Save Big Money Next Time You Travel

I know there’s not many opportunities for travel this month with everything that’s going on with COVID-19, but when things do settle down and you get back to traveling or start traveling for the first time, we’ve got some great travel budget travel tips for your guys by Jesse Clark from Soulful Travel, followed by some tips from our personal budget travel experiences. It you have any great budget travel hacks that haven’t been mentioned, we’d love to hear from you!

If you love to travel but don’t have a lot of extra income to play with, then you need to come up with a travel plan that saves you money. Thankfully, there are a lot of great ways to save on traveling. Try some of these tips the next time you go someplace away from home.

Save When You Book a Car Rental

Enterprise Rent a Car is a car rental company that can save you money. They have a large fleet of rental cars, which makes it more likely that you’ll find a location with prices you can afford no matter where you’re going or what your preferred price range is. Look online for Enterprise discounts or promo codes to stretch your savings further.

Stay at Your Hotel More Than One Night

You’ll often get a better rate at a hotel if you stay longer than one night. If you’re planning a vacation, instead of hitting the normal touristy highlights and moving on, try digging deeper into a single location. You’ll learn more about the area, and you will probably find a hidden gem that you might have otherwise overlooked. Plus, traveling slower is usually more budget-friendly. You can also save on hotel rates (and flights and car rentals) by booking on Priceline.

Be Flexible with Flying Times

If you are traveling on an airplane, you can often find discounted flights if you opt for unpopular flying times, such as early in the morning. When you fly during the night, you can sleep on the plane, thereby avoiding one night’s accommodation cost. If you can be flexible about flying dates, i't’s worth a look to see if there are any cheap flights a few days around the time you plan to leave. Avoid holiday times, and opt for a Tuesday or Wednesday, as those are often the cheapest days of the week to fly.

Eat on a Budget

Everyone has to eat, but it seems like eating while traveling can empty your budget very quickly! Instead of eating your way out of a vacation, try following a few simple budget-friendly guidelines. First, restaurants on tourist streets will cost more than an eatery just a few blocks off the main drive. Second, the most expensive meal at a restaurant is usually dinner. To avoid this, dinner could be a picnic (bring a collapsible cooler that can fit into your suitcase easily) or food bought from a grocery store and prepared with a microwave in your hotel room. You can also buy extra food for lunch and save the leftovers for dinner.

Rent an Apartment Instead of a Hotel Room

If you’re staying in one place for a few days, think about renting an apartment. This is a great low-cost option for families because an apartment is usually a lot bigger than a hotel room, and it has a kitchen area for preparing meals. Consider Airbnb for affordable vacation rentals all over the world.

Pick Activities that Put You Out of Your Comfort Zone

To really transform your trip into the ultimate adventure, why not choose one or two activities that are outside of your comfort zone? Studies show that unfamiliar territory causes your learning skills to kick into high gear. Everyone can benefit from doing something new and exciting; according to New Mobility, travelers with disabilities can try adaptive outdoor activities such as surfing, zip lining, and paragliding. These activities offer a fresh perspective and allow you to throw your cares aside and stay in the moment. You can look for lessons at affordable prices on websites like Groupon or LivingSocial.

Find the Cheap and Free Places to Go

Crowds of tourists all tend to stop at the same places and pay the same big prices. Many destinations have local things to do and see that are much less expensive than the obvious touristy spots. Do a little research and talk to some locals. You’ll be surprised what kind of adventure is waiting for you!

Traveling should be more about what you do and see, and less about how much money you need to spend. So take it easy on your wallet! Travel slowly, find the best deals possible, and enjoy yourself. You’ll be a little more cultured and glad that you read these tips when you come home.

- Jesse Clark

Justin and I have often been asked how we have enough money to travel, with the assumption being that travel, especially international travel, is very expensive. A co-worker recently told me about a good deal he had gotten on a trip to Costa Rica - just $6,000 a person for an all inclusive week long experience. I couldn’t help but think of the multiple international trips Justin and I could take for that amount of money! Here are some of our personal budget tips that have allowed us to travel internationally time and time again without breaking the bank.

Let Ticket Price Guide Your Destination

This is probably our most important tip if you want to travel internationally, as your ticket is often the most expensive part of the trip. As nice as it is to pick a specific travel location, we usually go wherever we find the cheapest tickets. Our preferred method of finding those tickets is currently via Pomelo Travel, a company that sends out cheap travel alerts and tells you how to book the tickets yourself thus avoiding travel agent fees. Our most recent amazing ticket deals from Pomelo Travel were round trip tickets to Indonesia for $400 from Los Angeles, and round trip tickets to Spain for $287 from Seattle. The thing about letting ticket price guide your destination is that once you get to a general region, you can often travel very cheaply to other nearby countries and therefore still get to wherever you really wanted to go. For example, I really wanted to visit Portugal, but that wasn’t where the cheapest flights were - they were to Spain. So, we bought the tickets to Spain and did some traveling there, then flew for $54 a person on a budget airline to Portugal, which ended up being much cheaper than if we’d flown directly to Portugal. We’ve done the same thing many times in Asia and have flown for as cheap as $12 per person from Singapore to Malaysia.

Headed to Indonesia for $400 round trip with just one layover in Beijing

Let In Country Costs Guide Your Destination

A second really important thing to consider is how much things like food, accommodations, and activities will cost in the country you want to travel to. For example, when comparing a $300 round trip ticket to Sweden versus a $400 round trip ticket to Vietnam, we’d pick Vietnam knowing that in country travel costs were going to be significantly less in Vietnam compared to Sweden. If you’ve never traveled to a developing country before but are serious about budget travel, you should definitely consider it because the savings can be huge! For example, when Justin and I traveled to Nepal we averaged $5 per night for accommodations and $1.50 per meal! The other benefit of traveling to a developing country is that you can often splurge on really fantastic food and accommodations without breaking your budget. For example, when we traveled to Cambodia we stayed in an amazing boutique hotel for $40 per night in a gorgeous room where we were treated to incredible breakfasts of freshly squeezed fruit juice and pastries, had our laundry done for free, and were in an ideal location to top things off. Another thing to keep in mind is what’s happening with exchange rates in the countries you want to travel to. Going somewhere where your currency is stronger than the local currency or at least at a time when it’s doing better can save you a lot.

Get Creative With Lodging

Hotels are not the only lodging option. There are many other choices, most of which are actually cheaper than hotels. As Jesse mentioned, apartments can be a good budget option, especially in places like Europe where they are readily available to rent for single night stays same as a hotel. Another budget option we’ve utilized many times is hostels. While staying in a hostel may immediately bring to mind an image of a bunch of rowdy “youths” crammed together in a single room in bunkbeds, the truth is that many hostels have become more sophisticated these days and can save you a lot of money in places where accommodations tend to be pricey. Most hostels offer private rooms if you can’t handle the thought of staying with strangers, or dorm rooms with less beds (4-6 is common) to keep things less crowded/noisy. The main thing I look for in hostels is the ability to have privacy in your bunk, usually via curtains. When I book hostels for Justin and I, I make the booking for two beds in a co-ed dorm so that we can stay together and so far we have always been assigned the same bunkbed. If you’re up for booking a hostel, one of my favorite places to research hostels and read ratings like noise level and cleanliness is Hostel World.

One of the lovely hostels we stayed at in Spain - note the curtains for privacy

Walk Or Take Public Transit

Sometimes there’s no way around it - you need a car. Even with discounts though, car rentals can get expensive, so whenever possible, we try to book accommodations in a central location within walking distance of various sites and public transit. I also always try to pick accommodations that have free airport pickup or that can be reached from the airport via public transit in order to avoid paying for taxis, which is also very expensive.

Carry-On Luggage Only

This may not be an obvious budget travel move, but we’ve saved a lot of money by traveling with carry-on luggage only. While most airlines allow you a free check in for international travel, if you’re planning on traveling onwards with a budget carrier (like fly around Europe on an airline like Ryanair), they charge an arm and a leg for checked luggage. The other way going carry-on only can save you money is by allowing you to take public transit and stay at places like hostels. If you’re hauling around a bunch of suitcases it’s unlikely you’ll brave something like the metro and will probably find that hostels don’t have enough locked storage space for your bags. Don’t think you can travel internationally with just carry-on luggage? Check out our carry-on only internationally travel packing guide.

Carry-on only! Everything I took for our trip to Spain & Portugal

Another Food Hack

Jesse already shared some great ideas about how to save money on food when traveling. Here’s another idea. Many hotels in places like Asia have buffet breakfasts included in the room fee. If we stay at a place like that, we eat as much as we can for breakfast so we can skip lunch, then make dinner in our room - usually instant noodles. Doing that has allowed us to take trips where we only spend a handful of dollars on food the entire time.