A road trip like no other awaits…
There can be few vacations that inspire such romance and adventure as a well-planned road trip via some of the world’s most inaccessible highways. Imagine driving the four-mile-high mountain passes of The Karakoram; the second-highest mountain range on Earth including the Hindu Kush, the Pamir Mountains, and the Himalayas.
Or there are the iconic journeys like California’s Pacific Highway 1, maybe Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, or The Silk Road. That latter route meanders across northern China to eastern Turkey, a network of some 4000 miles of barely recognisable roads through some of the best breath-taking scenery and most dangerous countries on earth.
And the danger from travelling isn’t always just from potential bandits, robbers and trigger-happy police and border guards. Nowadays, cyber-security is as important as physical security when you’re on the road.
In order to protect yourself from any online security attacks and hacks, before you leave home, it’s a good idea to download a VPN for travel from a reliable provider. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It’s a simple yet highly effective and affordable security precaution; the VPN simply acts as a browser extension on any device that you might be using.
A VPN connects to the internet by placing an intermediary or ‘middleman’ server between the user’s requested web service and the person’s device. That request may be on a phone to log on to social media, or via a travel booking website or webmail portal on a laptop or iPad.
The VPN server is encrypted and provides two very useful facilities: firstly, it anonymizes the user’s location by providing an IP address different from the actual geographical location of the VPN user. It also ensures that nobody can identify the person accessing the internet.
This encryption, anonymity and location scrambling offer many advantages when on a road trip. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Hotter than hot Wi-Fi
Imagine this fictitious but dream scenario: You’re travelling across the USA on Route 66 in a gorgeous, rented classic ‘69 Chevy with a 396 cubic inch Chevrolet V8 with a Hurst stick-shift. Bliss. You pull into a roadhouse called the ‘66 Diner’ at Flagstaff Arizona and take a table for coffee and a Hero sandwich.
Opening your laptop computer, the Wi-Fi dialogue box tells you that there is a hotspot called ’66 Diner’. You glance over at the specials menu above the coffee counter on a chalkboard to see the Wi-Fi password advertised as “66d1n3r”. That makes sense. So you put the password in, providing your email address as part of the T&Cs of the Wi-Fi provider.
Hey Presto – you’re connected with a great signal, and you receive an immediate email from the diner urging you to click on a link for a free coffee voucher at your next visit. You click that link, and all seems well.
What actually just happened was that you logged onto the self-created hotspot of the guy sitting in a van outside, who has used the same nomenclature and password as the legitimate establishment’s Wi-Fi. If you’d looked carefully before logging on, you would have noticed that there were in fact two hotspots called 66 Diner, and you had a 50% chance of logging into the criminal version. That coffee voucher link was actually a piece of malware designed to record your keystrokes and install ransomware into your machine. That’s going to really ruin your day.
But if you had connected to the same hotspot using a VPN client on your browser, the VPN server would immediately detect the malicious activity and disconnect your machine well before any harm could be done. It’s a bit like having virus protection software on steroids!
Hotel booking using local currency and avoiding dynamic pricing
Let’s now look at a different scenario, you’re cycling across Europe, you’re starting in the UK and travelling through France and Germany down to Italy. If you visit an accommodation reseller site to look at hotels in France for your first stop, something like hotel-booking.eu or whatever, you’ll see that French hotels are available, but you need to pay in £GBP Sterling because your IP address shows that you’re based in the UK.
The exchange rate offered by many reseller sites isn’t advantageous to the customer, so if you were using a VPN, you would only need to choose a server based in France to access that accommodation portal from a French server. Now you’ll notice that the accommodation prices are in Euros, and a quick calculator sum will allow you to realise how much you were being overcharged.
Worse still, there’s the concept of ‘dynamic pricing’ whereby some websites assess your device and its location. If you’re logging on to the internet from, say, an IP address that puts you in Beverly Hills, California and you’re on a brand-new MacBook Pro – the AI in the pricing algorithm shrieks ‘rich person, charge top rates!’. However, if you use a VPN you could choose to access the web from, say, Mexico and your device’s make and model would be unrecognisable, so the prices you’re offered won’t be at a premium.
The end of the road
In conclusion, together with saving money, extra security and other benefits we don’t have space to examine here, installing a VPN before you travel, and using it on your road trip will help to ensure that whatever goes wrong, it won’t be with any of your online connected devices. Happy travels!
Image credit: Depositphotos