She stuffed her bra with clothes at the airport. here is the reason

We’ve all been there – frantically dumping suitcase contents onto an airport bench, desperately trying to rearrange items to avoid going over the airline’s baggage allowance.

“Maybe I should wear all my clothes at once,” you muse, as you weigh the inconvenience of layering four sweaters on a crowded plane over the cost of shelling out more for your overweight suitcase.

That’s where the luggage specialist comes in. Chelsea Dickenson .

“You can pack smaller than you think, I promise you, you can,” Dickenson told CNN . “And I go out there and say it will make your vacation better.”

Dickenson, a 33-year-old traveler from the UK, founded the site Cheap Holiday Expert to provide tips and tricks for budget vacations. As a frequent flyer, Dickenson prides herself on traveling light. And if she runs out of space, she’s also good at coming up with unexpected solutions.

See, for example, the viral trick to store objects in fishing vest by Dickenson, in which she travels in a multi-pocket, zippered vest designed for fishing gear.

On a recent EasyJet flight from London to Lisbon, Dickenson donned her vest and stuffed her pockets with everything from a bikini to a laptop computer.

Did she get weird looks in the airport security line?

“With the fishing vest – it’s a jacket. What do you do with your jackets? You place them on a tray. Do you take everything out of your pocket? Not with a regular jacket – so why would you do that with a fishing vest? It’s the same thing,” says Dickenson, who points out that the airport security team isn’t concerned with the amount of luggage, just making sure you’re not carrying illegal items or too much liquid.

At the gate, Dickenson and his fishing vest also “passed through”. On board the plane, she took off her jacket and placed it in one of the overhead compartments before taking it out and putting it on at the end of the flight.

Tips and tricks

The fishing vest is just one of several tricks Dickenson shared with his thousands of followers on TikTok and not Instagram.

On another flight from London to Vienna with Wizz Air, Dickenson replaced memory foam in your travel pillow for seven pairs of underwear, five pairs of socks, one pair of leggings, and two T-shirts. She placed the travel pillow on a tray through security “no problem” and was released at the gate, “no questions asked.”

Perhaps the best part, Dickenson says, is that the pillow was still super comfortable when she rested her head on it during the flight.

dickenson too tried to stuff a bra with clothes and then wear it over your clothes and under your coat. She took her bra off to get through security to avoid any embarrassment, stuffing it in her purse before putting it back at the gate.

While Dickenson decided the bra idea was “ridiculous and the payoff isn’t big enough,” she’s a big fan of the fishing vest and travel pillow.

“The neck pillow was a huge win because not only did I do it, but I also got a lot of messages from people who did it,” says Dickenson, who says he’s been in an airport and overheard other travelers talking about how they were trying to do that too.

“It’s about having a little fun with it,” Dickenson says of her gimmicks.

My aim is to highlight how ridiculous it is that we have to pay so much money if we want to take any luggage with us, this is how cheap airlines currently operate

Chelsea Dickenson, founder of cheapholidayexpert.com

Hotel upgrades

Dickenson also has some more conventional tips for making traveling easier and more affordable. She’s a big fan of vacuum packaging, for example. “You put all your clothes on and then you get all the air out of them,” she explains. “You get a lot more space.”

And Dickenson is a big advocate of creating lists to avoid excess baggage. Before traveling, she always writes down all the items she will need, detailing the journey day by day. This strategy helps her pack concisely and lightly. Instead of carrying random clothes, she has everyday clothes ready to go.

And there’s an added bonus.

“That means you really cut down on bringing too many pairs of panties,” says Dickenson. “I don’t know about you, but I used to take about 20 for a week off – you don’t have to do that.”

Dickenson is also known for her hotel upgrade email template, available at your site for others to copy, paste, and send.

The template is brief, polite and friendly – ​​and has a pretty high success rate.

“I get messages – maybe two or three – every day from people saying, ‘Oh my God, it worked. I just arrived, we are in a suite. We have champagne. Thank you very much. I never would have asked if you hadn’t put the suggestion in my head,’” says Dickenson.

Dickenson’s motto is when it comes to any kind of travel upgrade, it’s always worth asking. After all, the worst that can happen is someone says no. For hotels specifically, Dickenson advises doing some research beforehand and figuring out who you should address your email to – that personal touch can really help.

The wonders of traveling

While Dickenson enjoys making her followers laugh with her packing tricks, she is also serious about her commitment to helping people travel on a budget.

She is often frustrated by the high costs of travel, particularly for families, and the fact that these costs can become a hindrance to a vacation.

“People deserve to walk around, to have that moment to relax, to see something new,” says Dickenson. “For kids growing up – I think that’s a really important part of learning something new, learning about new cultures.”

Dickenson hopes his tips can help travelers avoid unnecessary costs and encourage them to explore the world as much as they can.

“There’s something lovely about traveling that reminds us that we’re just humans scattered across different parts of the world, and there’s so much more that unites us than makes us different,” she says. “I know I’m super cheesy here, but actually, that’s one of the biggest perks of travel, that it’s able to bring people together in this way.”