There goes the phone!

Oh, wow! what pain that must have caused!
I too don't trust my phone for any reservation. Saw someone arguing with the train conductor because he couldn't bring up his train e-ticket. I don't trust my phone enough not to have that happen to me so always have hard copies of all tickets and reservations even if they are heavy and take up space in my backpack.

I confess an absolute lack of sympathy. The inability to look at a consequence 1 inch beyond the end of the nose is amazing.

We too like paper copies. Never can tell when devices are out of power.

With boarding passes on the phone, a good tip is, yes, keep on the phone, but take a screenshot when you have wifi. Will you have wifi when presenting cellphone to TSA inspector? If you have a screenshot, all you need is power. The example of being unable to bring up your e-ticket on the train given by Darcy above is illustrative - my experience is that train wifi is very very spotty.

Yep, paper copies of everything--lodgings, transit, museum tickets. We begin with a 5-7 oz. stack, which decreases to nothing during the trip.

I have to do screenshots since I can only access stuff on my iPad if wifi is around. I did buy some entries to museums on this last trip during the trip (usually a day or two before) and made sure I had screenshots.

Didn't I read somewhere that Venice was built on a foundation of lost and discarded phones, back in the Dark Ages? (I guess they didn't have smartphones back then, just the flip kind I use.)

Paper all the way for me. It might get soggy in the lagoon but it will survive, and stay on the surface long enough to be fished out.

Seriously.......no sympathy for someone who stumbled and dropped something? That's cold.

I agree with having paper copies, but I still feel sorry for someone who lost her phone, regardless of how it was lost.

@chiara: Sorry, my heart is as cold as a stone. Adults need to ask questions like "If I go to the edge of the cliff and stumble, what will happen?" and "If I am on a boat and the boat tilts (which boats do), and I am holding my phone, will I save my phone?"

Oh, Paul, for real?

How horrible for her. I think all of us (with apparently one exception) have made the mistake of acting without thinking something through all the way.

Hmmm... in Germany now... all my train tickets are on the DB App on my phone (no hard copies)... they're available off-line, too. I honestly can't remember if I did something to make that happen or if the app automatically makes them available off-line if I buy them on the app. I think the latter?

While on a train in Sicily I chatted with a group of 20- and 30-something Canadians who were heading to a one-week sailing adventure in the Aeolians. I noticed that the young man who was to captain the boat was reading a book, and I commented on how uncommon it as these days for travelers not to use an e-reader. His response was that he'd rather risk losing a paperback book overboard than an electronic device. I hadn't thought of it that way but should have, considering that I once walked into a lamppost because I was reading a book as I walked (here in DC). All it takes is a stumble and my smartphone hits the ground.

I see people with their devices in all kinds of questionable situations. When I take mine out, I do it where I can drop it, and not have a disaster. For some, it takes the hard lesson of dropping it into the drink to realize that "Holding a device over water is not smart". Adults need to think of consequences.

I note one comment above about "with one exception" that presumably being me. I do not hold my phone over water or a deep hole. Why? Because I drop my phone now and again. I have it in a rubber case. It slips out of my fingers. I know that, and know that, if I picked it up over water and then dropped it, bye-bye phone. My self-knowledge suggests that some things are safe and some are not.

This happens all the time at the Grand Canyon. Signs say "don't go beyond this point" and you see people picnicking on the ground 20 feet beyond the sign. Well, some of them drop into the canyon. You have to think of consequences.

I agree that you need to be very mindful of where you use your phone/not drop it into canals. Some people are very careless with these things and it's pretty stupid.

BUT paper is pretty risky for reservations and tickets, too. It is very easy to loose paper or be stuck in a rainstorm or spill wine on it or have it blown away by wind. If you loose your paper notes they are gone. Loose your phone with electronic notes and you are out a very expensive device (hopefully insured!), but your documents are safe on the cloud and can be retrieved at the nearest public computer or your laptop/ipad back in the room, if you brought one.
Keep everything as a PDF (not internet dependent) so it can be accessed without any connection, though!

This is the main reason I attach a wrist strap to the case of my Iphone:
https://tinyurl.com/yxdcoqk6

I'm a dropper

I keep looking for an around-the-neck lanyard for my Samsung phone (saw one on a woman riding Alpine lifts) -- I need a never-put-it-down solution that allows me to take photos on the fly. That's how I carry my transit pass at home.
Saw numerous people sticking their phones out from the Eiffel Tower to get a better shot -- one dropped from there would not only be lost, it would be seriously dangerous for the person below.

I keep looking for an around-the-neck lanyard for my Samsung phone

If you search "around the neck strap for smartphone" on Amazon you will find hundreds of different products.

Thanks. Mchael -- so many of the lanyards have straps that block the camera on my (older Series 6) Samsung although they work with iiphones.

As Mira noted, paper has it's risks too...lost, wind blown, rain soaked, etc. I have copies of essentials on the phone, but also paper copies as well. When printing up the paper I always make two copies, one for me & one for my wife. We both have all the relevant paper work if we become separated, As mentioned before, the stacks start out cumbersome on day one, but reduce to zero by the last day.

Paper is still good for me, too. Having said that, this is one reason I like having my phone in a case with a wrist strap. It's too easy to drop it and with the crowds in places like Rome and Venice, I found it helpful to use that wrist strap.

I see people with their devices in all kinds of questionable
situations.

A friend of mine killed a phone when he dropped it in a urinal.

Oh lord Emma! That reminds me when we were in Halifax for fireworks and there was a guy sitting on the edge of the boardwalk. He took out his wallet, fumbled it, and into the harbour it went. Luckily, he was really fast (since he had to run down a gangway and across a dock) and the wallet didn’t instantly sink, so he was able to get it.

I am one of those extremely careful with my gadgets people. We did a walking tour in Vienna and saw this teen girl swinging a Nikon back and forth (not part of the tour). Well, me and one of the other participants (after being out of earshot) said to each other how nervous that made us...lol. I get nervous seeing people carrying SLR’s without a neck strap or any strap. shudder. If I’m carrying my iPad on my hand I have a death grip on it...I actually have a case for it with elastics so I can slip my hand thru the elastic for extra security.

And while I do like having paper, it is good to have electronic and paper. I mean, what are the odds that something will happen to both? (She says, tempting fate on her next trip).

And the vaporetto woman was getting lots of sympathetic glances. She wasn’t right over the edge of the boat, but maybe a few feet back. Just the tilt of the boat and the slippery floor and off it went.

We were in Newfoundland this past July , on a boat trip on a very, very deep lake.
We were sitting on the lower level, when suddenly a camera dropped from the upper level, hitting a young man on the head.
The only thing that bounced onto the deck was the lens cap.

Goodness SJ...hope the fellow wasn’t hurt too bad! I worked at a camera shop and one of the fellows who was there...whenever he’d have someone’s camera (they’d come in for cleaning) in hand, he had the strap wrapped around his arm...I always do this when it isn’t around my neck...make sure I have the strap looped! (Well, I have a sling strap...can’t stand a neck strap...sling strap is so much more comfortable, so rarely have it off my torso).

It goes beyond having accidents, hardware fails. Has anyone ever had their laptop destroyed by a windows update or a hard drive fail? How about flames coming out of the power supply? On a 6 week business trip my pc died on the plane on my first leg to Germany. I ended up getting the hard drive installed in a different machine and spent the rest of the trip getting used to the differences in the keyboards. Print hard copies, carry backup files, use jump drives, SD cards, put things on the cloud, attach them in your mail folders but don't travel without backups.