Gear / A family charging kit for Greece
A family charging kit for Greece
How do you charge a family of devices in one hotel room?
Two wall outlets, two multi-port hubs, and one small AC-outlet charger stacked behind them covers around ten devices. Hotel rooms rarely offer more than two usable outlets, so port count matters more than wattage.
The real constraint in a Greek hotel room is not wattage. It is that there are two usable outlets, one of them is behind the bed, and a family arrives with about ten things that need charging overnight — three phones, a tablet, a laptop, two watches, camera batteries, an action-camera case and the power bank that has to be full again by morning.
Solving that by bringing a power strip is the obvious move and the wrong one, because a strip occupies an outlet to give you back sockets you then need adapters for. The approach that works is two hubs, one per outlet, chosen so that between them they cover every port type you own.
Ours ran like this. Outlet one took a four-port USB-C hub with a removable cord, so a European figure-of-eight lead put it straight into the wall with no adapter — that outlet charged the three phones and the tablet. Outlet two took a six-in-one hub through a Schuko adapter, and its job was the awkward things: the laptop on its high-wattage USB-C port, both watches on USB-A, and then a smaller hundred-watt charger plugged into the hub's own AC outlets to feed the camera battery charger, the action-camera case and the power bank. That comes to eleven ports across two wall sockets, which covers ten devices with one to spare.
The spare matters more than it sounds. Something always turns out to need topping up unexpectedly, and a kit with exactly enough ports is a kit that makes someone wait.
Split the buying by where the device will actually be charged. Overnight-in-the-room devices can use whatever is cheapest and slowest, because they have eight hours. The one charger worth spending on is the small light one that lives in the day bag and handles the laptop on the move — that is the one you will use in an airport, a café and an aeroplane seat, and its weight is the spec that matters, not its wattage.
Cables are the quiet failure point. Buy one more than you think you need, keep them all the same length so a short one never ends up at the far outlet, and check they carry the wattage your laptop actually wants rather than assuming any USB-C cable will do.
Common questions
Even good rooms often have fewer usable outlets than a family needs, and rarely where you want to charge.
Only if it is dual-voltage. Single-voltage strips must not go on a 230V supply.
Rarely. Total ports matter more than peak wattage for a family of phones and tablets.