“Book A Normal Ticket First": 30 Air Travel Tips To Make Your Flight As Effortless As Possible

Bored Panda got in touch with professional traveler Haley, from Olive the travelier, who has been all over the globe, with her dog! So before talking about travel in general, we were, of course, curious to hear her best advice for bringing a furry friend on a journey, as that’s not something even most seasons travelers have experienced. 

So to start with, she gave some preliminary advice. “It is crucial you train your dog to be comfortable in a travel carrier. If you do not practice the carrier with your dog, you're setting yourself up for a very long flight. There is a lot of contradicting information about flying with a dog, it's hard to know what is allowed and accepted. I have even spoken with airline employees who contradict their own airline policies, it's tough! Luckily, I have so many resources available on my platforms to answer all those questions!" You can find her Instagram here and YouTube channel here.

We also were curious about her take on the plethora of travel tips one could find online, so we asked what she thought of them. “Travel tips are NEVER overrated. There's a balance with it though. You need to come prepared, but there is only so much you can prepare for, especially when flying with a dog. Things always happen when you travel (with a dog or not), you need to count on it. I to this day have things happen that I never in a million years would have thought about. Know what you can and can't control, this goes a long way.”

As per her last point, there are always those things even the most experienced traveler can’t account for, so we wanted to hear some examples from Haley. “One of the top horror stories though was when I was traveling with my dog and a little boy was curious about my dog. I asked him if he wanted to pet her, and he came over and kicked my dog in the face on purpose.”

“Luckily my dog was okay, but I was enraged, mostly because the parents never even said anything. The airline employee had to get security over, and he gave us direct access to the front of the TSA line (that was nice). I am VERY aware of children now with my dog when flying,” she added, which, again, is not an experience almost anyone could have predicted until they traveled with a dog for the first time. 

So if you plan to travel “off the beaten path” in any way, it can’t help to seek out those few people who have done it before you. There can be a certain degree of adventure to just winging it, but a foreign country without a plan or a two-day layover is going to suck a lot more in person than it seems on the drawing board. Fortunately, the internet allows us to do all sorts of preparation beforehand, so it would be a bit silly to not use such a useful tool.