How to Be a Good Travel Companion: Eight Rules (All of Which I Have Broken)
- Rand Blimes
- 2 hours ago
- 14 min read
“If you have someone you think is the one, take them and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all over the world, to places that are hard to reach and hard to get out of. And when you land at JFK and you're still in love with that person, get married.”— Bill Murray
This is funny advice. It is also terrifying advice. And—annoyingly—it is correct. Like, soooo correct.
Travel has an uncanny ability to reveal things that normal life politely conceals. It strips away routine, comfort, and predictability, and then asks you to make decisions together while tired, hungry, overstimulated, and occasionally (usually?) lost.
You don’t just see how someone handles beauty and joy. You see how they handle missed connections, broken air-conditioning, food poisoning, bad directions, and the slow realization that the thing they were sure was a five-minute walk is, in fact, forty-five minutes uphill in the heat, with several obstacles (at least two of which will lead to your violent end if you aren’t careful).
Travel doesn’t create these situations. It just concentrates them.
That’s why being a good travel companion matters so much. Not because it makes the trip smoother—though it often does—but because travel turns personality traits into shared experiences. Your stress becomes everyone’s stress. Your flexibility (or lack of it) becomes the group’s operating system. Your excitement, irritation, humor, or silence doesn’t stay neatly contained inside you. It leaks.
So I have a list of eight rules for being a good travel companion.
This list is not about packing hacks, gear, adapters, or booking strategies. It’s not about being an “experienced traveler” or doing things the hard way for bragging rights. It’s about something far more fundamental: emotional responsibility. How you manage yourself when things go wrong. How you share space, time, expectations, frustration, and joy with the people you’re traveling with.
These rules reflect the fact that travel is just life, but condensed. They apply to travel, but they also apply to non-travel—because travel just speeds everything up and removes the buffers. Follow them, and you won’t just be easier to travel with. You’ll make the experience better for everyone involved, including yourself.
These are rules I’ve learned slowly, imperfectly, and often in retrospect. My wife will be the first to tell you I have broken every single one of these rules. More than once. But I keep trying.
So here they are: eight rules for being a good travel companion.
Rule #1: Don’t be a constant stream of complaints
If you are hot, tired, and smelly, congratulations—you are probably traveling correctly (or, alternately, you have a condition that warrants a trip to your doctor). But here is the thing: your companions are probably also hot, tired, and smelly. Possibly more so.
And if you are upset because a ten-year-old grifter manning the orange juice counter in Marrakesh just charged you ten times what it should have cost for a glass of freshly squeezed OJ, I promise you are not the only one silently replaying that transaction in your head and imagining alternative endings where you suddenly become fluent in the local language and terrifyingly competent at currency conversion.
What does not help is narrating every one of these feelings out loud, in real time, as if you are providing live commentary on the decline of morales in society.
Complaining feels useful in the moment. We do it to release pressure. We do it to get sympathy. We do it because our brains are overheating and need to dump excess emotional data somewhere. The problem is that travel complaints are kind of like farting: even if the complainer feels marginally better afterward, everyone else in the vicinity feels worse.
Nothing kills group travel energy faster than a steady drip of negativity. I don’t mean a single complaint. Not the occasional “wow, this is rough.” But the ongoing broadcast. The play-by-play. The detailed inventory of discomforts that everyone else is already experiencing but was politely trying not to amplify.
Here’s the hard truth: your travel companions already know things are bad. You don’t need to convince them. They are standing in the same heat. They are also wearing the same clothes for the third straight day. They, too, are wondering how a ride that lasted six minutes cost the equivalent of a small mortgage payment.
So what do you do instead?
You don’t suppress it. That doesn’t work either. Bottling everything up just turns you into a ticking emotional time bomb who eventually explodes over the texture of a hotel towel, or something else similarly unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Instead, you reroute.
Some people swear by meditation. I used to roll my eyes at this, but now I am here to tell you—meditation is freaking amazing (and the research backs this up). It doesn’t fix the heat. It doesn’t refund the taxi fare. But it does keep your internal monologue from hijacking the entire trip. Even a few minutes of breathing, quietly contemplating nothing at all, can dramatically improve your odds of remaining pleasant company.
Humor works especially well—preferably humor that punches up at the situation, not sideways at your companions. Self-deprecating humor is gold. Gallows humor is acceptable. Endless whining is not.
The goal is not to pretend travel never sucks. Sometime, it does. The goal is to process stress without exporting it wholesale onto the people you’re traveling with.
Because if everyone is miserable, at least you can be miserable together. And that, strangely enough, is often how trips recover.
Rule #2: Find the you/me balance
This rule applies to travel, relationships, group projects, and most of adult life, but travel has a special way of stress-testing it. You have to find a balance between taking other people into account—what they want, what they need, what makes the trip meaningful for them—without quietly erasing yourself in the process.
Let’s be clear about one thing right up front. If you never think about anyone but yourself, you are a selfish jerk. You will be miserable to travel with. You will be miserable to be with. You will suck. No amount of cultural curiosity or cool gear will save you from that. Don’t be the self-centered, oblivious a-hole who drags everyone through a trip that feels suspiciously like a solo vacation with witnesses.
But—and this is important—being considerate does not mean becoming a side dish.
You are allowed to have preferences. You are allowed to want things. You are allowed to advocate for yourself and set boundaries. The trick is not forcing your will on others all the time and not disappearing entirely. You have to assert your will some of the time, and then gracefully step aside at other times. This is harder than it sounds.
Travel has a way of revealing this imbalance quickly. There are travelers who see the world exclusively through their own checklist. They hate fish, so they refuse to eat anywhere near the ocean. They love museums, so every day becomes a forced march through galleries while everyone else quietly fantasizes about sitting down. Or they hate museums and want nothing more than to spend entire days on the beach, even when the people they’re traveling with have been dreaming about that one museum for years.
Preferences are fine. Rigidity is not.
If you are a museum-lover traveling with someone who just wants to lounge on a beach or by the pool, you are going to need to compromise. Get ready for some beach time (poor you!).
But the balance cuts both ways.
If you spend the entire trip on that beach with not a museum in sight, that’s not balance either. That’s just domination wearing sunscreen.
Being a good travel companion means making sure that everyone gets time doing what they care about—and remembering that “everyone” includes you. It means sometimes saying, “Sure, let’s do that,” and other times saying, “Okay, but tomorrow we’re doing this.”
That requires judgment. It requires maturity. Occasionally, it requires humility. And sometimes—especially if you’re not used to advocating for yourself—it requires a surprising amount of courage.
Find the balance. Travel goes a lot better when no one feels invisible and no one feels steamrolled.
Rule #3: Communicate well (early, honestly, and like an adult)
Good travel depends on good communication, and not the dramatic, last-minute, emotionally charged kind. The boring, preventative kind. The kind that happens early, often, and without anyone needing to “work up the courage” to say something obvious.
Being a good travel companion means making your needs, limits, and expectations legible to the people you’re traveling with—and being willing to hear theirs in return. This includes big things (“I really need downtime every day or I turn into a gremlin”) and small things (“I get weirdly anxious about missed connections even when we have plenty of time”). None of this makes you difficult. It makes you predictable. Predictable is good.
Open communication also means asking questions instead of making assumptions. Don’t assume everyone is having the same experience you are. Don’t assume silence means agreement. Don’t assume that because something seems obvious to you, it is obvious to everyone else. Travel scrambles normal cues, and people often don’t speak up because they don’t want to be “that person.”
Be that person. But gently.
Another under-appreciated part of communication is sharing positives. Say when something is working. Say when you’re enjoying yourself. Say thank you to the person who booked the hotel, navigated the border, or figured out the bus schedule. Travel can quickly turn into a long series of problem-solving exercises, and if the only things you verbalize are complaints and corrections, morale drops fast.
And yes, there is still a time and place element to all of this. Big conversations go better after food, rest, and showers. But the deeper rule is this: don’t wait until things are unbearable before you talk. Most travel conflicts don’t come from major disasters. They come from small, unspoken irritations that stack quietly until someone finally loses it over something deeply trivial.
Good communication won’t make travel effortless. But it keeps misunderstandings small, expectations aligned, and everyone feeling like they’re part of the same team—which, on the road, is half the battle.
Rule #4: Be flexible (because the universe does not care about your itinerary)
Stuff goes wrong. Plans change. Cities are hotter than you expected, and suddenly the ambitious full-day itinerary you printed out and lovingly highlighted becomes more of a suggestion. That restaurant you’ve been dreaming about for months is closed. The hotel air-conditioning doesn’t work. There’s a strike and all public transportation shuts down. A landslide parks your bus on the side of the road for a few hours. There’s a coup and you’re stuck in your Airbnb for days. Someone in your group is puking their guts out. Your flight gets cancelled.
All of these things have happened to me. Some of them more than once.
Travel has a way of reminding you—often forcefully—that control is an illusion. You can plan carefully. You can prepare responsibly. You can do everything “right.” And then reality shows up and does whatever it was going to do anyway.
Being a good travel companion means accepting this early and completely.
Flexibility isn’t about pretending none of this is frustrating. It is frustrating. But flexibility is the ability to adjust without spiraling, without assigning blame, and without turning every disruption into a referendum on the entire trip. It’s the quiet skill of saying, “Okay, that’s not happening,” and immediately pivoting to, “So what is happening?” And sometimes, it is the skill of accepting that the answer is, “absolutely nothing.”
This matters even more when you’re traveling with other people. When plans unravel—and they will—someone in the group may break Rule #1 and start broadcasting their misery. When that happens, your job is not to lecture them about positivity. Your job is to model calm. Be the person who shrugs, takes a breath, and says, “Alright, let’s figure this out.”
Most people come around when they realize the situation has stopped escalating.
Flexibility is contagious. So is rigidity. One of them makes travel survivable. The other makes it exhausting.
Travel will teach you resilience whether you want to learn it or not. Being flexible just means you learn the lesson with fewer casualties—and a much better story at the end.
Rule #5: Take care of yourself (so others don’t have to)
You may think that not putting on sunscreen because you are too excited to hit the beach—while foolish and reckless—is your own personal business. It is not. It becomes everyone’s business the moment you are so sunburned that you can’t participate in outdoor activities for the rest of the week and the group itinerary quietly reorganizes itself around your lobster-red misery.
The same goes for food and water decisions made in moments of misplaced confidence. You really wanted to join the locals in drinking water straight from a sacred spring in a tiny mountain village? Great. Very authentic. Very brave. Now your travel companions get to accommodate you turning an alarming shade of green and sprinting to the bathroom every twenty minutes for the next two days. And if you’re unlucky enough to pick up giardia, they’ll also get to enjoy the toxic sulfur smell of your burps for the next week. Authenticity has consequences.
Sleep deprivation works the same way. When you don’t get enough rest, you may think you’re just powering through. What you are actually doing is forcing everyone around you to walk on eggshells because you are suddenly fragile, irritable, and emotionally unpredictable. No one signed up to manage your mood swings.
Being a good travel companion means recognizing that your body is part of the group equation. When you take unnecessary risks with it—sun, sleep, hydration, food—you aren’t being adventurous. You’re outsourcing the consequences to the people traveling with you.
So take care of yourself. Be sensible. Drink water. Wear sunscreen. Get sleep. Make decisions that future-you will not regret.
You may still get traveler’s diarrhea. This is travel. Um... stuff happen. But your companions will be far more sympathetic if you didn’t contract it while doing something objectively stupid.
There’s a big difference between bad luck and bad judgment. Try to limit your suffering to the former.
Rule #6: Travel with a sense of humor (aim it at yourself)
A sense of humor is not optional when you travel. It is essential equipment. And the most important rule about travel humor is this: aim it inward before you aim it outward.
Making fun of yourself—your mistakes, your bad calls, your misplaced confidence—is one of the fastest ways to defuse tension. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it changes the emotional temperature around it. When something goes wrong and you’re the first one to laugh at your own role in it, you make it much easier for everyone else to move on.
This kind of humor has to be generous. It has to be positive. Punching down or sideways—at locals, service workers, or your travel companions—is not humor. It’s just stress looking for a target. But self-deprecating humor? That’s gold. That’s how you turn a near-miss, a dumb decision, or a completely avoidable disaster into a shared story instead of a shared resentment.
It doesn’t work for everyone, but if you have the knack, it’s powerful. A well-timed joke can pull a group out of a spiral. It can help everyone reframe a bad moment as a temporary inconvenience rather than a trip-ruining catastrophe. And sometimes, it’s the only way to recover after the fact, when the damage is already done and all you can do is narrate it better.
One of my favorite lines—perfectly suited to travel—comes from an AJR song: 100 bad days made 100 good stories; 100 good stories make me interesting at parties. That’s not just a lyric; it’s a coping strategy. It reminds you that today’s frustration is very likely tomorrow’s punchline.
If you can laugh at yourself, you give everyone else permission to relax. You signal that the goal isn’t perfection—it’s experience. And experience, by definition, is messy.
Travel goes wrong. That’s part of the deal. Humor is how you keep it from going wrong emotionally, which is often the part that matters most.
Rule #7: Be reliable
If you tell your travel companions you will meet them in the hotel lobby at 7:00, be there at 7:00. Not 7:07. Not “basically 7.” Not 7:00 in the theoretical sense. Seven.
If you don’t want to be there at 7:00, that is often completely fine. Travel does not require universal enthusiasm for early mornings. But if you plan to be late—or to skip entirely—communicate that clearly and ahead of time. Reliability isn’t about rigidity. It’s about predictability.
Travel already comes with enough uncertainty. Missed connections, delayed buses, closed restaurants, malfunctioning air-conditioning—none of that needs help. When someone disappears without explanation or shows up late without warning, it adds a completely avoidable layer of stress. People wait. Plans stall. Mental energy gets wasted wondering whether to proceed or hold back.
This is basic courtesy, but it matters more on the road than it does at home. At home, being late is annoying. While traveling, it can cascade. A delayed departure can mean missing a ferry, losing a reservation, or standing awkwardly in a lobby wondering whether something has gone wrong.
Being reliable doesn’t mean you never change plans. It means when plans change, you say so. It means showing up when and where you said you would—or communicating clearly when you won’t.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not adventurous. But it is one of the quiet habits that makes travel feel smoother, calmer, and far more cooperative for everyone involved.
Rule #8: Talk about the positives (out loud, unapologetically)
Let’s end with the equal and opposite of Rule #1.
Just as constant complaining drains the life out of a trip, genuine enthusiasm does the opposite. It lifts everyone. It expands the experience. It makes moments feel bigger and more memorable simply because they are shared with joy instead of restraint.
Wear your excitement on your sleeve.
There are few things that make me enjoy a place more than when my wife can’t stop gushing about how cool something is. Her excitement doesn’t diminish my experience—it amplifies it. It pulls me deeper into the moment. It reminds me to slow down and actually notice what’s happening instead of mentally moving on to the next thing.
Don’t be cool. Don’t be ironic. Don’t act like you’ve seen it all before, even if you have. Let loose your inner two-year-old—the one who is genuinely amazed that the world keeps producing new, surprising, beautiful things.
Smile. Freak out a little. Say, “This is amazing.” Say it again. Celebrate small victories and unexpected triumphs. Talk about how the late afternoon sun poured through the stained-glass windows of that thousand-year-old church. Or what it felt like when a Bengal tiger crossed the road right in front of your truck. Or how surprising it was when the fried tarantula you ordered for dinner turned out to be… actually pretty good.
Positivity is contagious. When one person allows themselves to feel wonder, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. It shifts the emotional tone of the whole group from endurance to appreciation.
And here’s a strange little truth that doesn’t get said often enough: no one will ever be more excited to hear your travel stories than the people who were there with you when they happened. Those shared moments—the laughter, the awe, the disbelief—are the stories you’ll return to again and again.
So talk about what’s working. Name what’s beautiful. Let yourself be moved.
Because travel gives you plenty of chances to be uncomfortable. Don’t miss the chance to be delighted too.
