about my top essential travel gadgets contains affiliate links.

After travelling the world for 11 months and visiting many different countries and cities over the last few years, when it comes to my top essential travel gadgets, I think I’ve pretty much got it nailed.

It’s taken a fair bit of trial and error to find the travel gadgets that I truly deem as ‘essential’ and the ones that I really can’t travel without, but I think I’ve finally narrowed it down to my top 10. I’ll be sure to add more to this list as and when I find new travel gadgets that I deem as essential, but for now, here’s just a handful of my top picks.

In this post, I’ll be sharing my most loved travel gadgets and accessories in a sort of gift guide; so whether you’re looking to narrow down your own list, or you’re looking for gift inspiration for the traveller in your life, I’ve got you covered!

Nikon D3500 Camera – top essential travel gadgets

The first proper camera that I bought when I started blogging was the Olympus Pen E-PL8 which I really loved and it was the perfect camera to start my blogging journey with.

However, when it came to travelling with my Olympus Pen camera, I didn’t feel like it really lived up to my expectations. It was absolutely incredible for flat lays, product shots and portraits of people, but when it came to landscape photography and nature shots, it just wasn’t performing as well as I wanted it to.

Enter my beloved Nikon D3500 DLSR. This camera changed the game for me when it came to photography, especially travel and nature shots.

This camera has travelled with me to over 15 countries so far and has outperformed itself every single time. From sub-zero temperatures in South Island New Zealand to terrifically hot climates all throughout Asia (I’m talking 35°c+ sometimes!), my Nikon D3500 camera has been worth its weight in gold and I can’t imagine my travels without it.

GoPro Hero 7

As much as I love watching beautifully curated travel videos on Instagram or YouTube, I’ve never really been much of a visionary when it came to crafting travel videos myself.

However, when Matt received the GoPro Hero 7 as a birthday gift in 2019, we were both incredibly excited to take it travelling with us and to create videos of our travels.

There are now newer versions and models of the GoPro, but our Hero 7 is still going strong.

It’s great for underwater shots and extreme adventures and sports and I’m so glad we were equipped with ours while travelling as we now have hundreds of hours of footage from our adventures.

My only slight qualm with the GoPro Hero 7 is that it doesn’t always take the clearest photos and the wide-angle lens can also sometimes be a little too wide-angled for my liking. However, we have my Nikon D3500 camera for photos and as for the wide-angled “issue”, that’s really just my own personal preference.

I think if you’re looking to document your travels in a fun, videography way, then you definitely need a GoPro as part of your travel kit.

P.S. You can check out some of our travel videos here.

GoPro Waterproof Case

Speaking of GoPro and my ultimate travel accessories, I’ve also included the GoPro waterproof case we have to this list.

While GoPros themselves are actually waterproof up to a depth of 33 feet (10 metres), we wanted to err on the side of caution and make sure that we were fully covered in every water-based eventuality.

The waterproof case that we have is only £13, so it just made sense to us to invest in it to ensure that our GoPro was fully waterproof.

AmazonBasics Tripod – top essential travel gadgets

For my birthday one year, Matt fully kitted me out with numerous camera-related travel gadgets to accompany my Nikon camera, including the AmazonBasics Tripod (and the Joby Tripod and camera bag – more on that below).

The AmazonBasics Tripod really is just that – basic. It’s nothing too fancy or swish, but for less than twenty quid, it does its job perfectly and we’ve taken it to many countries and have never had an issue with it.

One thing I would like to mention, however, is that the legs, especially the clasps, can get a tad rusty if they get wet or sandy, but if you let them dry properly and then dust them off, then you’re good to go.

MacBook Pro Laptop

Just a little disclaimer before I get started on this particular gadget; I truly don’t believe that you need a laptop to go travelling with. However, as a full-time writer and blogger, it’s kinda in my job description to write for a living and so I need the tools to do so.

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s move on to my next travel gadget; my MacBook Pro laptop. Of course, I don’t necessarily need a MacBook, I could easily do my work from any kind of laptop or tablet. But I am a fan of Apple products and have tried many different brands of laptops in the past, I’ve always found myself coming back to a MacBook.

I find it so easy to use and as it syncs with my iPhone and iCloud, it just makes my whole work process much easier and more streamlined.

Of course, most Apple products aren’t exactly cheap and a MacBook laptop is by no means an affordable investment, but to me personally, it was worth the investment.

Joby GorillaPod

Remember when I mentioned above that Matt bought me an array of travel gadgets for my birthday? Well, alongside the tall AmazonBasics Tripod, he also got me the Joby GorillaPod.

I think I’ve actually only used this once for my camera, but we’ve used it many times with the GoPro. It’s a great little piece of kit for getting time-lapses and as it’s so small, it’s incredibly easy to carry around and it takes up virtually no space when travelling.

Ironically, the Joby GorillaPod is actually more expensive than the AmazonBasics Tripod, despite being much smaller, but I still think it’s worth the money, especially if you want something much smaller and more concise than a giant tripod.

SD card reader for iPhone

An SD card reader for my iPhone is actually my latest travel gadget purchase and one that I wish I’d purchased much sooner.

For the longest time, I was using the Nikon SnapBridge app to transfer my photos from my camera to my phone (I always prefer to put them straight on my phone rather than my laptop as I always edit my photos on my phone).

However, there would be days when I’d taken literally hundreds of photos and it would often take over 8 hours to download every photo; I often had to leave it downloading overnight!

I knew there had to be a much simpler way of transferring photos from my camera to my phone and when I realised that this handy little gadget could do just that, I’d literally never spent £8.99 faster!

My photos now transfer ridiculously quickly and while I had some formatting issues at first (with regards to RAW images and JPEG), this little guy is now an essential part of my travel accessories.

External hard drive

Before I met Matt, I never really fully appreciated just how important it was to back up your data, but over the last few years, I’ve discovered just how important it really is in order to ensure you never lose things.

Our external hard drive is now an integral part of our travel equipment and it stores tens of thousands of pictures and videos from the last few years.

While it’s not impossible for a hard drive to fail (ours literally wiped everything from it just a few days before writing this post due to our user error – thankfully we did manage to get everything back!), it is nice knowing that not only do you have your data saved on your laptop and/or phone/camera, but you also have another separate entity that looks after everything too.

World Travel Adapter

Aside from my beloved camera and laptop, if there’s one travel gadget that I absolutely had to recommend to you guys, it would be this travel adapter.

We’ve used this religiously every single day since we first bought it back in April 2019 (yes – even since being back in the UK for 8+ months now!) and I honestly couldn’t be without it now.

It has 4 USB slots, 1 USB-C slot, plus input and output adapters for every plug socket in the world. We’ve truly got our money out of this and more and I can’t recommend it enough if you’re going to be travelling to multiple different countries with different plug sockets.

Camera Bag – essential travel gadgets

If you’re going to be travelling with a fancy camera (or at least a camera that you really don’t want to break), then I’d highly recommend investing in a good quality camera bag.

I have the Case Logic Compact Nylon Bag and it’s the perfect size for my Nikon D3500 camera. It has padded straps so that when it sits on your shoulder, it doesn’t rub at all.

The whole bag is pretty much padded so it provides plenty of protection for my camera, and it also has numerous pockets which are perfect for storing my spare camera batteries.

There you have it! My ultimate guide to my essential travel gadgets and accessories! I hope you’ve found it useful and I hope you feel a bit better prepared now when it comes to packing your travel bag full of electronics and gadgets!

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• Backpacking Southeast Asia Packing List & Essentials
• Osprey Fairview 70L Backpack
• Vango Velan Women’s Walking Boots

Pin for later – top essential travel gadgets

What are some of your top essential travel gadgets? Let me know in the comments or on Instagram @imjustagirl_16.