Whatever airline you decide to fly with, you should join their Frequent Flyer program, even if you’ll only be flying a couple times in your life. It just makes things a little bit easier.

If you’re flying with Virgin their program is called “Flying Club”, BA is “Executive Club”, Delta is “Sky Miles”, etc.

Once you have a Frequent Flyer account, you can get that airline’s app and add in things like your passport number and emergency contact information, just in case there are any problems.

Print your boarding pass at home. Especially if you’re flying an airline like Spirit or Ryanair that might charge you extra to print your ticket at the airport. You might not be able to do this until 24 hours before your flight, so don’t panic if you can’t do it right now.

You should also definitely add your confirmation number for your flight into the app. For many airlines (but not all of them), this will let your phone work as a boarding pass in case you lose your paper ticket.

Pack your bags!

If this is your first time traveling, you might want to try living out of your bags for a few days before you go. That way, you can discover that you’ve forgotten to pack something important, like socks. Or pants. Not that I would know anything about that. *cough*