7 Must Have Business Travel Essentials

Travel with these gadgets and accessories to help ensure your business trip runs smoothly.
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Making sure that you have everything to hand when you’re back at base in the office can be hard enough, so when you’re traveling for work it’s an additional hassle. Pack these seven essential pieces of kit, however, and you should have all you require for a successful business trip. 

1
A portable battery pack
sirastock via Getty Images
So that your tablet, e-reader, phone or computer never run out of juice, keep a fully charged external battery charger pack on you at all times. The smallest of these are the size of a lipstick, the largest are similar in proportion to a paperback book. The more expensive models hold more charge, can charge multiple devices simultaneously and charge quicker than their cheaper trickle-charge counterparts. Before buying a device check its mAh (milliampere hours) rating. The higher the rating the more charge it can store. The ElectriQ Universal Laptop and USB Power Bank has a vast 30,000mAh capacity, which will charge most laptops two to three times over; and it is compatible with most devices, including cameras, tablets and phones. £59.97, Laptops Direct.
2
A global travel adapter with USB ports
KINDEN
Its time to upgrade your travel adaptor to one that includes USB ports. This will cut down on the number of separate adaptors you need to travel with and lighten the load. The KINDEN Universal AC International Armour travel power charger wall adapter plug covers over 150 countries with standard US, UK, EU and AU plugs. It has two 25A USB outputs and also comes with a car charger.
3
A Smart suitcase
Bluesmart
Not only do you want your suitcase to look smart, you want it to act smart too. The Bluesmart Black Edition suitcase does just that. Hidden within its sleek water resistant shell is a global location tracker powered by GPS and a 3G SIM card, so you can quickly hunt it down should it go missing. You can also lock it remotely via an app and should it leave your side it will automatically lock itself. Plus, it features a USB charger with a 10,000 mAh capacity, which should charge your phone up to six times before it needs recharging itself; and its built-in weight sensors lets it weight itself and tell you if it’s within airline weight limits. A variety of storage compartments lie within too. $599, Bluesmart
4
A real-time translation earpiece
Waverly Labs
If you regularly travel abroad and frequently require the services of a translator, the soon to launch smart earpiece, Pilot, could you save you a great deal of time and money. This discreet piece of wearable technology will help you to break down language barriers by automatically translating what you are hearing in a foreign tongue. A mobile app version is launching this Autumn, the Pilot earpiece will be available next Spring. Using advanced speech recognition technology and machine translation it will translate to and from English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. It will need internet access to work and costs around $299. The earpiece is available to preorder here
5
Premium quality headphones
Sennheiser
There are times when you are travelling when you need to shut out the background humdrum and concentrate on a vital business phone call, focus on a podcast, relax with your own personal music playlist or simply enjoy a movie with cinema quality sound. The Sennheiser PXC 550 Wireless headphones features noise cancelling technology NoiseGard™ to shut out background noise and up to 30 hours of battery life. £329.99, Sennheiser
6
A portable keyboard
Logitech
Turn your phone or tablet into a mini laptop with a light and portable keyboard. The Logitech Keys to Go Keyboard is compatible with all iOS devices including iPad and iPhone and with devices running Android 4.1 and higher or Windows® 7 and higher. The light and compact wireless keyboard makes it so much easier to type long emails on a small screen; and will make it simpler to complete longer pieces of work on your mobile device too. £54.99, Logitech
7
A portable external harddrive
amnachphoto via Getty Images
If you need to boost the memory on your laptop or want keep your luggage weight limit down by accessing all your documents from your tablet or phone, take an external hard drive along with you. The latest numbers are almost as slim as a CD case. The Seagate BUP Slim Portable 2TB hard drive is interchangeable between Mac and PC and holds 2TB (2 trillion bytes) of storage. £69.99, Argos.