If you’ve ever unpacked hundreds of miles from home and discovered you left something critical – such as prescription meds or dress shoes – at home, you may be as thrilled as I was to discover Pack Point, a packing list app.
And, if you’re like me and you tend to over-pack, Pack Point can help you with suitcase discipline.
The basic version is free, and the “premium” version, which allows you to customize lists, costs just $2.99 per year.
Pack Point is super easy to use. The first time you open app, the only personal information it asks for is your gender, so it knows whether to indicate dresses or ties. There is no "non-binary" or "other" option.
Then, for each trip you are planning, you fill in your destination, the dates you will be there, whether it's business or leisure and whether or not you will do laundry. (If it's both business and pleasure, there are options to add that later on). Pack Point checks the typical weather for your destination and dates, then generates a packing list.
In addition to an “essentials” list of items such as socks and toothbrushes, it has modules
you can add to indicate activities such a beach trip or a fancy dinner. In the premium version you can create your own modules. I’ve added one, for instance, for birdwatching, to make sure I pack my monocular and a reference guide for the region I'm going to. The premium version also allows you to modify the existing modules, adding particular items that aren’t on the generic list.
Pack Point is geared to individuals, not families. However, if you want to generate a list for your spouse or child, you can do so on the premium app by creating a custom module for them.
As you pack, you simply check off the items you’ve put in your suitcase, and they disappear from
the list. If there are items on the list that you don’t plan to take, you can hide them with a simple swipe to the left. (The one thing I find a bit annoying is that the app repeats items that are in more than one module, so I usually end up hiding duplicates. I could fix this problem by deleting common duplicates from the custom modules, but haven’t taken the time to do so.)
I’ve been using this app for at least four years and – other than once packing an empty container of deodorant – haven’t committed a serious packing foul since then. Pack Point takes the anxiety out of packing.