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Trips are planned as lists of places and experienced as sequences of journeys. The gap between the two is where a holiday turns into logistics, and it is invisible on paper.

The Travel Copilot works in bases and travel days rather than in destinations, because that is the unit that determines whether a trip feels spacious or exhausting.

Entry requirements, visa rules and health requirements change, and they change without announcement in the places people read about them. A confident answer from any AI about a visa is a starting point and not a source.

Check the embassy of the country you are visiting, and your own government's travel advice. It takes ten minutes and it is the one part of trip planning where being wrong ends the trip at the airport.

Travelling with a toddler, with a mobility requirement, or with a serious dietary restriction turns every ordinary decision into research. Most travel content is written for someone without any of those.

That is where this earns its place - not in finding the famous sights, which is easy, but in working out which of them are actually workable given who is travelling.

Travel insurance is bought hastily at checkout and read afterwards, which is the wrong order for a product where the exclusions do most of the work.

Standard trip cancellation covers a defined list of reasons - illness, injury, death of a family member, certain weather and carrier events. It does not cover changing your mind, and it typically does not cover a pre-existing condition unless a waiver was purchased within a short window of the initial booking. That window is short and frequently missed.

Cancel for any reason is a separate and more expensive product, usually reimbursing a portion rather than the full amount, and usually requiring purchase soon after the first payment.

Medical coverage abroad is the part that matters most and gets the least attention. Domestic health insurance frequently provides limited or no coverage outside the country, and medical evacuation - the genuinely catastrophic cost - is often a separate limit. That limit is the number worth checking.

Credit card coverage is real and narrower than assumed. It often requires that the trip be paid for with that card, carries lower limits, and excludes categories people assume are included.

Read the exclusions before the summary. The summary describes what the product is for; the exclusions describe what it is.

Visa status is the requirement everybody knows about. The ones that strand people at check-in are usually the others.

Passport validity is the most common. A great many countries require six months of validity beyond the date of entry, and a passport that is technically unexpired can therefore be unusable. Airlines enforce this at the gate because they carry the cost of a refused entry.

Blank pages are the second. Some countries require one or two, and a heavily used passport can fail on that alone.

Onward or return ticket requirements are the third and catch one-way travellers regularly. It is an airline enforcement point more often than an immigration one, which means it is discovered at check-in.

Electronic travel authorisations are increasingly common for travel that used to be visa-free, they must be obtained before departure, and processing is not always instant.

Then transit. A layover can require a transit visa depending on nationality and whether you leave the secure area, and it is genuinely easy to miss when booking a connection.

Every one of these is checkable in ten minutes on the destination embassy site, and every one of them ends a trip at the airport if missed. It is the one part of travel planning where verification is not optional.

The costs of spending money abroad are mostly invisible, which is why they persist.

Foreign transaction fees are a percentage added by the card issuer, typically small per transaction and meaningful across a trip. Cards without them exist and are not difficult to obtain.

Dynamic currency conversion is the more expensive one. When a card machine or an ATM offers to charge you in your home currency, that convenience is a conversion at a rate set by the merchant, and it is consistently worse than the network rate. Always choose the local currency - the offer is designed to sound like a favour.

Airport currency exchange is the worst available rate almost everywhere, and it is where the largest number of travellers exchange the largest single amount.

ATMs generally give a good rate and may charge a fixed fee, which makes fewer larger withdrawals cheaper than frequent small ones.

The other practical point is redundancy. Two cards from different networks, stored separately, converts a lost wallet from a crisis into an inconvenience. It costs nothing and it is the single most useful piece of travel money advice there is.

Disruption is the part of travel where knowing the rules is worth real money, and most people find out what they were entitled to afterwards.

The entitlements depend on where you are flying from and with whom. European regulation provides for compensation on delays and cancellations within its scope, with amounts set by distance and exceptions for genuinely extraordinary circumstances. Several other jurisdictions have adopted similar frameworks. US rules differ substantially and are stronger on refunds than on compensation - a cancelled flight generally entitles you to your money back rather than to a voucher, and that distinction is frequently blurred at the desk.

The practical advice is more useful than the legal detail. Get in the rebooking queue and on the phone simultaneously, because whichever resolves first wins. Airline apps often permit self-rebooking before an agent is reachable at all.

Keep every receipt if you incur costs. Reimbursement claims depend on documentation, and the hotel booking made in frustration at midnight is the one that gets rejected for lack of a receipt.

Ask specifically what you are entitled to rather than what can be offered, because those are different questions and produce different answers.

And build the buffer in advance. A connection with a short layover on separate tickets is where a single delay cascades into a lost trip, and no amount of entitlement makes that pleasant.