Best watches for travel

It synchronizes to radio time signals across 43 cities, keeps a perpetual calendar, holds a second time zone and runs on light — so it is correct on arrival without you touching it, in any of the places it covers. Behind anti-reflective sapphire and rated to 200m.

45mm is the largest watch on this site, and the U680 is a module rather than a movement: replaced while parts exist, and finished when they do not. Buy it as a superb twenty-year instrument rather than an heirloom.

It sets itself by radio, runs on light and is rated to 200m behind sapphire — and it is a module, not a movement. When the module stops being made, the watch is finished, however good the case still is.

Seiko put a genuine GMT caliber into an affordable case with the SSK line, and the 4R34 is a Seiko caliber with the same published overhaul price as the rest of the 4R family — $176, which is the cheapest mechanical GMT to keep running that we know of.

42.5mm across, 46mm lug-to-lug, 13.6mm thick, 100m, on a 22mm strap. Hardlex is the compromise. Note that the second zone is set via the 24-hour hand, so this is a caller rather than a flyer GMT.

The 4R34 is a caller GMT — the 24-hour hand is the one you set, not the local hand — but it is a real mechanical second time zone on a movement whose service price Seiko publishes.

The field-cased SSK023 is the version of this watch that fits a normal wrist: 39.4mm across against 42.5mm, on a 20mm strap rather than 22mm, with everything else unchanged including the 100m rating and the $176 overhaul.

If you have ever found GMT watches too large — and most of them are — start here rather than with the more famous SSK001.

Identical movement and identical service cost to the SSK001 in a case 3mm narrower. If the 42.5mm SSK001 is too much watch, this is the same purchase in a size more wrists can carry.

A second time zone, a slide rule for currency and distance conversion, 200m of water resistance and a five-year warranty, running on light. For a trip involving water, this is the most robust proposition here after the Skyhawk.

The mineral crystal on a 42mm dial is the weakness, and it is the specification most exposed to airport luggage. Citizen does not publish a lug width for this reference either.

200m, five years of cover and a second time zone from a watch you never wind, service or open. The mineral crystal is the cost, and on a 42mm slab of glass it is a cost you will eventually see.