How do I get through the airport without paying extra?

Four small savings, each decided before you leave the house: an empty bottle, a bag that closes without kneeling on it, one fee that vanishes at a desk, and a map that works when the plan does not.

Carry the bottle through empty. Carry the bottle through empty starts at the gate with two hours to fill and a bottle of water that costs what a meal costs outside. Thirteen separate conversations there arrive at the same reading of the sign: the US liquid rule is about what is in the bottle, so an empty one is just an object, and past the checkpoint there is usually a fountain, often beside the toilets. Six conversations pack solid food for the same reason. And six confirm that miniatures of spirits go through in the clear bag, with the second rule attached: a US federal regulation says nobody may drink alcohol on the plane unless the airline served it, so the miniature flies legally and stays sealed. The page names the two accounts whose empty bottle was refused anyway, and who it is not for: anyone flying into another country with fresh food, where the question is customs and the answer is eat it first and declare the rest.

Roll what forgives, fold what creases. Roll what forgives, fold what creases comes from people who had both experiences, the bag that finally closed and the shirt that looked slept in. Roll the soft things, t-shirts, underwear, gym clothes, firmly enough to press the air out; fold anything with a collar, a crease or a pressed seam. Across nineteen conversations rolling fits more into a bag, and across eight it often left clothes more wrinkled than folding did, so six reach the same conclusion: the method depends on the garment. The page carries the argument about whether rolling saves any room at all with both sides, four accounts to four, and its decider is how tightly you roll and what you are comparing against; the bag matters too, a soft duffel rewards rolls, a shallow suitcase rewards flat layers. Two cautions there: rolling does not change what it weighs, only what fits.

The fee the counter skips. The fee the counter skips is a small find from people who fly the bare-fare airlines on purpose: Spirit adds a booking fee to online fares, per person and per flight segment, that disappears if you buy the ticket at a US airport counter. Someone who assumed it was nonsense tested it, priced a New York-to-Florida flight online, waited about ten minutes at LaGuardia, and paid roughly 30 percent less. The page is honest that this makes a cheap fare cheaper, not a different kind of fare, and that some travellers skip these airlines entirely.

Download the map while you still have signal. Download the map while you still have signal is for the city where your plan costs a fortune. Your phone can find its own position under an open sky with no data, but it can only draw the streets if you saved the area first, on home wifi the night before. Its safety line for travel: 112 reaches the emergency services free across the European Union, 999 in the UK, 911 in the US, 000 in Australia; and where the signal is weak rather than absent, turn off mobile data rather than using airplane mode, so you stay reachable.

Who this is not for. The bottle page says some people found its advice obvious and said so; it was written for the person who did not know, and the price of a bottle at the gate says the airport counts on that. If the overpriced snacks are part of the trip for you, one person there said exactly that, and nothing here argues.