Hotel "hacks" - how minimalist travelers get the most out of their hotel room

Hotel room “hacks” is a life hack genre all to itself.  Here, I’ll share my favorites:

• Use a binder clip to create a hotel room blackout for sleeping in late.
• Use the Scientific 7 Minute Workout I mentioned above for a no excuses quick workout requiring no equipment.
• If you practice yoga, you may have struggled with squeezing a yoga mat, even a “travel mat”, into your bag. This mat is amazingly thin - folds up to the size of a Newsweek magazine. Because it is so thin, you’ll need to use it on carpet rather than hard surfaces.
• When my sisters and I were kids, we thought hotel swimming pools were awesome. And we were right! Take advantage of this great low-impact cardio workout (I travel with goggles and this only slightly ridiculous swimsuit. I admit I wouldn’t wear it around anybody that I actually know, but it adds almost zero weight to my bag and it’s perfect for this purpose). Jumping in the pool even briefly is also a chance to disconnect and literally wash off the stress of traveling for out-of-town business. Check out this Huffington Post blog about our “blue mind” - the mental health benefits of being in or near the water.
• For shorter trips, like a week or so, use the hotel room laundry method I sketched out earlier. If you’re traveling longer than 2 weeks, take advantage of hotel laundry service at least once; this is available in nicer hotels and sometimes you can even get a 12 hour turnaround.
• Dump everything from your pockets into a collapsible bowl or the Tom Bihn Travel Tray - I have used both and have found that the bowl packs a bit flatter and lighter. The point here is to have one place, one container, where coins and hotel room key and phone and other easily misplaced items can be scooped up quickly when you are packing up.
• Snatch those awesome plastic laundry bags from the hotel room closet – great for separating dirty clothes from clean, or for transporting wet stuff back from the beach, or for safeguarding fruit or food items that might spill out in your bag.
• Your hotel ice bucket provides a nice mini fridge for keeping yogurt and hummus fresh overnight. According to this quasi-scientific investigation (and my own experience), a bit of water and ice in the bucket provides a quick solution to chill beer (or the little free bottles of water some hotels provide).
• Hotel room keys which use NFC technology (these are the cards you tap in order to unlock the room, not the ones which you swipe like a credit card) can be rewritten with Android phones, and assigned tasks specific to your typical hotel room stay. Then, simply tapping the hotel card to your phone will automatically set an alarm, turn on Wi-Fi, dim your screen, or any other tasks you might assign it.
• I was initially hopeful that my tiny little Chrome Cast device would allow me to access Netflix and other video content on my hotel television; my experience thus far has been that I simply cannot connect the device to the hotel Wi-Fi in order to communicate to my phone or tablet. But because I use the Samsung All Share hub to display PowerPoint slides from my phone to an LCD projector, the device is always handy (smaller than a deck of cards, and lighter) for streaming content from my phone to the hotel television. Many of you will pack an iPad or thin laptop, and find it agreeable to simply watch movies with that device.
• Increasingly, hotels are providing decent (if not free) internet access. But I do pack a tiny mini router which has proven useful on a couple of occasions to boost a weak hotel Wi-Fi signal. This device requires an Ethernet connection, something which some newer hotels no longer offer.
• Rather than purchasing Wi-Fi access for multiple devices, pop in a wireless USB adapter to create a hotspot from your laptop or other USB enabled device.
•  As another incentive to get down to the hotel gym, note that many decent hotels offer free fresh fruit in their workout facility. No need to eat crap when you travel.
• Most hotel rooms provide an iron and a junky ironing board - but you can avoid ironing altogether by taking advantage of that usually super steamy hotel bathroom. Before you start your shower, bring wrinkled clothing into the bathroom on a clothes hanger, then shut the door while you shower and shave; most wrinkles will fall out with the heat and humidity.
• At their worst, hotels can be noisy strange places that smell funny. At their best, they can provide a mini retreat – an occasion to pull back from your daily routine, reconnect with yourself, rest, and renew. Without any of the typical trappings of home around you – yard and garage and things to do – your hotel can actually be a quiet sanctuary. Personally and professionally I have a huge booster of journaling. Sketching out experiences and thoughts you’ve had over the course of the day, checking in at a deeper level regarding your goals and your values, thinking about next steps and plans, noting where you are in your most important relationships at work and home and community. You don’t actually need a paper journal to do the work of “journaling” (I do a lot of my journaling in Evernote), but if you agree that there is something organic and raw about putting actual pen to actual paper, a great travel journal is one of these super thin Moleskine cashier journals. I’ve always got one handy when I travel. I have also been known to put my thoughts out onto hotel stationery, then stuff it in my bag and pull it out later only to wonder “when was I in Lawrence Kansas?”
• I have no idea where you could possibly buy one of those tiny little sewing kits they provide in some hotel rooms. The next time you’re staying in a decent hotel which provides these little kits, go ahead and snag one and make it part of your regular travel gear.
• If you stay in different hotels over several days, you’ll eventually find that you have completely forgotten your room number. A simple solution here is to use your phone to take a photo of the room number. A somewhat more complicated solution – because you first have to master this strategy – is to use a system like Ron White’s “skeleton mnemonic” which assigns the numbers zero through 9 to a location on the human body and allows users of the mnemonic to remember sequences of numbers. 
•  A small roll of duct tape may be a worthwhile investment of space and weight in your one-bag travel system – it fixes everything, or at least holds it together until you get back home
• The hotel lost and found box has been a lifesaver for me on more than one occasion when I’ve misplaced a phone or laptop charger. Stop by the front desk and tell them what you’re looking for and ask if you could take a look through the stuff that previous guests have left behind.

So there you go, a list of my favorite hotel room hacks and travel tips.  

Get more like this at Amazon in my book 

A Guy's Guide to 1-Bag Packing: Minimalist Travel Secrets That Save You Time and Money.