Louise Tuck, a travel content creator based in Banff, Alta., never leaves home without her LifeStraw collapsible water bottle. According to the brand, the bottle’s built-in filter removes 99.99 per cent of bacteria from drinking water – an essential for staying healthy while travelling.Glenn Lowson
On a trip to Japan this May, Louise Tuck woke in the middle of the night and glanced at her portable carbon monoxide detector.
As she now routinely does when travelling, she had set up the device in her hotel room, where it continuously monitors air quality and sounds an alert in case of danger. Thankfully, it read zero.
Ms. Tuck, a travel content creator from Banff, Alta., purchased the device after learning about the risk of carbon monoxide leaks in hotel rooms.
“It was a fairly cheap buy,” she says. “I thought, why not, if it gives us peace of mind?”
Canadian frequent flyers like Ms. Tuck are increasingly turning to innovative, often inexpensive, tech tools to support their wellness on the go – from reducing stress to tracking sleep quality or staying present while exploring.
Small devices for peace of mind
Other compact, portable items, like the LifeStraw collapsible water bottle, have also become mainstays on Ms. Tuck’s packing list.
According to the brand, LifeStraw filters water, removing 99.99 per cent of bacteria, including E. coli and salmonella, another risk for vacationers.
For Isaac Mosna, a content creator and tech reviewer from Toronto, adding Bluetooth trackers to all his travel essentials has significantly reduced airport anxiety.
Instead of rifling through his bags in the back of a taxi or after going through security, a quick glance at his smartphone is all it takes to confirm nothing’s been left behind.
“I just open the app and go, ‘That’s with me, that’s with me, that’s with me,’” he says. “It alleviates some of the pressure when travelling. There’s enough you have to worry about, so if you can just make sure you have your things with you at all times, it’s pretty handy.”
Wearables: providing health data in real time
Wearable tech is on the rise, according to a March 2025 report from Leger that found about 40 per cent of Canadians and Americans now use it. Among them are Canadian travellers adapting their routines based on biometric data.
Yukon-based adventure creator Danielle Lister was surprised by her smartwatch’s exertion results after what felt like a relatively easy hike in Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park this winter.
“It wasn’t really that intense of a hike for me, but it was a lot of distance,” says Ms. Lister, who is accustomed to steep, rugged terrain in Canada’s backcountry.
While she expected to have handled the trek with ease, her smartwatch told her otherwise, leading her to adjust her travel plans.
“It was interesting to see the wear and tear,” she says, referring to data like heart rate, steps and maximum oxygen intake. “Even though we were in an area where we could do a lot of hiking, we decided to take a couple of rest days after that.”
Ms. Tuck, who travels nearly every month for work, says she uses her smartwatch to help beat jet lag after long flights. When it comes to sleeping on planes, she’s looking for quality over quantity.
“Eight hours of good-quality sleep will usually give me a score of 80 or more,” says Ms. Tuck, referring to the sleep score feature on her smartwatch, generated from a combination of heart rate, time spent awake or restless and sleep stages.
While you might feel like you managed five hours of rest on a flight, your smartwatch may disagree – hers recently gave her a sleep score below 60 after an overnight trip. Guided by this data, she focused on getting quality sleep the next day with the help of noise-cancelling headphones and sleep stories from the Calm app.
Activity data from wearables can add to the fun of a trip abroad too, says Aly Smalls, an Edmonton-based travel YouTuber. While in Austria hiking to the Dürnstein Castle this spring, Ms. Smalls made sure to set her smartwatch to the hiking setting so it would monitor factors like elevation and distance.
“My husband likes looking at the cool castle stuff,” says Ms. Smalls. “I do too, but I also love to know how many steps we got from that and how many calories I burned.”
Discovering nature with smartphone apps
Family physician Emily Chen would never have walked the Fish Lake Lookout trail outside of Whitehorse had it not been for AllTrails, an app that uses a combination of user-submitted data and maps to aggregate hiking information.
“It tells you the conditions from locals who have done the hikes or trails recently, and gives you what to expect,” says Dr. Chen, who works as a locum across Canada. “I can’t imagine not having that, because I feel like it’s opened up so much more nature and parts of the country for me.”
“I knew zero local people in the Yukon, so it was really helpful to have the app guide us,” she says, adding that it led her to the trail she described as vividly green and open.
For more advanced hikers, Ms. Lister suggests Gaia GPS, an app that allows you to download maps for offline use and plan hiking itineraries.
To explore new surroundings, Ms. Lister uses her favourite birding app, Cornell University’s Merlin Bird ID, along with the citizen science app iNaturalist to identify plants and animals.
Research shows that spending time in nature has real health benefits. According to the Canadian Psychological Association, just a few minutes outdoors can boost attention span, while 20-minute stretches are ideal for reducing stress hormones in the body.
“It’s a really cool way of actually getting to know the landscapes that you’re travelling through better,” says Ms. Lister. “Having a deeper appreciation of where you are and having the opportunity to learn about what’s around you.”
While there’s no shortage of smart gadgets that promise to improve your life, not everything in your luggage needs to be high-tech, says Mr. Mosna.
“I’ve tried all this stuff,” he says. “But if it doesn’t need to be smart, it doesn’t need to be smart.”
Instead, he suggests focusing on the tools that make the biggest difference to your well-being – and spending the rest of the time simply enjoying your trip.
