Costa Rica Travel Center: Travel Tips:

Costa Rica Travel Tips
Traveling to Costa Rica: Document Backup

Costa Rica Travel

Be Prepared with Instantly Accessible Copies of Your Travel Documents
You can easily lose three or four days of your vacation trying to replace lost or stolen travel documents. Much of this time will be dedicated to simply waiting for copies to arrive at the local embassy or consulate, and some of it can be avoided by a few minutes effort before you leave home.

You should minimally have copies of your passport, driver’s license, and any airline, or bus tickets (or the e-ticket confirmation information), and you might also consider copies of hotel and tour reservations, car rental agreements, your birth certificate and social security card, travelers checks and credit cards.

Modern technology is a great thing. Use your digital camera, or scanner to capture .jpeg images and then copy them to a USB micro drive, CD, or even attach them to an e-mail to yourself. You don’t need to carry a computer with you to take advantage of these copies since the embassy, consulate, hotel, or rental car agency etc. will have one.

You can take advantage of this strategy even if you don’t have access to a computer, scanner, digital camera, or even an e-mail account. There are two options.

- First you can buy a disposable camera that includes a photo CD with the processing (you can also usually request a photo CD with the processing of any film for a few dollars extra). Take pictures of your documents and carry the photo CD in a separate location from the documents themselves while you travel.

-The second option is to take your documents to the local copy shop (Kinko’s etc.) and tell them you would like them scanned onto a compact disk, or USB micro drive. With either option, the people who are working with you to replace your passport or credit card will know how to access the digital versions of the documents.