Travel Expert Katy Nastro’s Product Recommendations

The Expert Edit features interviews with specialists about the products they swear by in their chosen field. For the latest installment, we spoke with travel expert, news personality, and Going spokesperson Katy Nastro about her essentials for holiday season travel.

Katy Nastro might have started her professional career in digital advertising, but freelancing writing and broadcast gigs quickly showed her that her passion lies in storytelling and travel. Today, she’s a spokesperson for Going, which is a flight-saving app that offers users newsletters filled with budget travel tips; a news personality on CNN, “Good Morning America,” ABC, NBC, and more; and an avid passport stamp collector. “I had always enjoyed traveling, but the experience of traveling alone was like trying a new food for the first time. Curious at first, then quickly becoming insatiable,” she tells PS. “If I received any opportunity to travel, the answer always became: hell yes.”

Nastro’s goal moving into 2025 is to reach even more people and help them travel affordably. Like many of us, she, too, considers planning a vacation one of the best forms of practicing self-care. “There have been various studies on how planning a trip can give you the same (if not more) psychological benefits as when you are physically on the trip itself,” she says. “Having a trip to look forward to not only gives me that psychological boost, but helps expand my professional repertoire.”

Nastro’s job is not just to consume travel content and tack on her own experiences, it’s to analyze data that she can share in real time on national TV (such as the little-known fact that the average price of airfare is currently down from its post-pandemic peak in 2022 by about 15 percent).

Of course, memorizing these trends and factoids can feel daunting at times. “I still get wildly nervous and say, ‘Holy sh*t this is my life!'” she says. “Whether I’m being interviewed on a national TV network or chatting to a seatmate on my next trip about how they could’ve paid less for the exact flight with the Going app, I still can’t believe I get to dive into a topic I love, and for a brand I always admired.”

Since the holiday season makes for one of the busiest travel times of the year — and Nastro is a pro — we tapped her to provide 10 essentials she couldn’t live without while on a trip. From beauty products that allow her to feel refreshed to must-have snacks and reliable tech gadgets that also happen to be super giftable, shop her picks and learn exactly how she uses them.