A vacation should always make you happy, but you might as well get as much as you can out of it. This psychological trick will help you feel even happier when you return from your vacation.

Summer is a great time to get in shape — you can enjoy the non-freezing weather, the longer days and, depending on your line of work, you might have more free time. But then a holiday happens, and your fitness goals take a back seat for a little while. Here’s how to minimise the damage.

Chrome: If you’re a travel junkie — or, better yet, need a little inspiration to plan your next trip — you’re going to love the Chrome extension Random bnb. It’s incredibly simple, but it does a great job of reminding you that there are gorgeous places in the world you can stay at right now and, in some cases, not even spend a small fortune for an incredible experience. You just have to find them, and that’s where Random bnb comes in.

It's time to bust out your calendar and start thumbing through those travel guides. You don’t want to let those precious leave days go to waste just because you got too busy before you organised some much deserved R and R.

Whether a day trip or a transnational odyssey, if you’re bringing along an infant (yours, we hope), packing the dreaded nappy bag is a rite of passage.

Planning trips with friends can be a tremendous and painful undertaking. Depending on your group, you'll either end up with a bunch of people who just want you to figure everything out on your own (so they can complain about it when you do), or a group of highly-opinionated friends who all have their own ideas on what the "perfect" destination and hotel might be, to a point that no one can agree on anything.

The point of a holiday, however long, is to help you de-stress. And sometimes that means doing something instead of lounging around doing nothing. If you have a pile of personal to-dos that are weighing you down, using a leave day to get to those things you never seem to have time for can go a long way for your well-being.

Microsoft just updated its Translator app for iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire devices to support new optimised language packs that are (allegedly) up to 23 per cent better at helping you figure out how to say "where is the bathroom" on your next vacation. They also eat up around half as much space on your phone when you download them -- a wise move, since you don't want to be stuck without the ability to ask for directions if you're lost on your travels.

When you're planning an epic holiday, you want to be sure you're headed somewhere incredible in more ways than one. You want fascinating culture and history, eye-popping beauty, and, of course, incredible food. You want a location that millions of travellers can recommend.

I wish I left my computer on when I was on holiday. But when I came back from a week-long, cross-country trip to Lifehacker HQ late on a Saturday night, I made a fatal error. When I got home, I unpacked my bags, brushed my teeth, and fed my cat. I didn't think to flip on my desktop PC and let it chug through a sea of updates overnight, which would have saved me a ton of time.

Every time I go on holiday, I'm surrounded by people taking phone pics. But I only recently realised that this holiday annoyance could be useful: Before you book a hotel, campground, restaurant table or museum tickets, look up the place on Instagram. Not the place's official account, but all the photos taken at that location. (Just run a search within Instagram and click the result with the map pin icon.)

Travelling really takes it out of you - except when it comes to poop. That can stay with you for days, making your holiday a lot less enjoyable. Here's what causes that constipation frustration, and what you can do to keep that from happening.

Is there anything better than digging your toes into the warm sand on some beautiful, exotic beach? Well there is if that beach is riddled with hookworms that hope to burrow into your feet and make their way to your small intestine. If you do a lot of travelling to warm, humid locales, here's how you can avoid these nasty little things.

Even if you've had a holiday filled with rest and relaxation, the trip coming home is often enough to wipe you out and get you disoriented. The next time you plan a holiday, give yourself an extra day to bounce back and get ready for your return to work.

Life is competition, and it's especially easy to feel like you're losing if your coworkers are always taking bomb-arse holidays while you sit at home using a Netflix account you split with four other people.

I know, you're busy and you have work to do, but you also need to take some time off to recharge those batteries. So, should you plan one big holiday for the year? Or should you sparse out your days for multiple holidays throughout? Quantity can sometimes beat quality.

Hostels are an inexpensive option when you want to stretch your travel budget and don't mind sharing space with strangers (who might even become your friends). The downside is that if you want to hang your clothes or towels up to dry, you're fighting for the same common drying spots with everyone else in the hostel. Toss a couple of small magnets in your bag and you have this problem solved!

Over the past two years, two of my close friends have gone on three one to two-week vacations to Italy. At first glance, their multiple European vacations made it look like they must have suddenly come into piles cash. As it turns out, the key was when they were travelling: during the off-season.

Missing a connecting flight is one of the most stressful and frustrating things that can happen to you when flying. If you want to avoid it, you need to give yourself ample time between flights, and do a little homework before you fly.