When I travel I find my iPad to be completely adequate. If you write a lot, you may find a keyboard more useful and efficient. Are there any functions you need a laptop for? I keep full resolution photos on my laptop, so if I was to intend to edit and organize my photos while travelling, they are in full resolution versions resident on my laptop but would need to be downloaded onto my iPad and consequently use a lot of (possibly very limited) bandwidth, which is very inconvenient.
So if at the end of a travel day I wish to review and edit my photos taken that day I’ll use Airdrop to send my Iphone photos over to my iPad where can edit them and delete the bad ones etc. The hazard there is that the iPad, when on Wi-FI, wants to dump them into the cloud for my laptop and only keep low res versions on the ipad. (Settings - Photos - Optimize IPad Storage).