These Are The Essential Oils You NEED To Take On Vacation

What are the best essential oils for travel?

If you love your oils like I do, you probably just want to stuff every last one of them in the nooks and crannies of your suitcase!

Buuuut we all know that’s not super practical. Anyone who has traveled at all knows that when it comes to packing for a trip, less is more.

So how do you decide which essential oils to take on vacation? Some of your oils will serve you really well on any trip, while others are probably better left at home.

I consulted some friends in an oils group I’m part of on Facebook and we put our best ideas together. Check out these awesome tips for bringing essential oils on holiday.

Note: though I’m not fussy with my oils brands, for the sake of consistency I’ll be referring to Young Living oils in this article (unless otherwise stated). Check out this Young Living and DoTerra conversion chart for the DoTerra equivalent oils.

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Best Essential Oils For Travel

Essential Oils For Immunity Boosting While Traveling

Thieves. Thieves. Thieves. I’ll say it again, just for giggles. But also because I’m so serious. Thieves.

Travel exposes us to all kinds of new bugs and lurgies, plus we get tired from the busy-ness of it all; two detrimental factors for our immune systems. Protect yourself with Thieves everywhere you go – roll it on your feet before you go to bed, roll it on your throat, under your ears and nose if you begin to feel even the slightest tickle, and slather up with Thieves hand sanitiser while you’re out and about, touching all the germs of the world.

Thieves is hands down one of the best essential oils for travel – if not the actual best. Stock up before you go!

Essential Oils For Sleep While Traveling

Sleep can be a bit awkward when you’re traveling. It always takes me a night or two to get used to a new bed, and the last thing I want is to feel drained and exhausted from lack of sleep when there are so many things to do and sights to see. A friend recently suggested that I make up a sleep roller with cedarwood, chamomile, lavender and a carrier oil such as fractionated coconut oil for my next trip. I can’t wait to try it!

Sleep roller for jetlag

If you’re traveling between time zones, Jet lag can really mess with you for the first day or two of your trip. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Pack yourself a jet lag roller with lavender, cedarwood, frankincense, copaiba, valerian, ylang ylang and your favourite carrier oil.

Essential Oils For Tummy Troubles While Traveling

Whether it’s due to rich, unfamilar food, jet lag ickiness or Bali Belly, travel can wreak havoc on your poor old tummy.

DiGize is a must-have oil for those times! Roll it all over your tummy, or if you can handle the taste, plop a drop on your tongue.

Essential Oils For Skin While Traveling

If you’re traveling in Summer, chances are you’re going to find yourself in the sun a fair bit. So make sure you look after your skin!

Young Living does a sunscreen that I personally haven’t tried yet (it’s sitting in a drawer waiting for our next beach trip), but I have been told it is totally amazing. Plus it’s all-natural and safe for our reefs, so I am totally on board with that.

Any time you do get some sun in, even if you were slathered up with sunscreen, some after-sun skin care won’t go amiss. Create an after-sun spray (I used this one on our recent beach holiday and it worked wonders when my son and I got a little bit of colour. Plus it smells amazeballs). Or create a roller with lavender, tea tree and frankincense.

For bug bites, roll on some lavender or purification for relief.

Essential Oils For Head and Body Aches While Traveling

Travel can be quite physically demanding, with all the extra walking, swimming and perhaps even bike riding you do day-to-day. Even sleeping on an unfamiliar bed with a harder-than-you’re-used-to mattress and a budget pillow, or cramped onto a bus for hours at a time, can bring on the aches and pains. For head aches I love DoTerra Past Tense – it works wonders. For body aches, put together a tension roller with lavender, panaway, peppermint, copaiba, frankincense and carrier oil, and roll it onto the sore spots liberally.

Essential Oils For Hormone Support While Traveling

We should always be taking care of our hormones, always, but travel in particular can do a bit of a number on them. Make sure to bring Progessence Plus or Clary Sage with you and use every morning before heading out and about.

Essential Oils For Hay Fever While Traveling

If hay fever and allergies are likely to affect you while you’re trying to enjoy your holiday, a roller to help you breathe is a must! Create a simple Seasonal Support roller by adding 10 drops each of lemon, lavender and peppermint to a roller bottle, then topping it up with a carrier oil (such as fractionated coconut oil). Add 10 drops of copaiba for an extra boost.

Essential Oils Travel Tips

Now that you know which of your precious oils you’ll be packing, let’s get practical. How will you pack your essential oils for travel? What equipment will you need to bring? How will you get the most out of your oils while on holiday? Read on…

Essential Oils Diffuser Travel Tips

You’re probably not going to be able to squeeze your desert mist diffuser into your suitcase, but luckily there are plenty of compact diffuser options available for you.

USB Diffuser for Travel

A USB diffuser will plug into any USB outlet, making it a great universal item that will work in any country in the world. Plug this pretty little lotus-topped diffuser into your phone charger and leave it running on the intermittent setting overnight. Or for road trips, this LED-lit car diffuser will sit nicely in a cup holder.

Battery-Operated Diffuser for Travel

Alternatively, you can grab a battery-operated diffuser for camping trips, or those times when there’s no outlet you can use.

Just remember, if you do bring a plug-in diffuser or a rechargeable battery pack overseas, pick up an electric outlet converter.

How to use essential oils while travelling without a diffuser

If you decide to leave the diffuser at home, there are still plenty of ways you can use your oils while on holiday.

Lava stone jewellery

Lava stone jewelery is one of my favourite ways to use my oils. The smell of the oil is so crisp and untainted on the stone, and it lasts for several days before needing to be re-oiled. I have a lava stone bracelet that I wear almost every day, purchased from this gorgeous shop, but there are plenty of lava stone jewellery pieces on Etsy too.

Rollers

Rollers are an absolute must when traveling, whether that’s roller top lids or roller blends you create yourself with a carrier oil and pop in a glass roller bottle such as these rainbow beauties.

Perfume

I love using my essential oils as perfume, and it’s super practical when traveling, as it means you can leave your bigger perfume bottles at home – hooray space-saving! There are plenty of oils and blends that work well as a perfume. My absolute favourite is rose (I use DoTerra Rose Touch. Ugh, it is so beautiful). Other popular oils used as perfume include white angelica, Sensation, and DoTerra Whisper. Just pop a roller ball on your oil of choice and voila! Instant perfume.

How to pack essential oils for travel

Essential Oil Travel Kit

There are so many great travel kits out there designed to keep your oils safe and sound in your luggage. This compact little kit contains a portable diffuser and charger, as well as spots to store your top four oils.

For a larger collection of oils, this “There’s an oil for that” portable oils kit is as accurate in its message as it is practical. It holds up to 30 oils and is lined with hard foam, ensuring that your precious bottles don’t jostle about.

Small purse for on-the-go oils

For the handful of oils you need to keep on you at all times (think Thieves hand purifier and Thieves mini surface spray, headache roller, perfume, etc) a small purse is perfect. This pretty gold purse is my purse-onal favourite (groan!), with 10 mesh compartments inside to keep your oils in order. There are lots of options about though. A quick search on Amazon brought up hundreds of options; this pretty grey felt purse caught my eye, as did this striped cotton canvas piece.

Create a signature holiday scent

Smells do some crazy things to our brains. When I travel, I like to try and diffuse a signature scent whenever I’m having down time back in my room. Then when I go home, I will occasionally diffuse that same scent and all those holiday feels come back to me.

For a beach holiday I love Stress Away, Envision and orange. For a cozy Wintery holiday, I would choose a blend with oils like cinnamon bark, clove or cedarwood. Search Pinterest for “Summer holiday essential oils blends” or “Winter holiday essential oils blends” for heaps of inspiration. Just make sure to create the blend before you travel, so you know you’ll bring the oils you need and you’re not trying to create something from a limited travel selection.

There are so many amazing ways to use essential oils while traveling!

So when you’re packing for your next trip, make sure to grab those oils. They really are the perfect travel companion.

If you’re going on a Summer holiday, you might also want to take a quick peek at our article on the essential oils you NEED in the Summer.

And for more information on getting started with essential oils, check out our beginner’s guide to using essential oils.