If, like myself, you live somewhere it’s perpetually gloomy, you might be heading to sunnier shores to see out the tail end of 2024. Alternatively, if your family is overseas, you might be planning your journey to reunite with them for the festive season.
No matter why or where you’re going, if you’re headed abroad, you’ll need to ensure you pack a VPN. All of today’s best VPNs have easy-to-use tools that keep your data safe from would-be snoopers – and there are plenty of other good reasons to pick one up before your travels, too.
Keep reading, and I’ll dig into why VPNs have become travel necessities, as well as some of the biggest and best Christmas VPN deals you can bag this year.
1. Save money
Planning a festive trip can get expensive quickly – think travel, accommodation, excursions, and more. To make matters worse, some regions get better deals on all this stuff than others. This means you could pay more for your hotel room just because you live in a certain country.
This is where a VPN comes in handy. Connect to a VPN server in a country elsewhere and the sites, services, and apps you use will think you’re there physically, too, and serve up that region’s specific content – and deal prices.
So, if you’re still booking your trip, it’s well worth investing in one of today’s best cheap VPNs to see if you can bag a bargain and have a little more money to spend on last-minute presents.
2. Browse like you’re at home
Before you pick up a VPN subscription for your vacation, it’s a good idea to ensure it has servers in your home country. This might seem odd, especially if you’re traveling far afield, but ensuring you can spoof your location and appear as though you’re still at home has plenty of benefits. Here are the biggest and best:
- Get around censorship: some countries with oppressive governments, like China, Russia, and Iran, restrict access to certain sites and news outlets. Fortunately, you can use a VPN to get around these blocks by spoofing your location to a country where they’re readily accessible.
- Stress-free banking: if you need to take a peek at your finances overseas, you might end up locked out of your account, as some apps are only compatible with an IP address from your home country. The solution? VPN geo-spoofing power. Just connect to a home-town server and you’re good to go.
- Access to socials: similarly, some social media platforms can flag or block accounts if you access them from a place you usually don’t. Maintain access to your feed, and your friends back home, with a VPN.
3. Broaden your streaming horizons
If you and your friends and family love chatting about the shows and movies on your watch list, you might already know that platforms like Netflix offer different libraries to folks in different countries.
So, even though you’re all paying for a subscription to the same service, you’ll see a different spread of content from one another – which can be disheartening if there’s a series you’d like to share with them that just isn’t available in the country (or vice versa).
Today’s best streaming VPNs have your back, however. Just connect to a server in a country where the show or movie is accessible, reload the platform, and you’ll see all the region-specific content laid out for you. Easy.
Take your VPN with you on holiday and you’ll ensure that you still have access to shows and sports from back home, too, so you don’t have to go without during your festive vacation. It’s the best of both worlds.
4. Safer public Wi-Fi
Whether you’re using public transport, or out and about in cafes, shopping centres, and festive Christmas markets, you might be tempted to connect to a free Wi-Fi connection. They’re handy, but they’re also hotbeds of cybercriminal activity.
This is because they tend to lack encryption. That means any bad actor with the know-how can intercept your data as it travels from your device, in what’s known as a man-in-the-middle attack because there’s no encryption to deter them. Any logins you input, sites you visit, and even financial information could end up in the hands of a crook – and you wouldn’t even realize it.
VPN encryption puts a stop to third-party snooping
There are also “evil twin” attacks, where a bad actor renames a router in the hopes you’ll connect to a bogus hotspot. Usually, they rename these connections something plausible – if the legitimate connection is called “Free_WiFi”, for example, they might name their malicious one “FreeWifi”. If you connect to this fake hotspot, however, the bad actor behind it will be able to monitor your activity and inputs, essentially letting you do all the hard work to unravel your privacy for them.
The good news is that VPN encryption puts a stop to this snooping. As your data leaves your device, it travels through a secure VPN server where it’s encrypted. You’ll also be assigned a new IP address that masks your original one.
Together, these methods mean that, even if a bad actor got their hands on your data, they wouldn’t be able to read it – it’d be a string of useless nonsense – allowing you to continue your on-the-go vacation browsing with better peace of mind.