Maps, emergency communication, personal communication, photos, information lookup, and many other reasons. I'm not saying you need it, but these are reasons you'd take it for convenient traveling.

You can always compartmentalize and not connect your work accounts to your private phone. It's not crazy not to have a phone with you, but it's definitely a statistical anomaly.

Because, roaming agreement with Europe can be so expensive and your phone so old (thus not supporting the dual band) you prefer to buy a cheap local one?

Once again thrifty persons are common, and modest people can prefer to travel once a year for the price of a smartphone TCO.

I'd still take mine to organise a lift to my car after landing. I didn't say you must take one. Just that it's convenient for many reasons and most people do it.

I live in the suburbs. Used to not being able to come back because of a delay at the airport, trains incidents, and no one available to lift you.

Thus, staying in a gloomy airport or train station being jet lagged and having hallucination because of sleep depravation while waiting for the first train, and urging to not sleep to be sure I will neither miss my stop nor get robbed while sleeping.

Once you experienced your fears and survived them, you lose them and gain confidence.

I now kind of enjoy this «voyage au bout de la Nuit».

I travelled on a two week holiday recently, and pretty much all of our itinerary was stored on my phone. Boarding passes for flights, transport info, airbnb/hotel booking info. We also had local maps, and Tripadvisor info preloaded for the area.

I don't know why this is downvoted. This is standard practice by many people who travel, especially if traveling with the whole family.

Add I don't know why this is down-voted either.

When I go on holiday, I don't want business calls and emails following me. If I need to make a call, I'm sure I'll find a way to make it.

You don't need to have your work communication on your private phone. If you want to do that, you can still temporarily disconnect them before leaving for holidays...

That statement makes a few assumptions. I don't have more than one device for this stuff. My business and clients all emergency numbers (which would include that person number if it existed). I also have a painfully small amount of self control and have in the past nipped off to check my emails for "10 minutes".

A holiday can be a good opportunity to disconnect completely.

They go to a foreign country voluntarily with no comms devices whatsoever?

I didn't the last time I went on vacation in Europe. My cell phone carrier also is atrocious and charges usurious international roaming charges, so that was a contributing factor, but it's really nice to unplug and go off the grid on vacation. You just have to do things the old fashioned way - print out your reservations and itinerary, get some maps.

> My cell phone carrier also is atrocious and charges usurious international roaming charges

I sometimes get temporary SIM's when abroad, for this reason.

I enjoy that, but it's nice to have GPS for emergencies.

Sure. Everybody did for all of history until about twenty years ago. Many still do. It's really not that crazy.

20? I recall going to Europe for two weeks in 2006 (BMW European Delivery). Didn't bother bringing my dumb-phone. Just had a camera. I drove 2000 miles around Western Europe, 6 countries, had zero hotel reservations before I left, and had no problems whatsoever. This was in April so just popping into a hotel and finding a vacancy was not a problem.