How to save on travel.If you’ve landed on this article, it’s probably because you want to go on holiday on a budget . Great, you are in the right place! Below we will leave you 10 tips that will help you understand how to save money while traveling .
How to save on travel
Over the years we have often been told how lucky we are to be able to travel and many have asked us how we can afford our travels. We have always tried to explain that we prefer one less pizza, but one more weekend out and about, that we don’t like shopping if we don’t need to buy and that we often opt for the supermarket rather than the restaurant, even during a holiday.
Traveling is not for the rich. Just take some precautions , pay attention to expenses by limiting unnecessary ones and, sometimes, make a few more sacrifices .
In the section of the blog dedicated to saving while traveling , you will find lots of tips, but in the meantime, let’s see the 10 basic tricks for traveling on a budget !
What you will find in this article
- 1 – Be flexible
- 2 – Share the car ride
- 3 – Book in advance
- 4 – Take your time to evaluate the offers
- 5 – Evaluate alternative accommodations to the hotel
- 6 – Not just restaurants! Cook, go to the supermarket and enjoy street food
- 7 – Get around on foot or consider public transport season tickets
- 8 – Take advantage of the Free Tours
- 9 – Find out about free museums and attractions
- 10 – If you travel abroad, find out about roaming costs and currency exchange
1 – Be flexible
The first piece of advice we give you is to be flexible .
This can be tricky with regards to travel dates if you have a “mandated” vacation period, but you can always be with your destination.
Choosing a destination based on airline ticket deals, free on-site events, or simply cost of living will allow you to start saving on your travel destination immediately . This will give you an advantage on the next costs.
For example, by choosing to organize trips to the Balkans for 3 consecutive years , we were able to afford long holidays of about a month each: in fact, in those areas the cost of living is much lower than ours.
The suggestion we give you, therefore, is to browse through the offers of low cost airlines , read travel blogs to discover alternative destinations and evaluate more options to get an idea of the costs of one destination compared to another.
2 – Share the car ride
There are various tricks to save on car trips : some tricks refer to good practices for the safety of the car itself, while others exploit the new ideas of the sharing economy .
An excellent solution, for example, is to share the car journey with other people : whether you are the driver or a passenger, platforms such as BlaBlaCar , for example, can help you find travel companions with whom to share expenses.
Furthermore , if you are a lover of road trips , it will be a great opportunity to make many new friends during your travels from one place to another!
3 – Book in advance
Numerous studies have been carried out on what is the best time to book a flight and on how far in advance the most attractive fares can really be found. Among the most famous ones is the search for Skyscanner .
What we can tell you from our personal experience is that by booking at least 3 months in advance you will certainly find more interesting offers than in the last few weeks before departure.
This mainly affects airfares , but also hotel rates .
Furthermore, as regards the latter, booking in advance also and above all means having a wider choice of possibilities to evaluate . Especially if you’re traveling in high season, in fact, you could risk running into hotels that are already fully booked and you’d be forced to choose among the remaining ones (which are often expensive or a bit shoddy).
Furthermore, international hotel chains often offer advantageous rates for early bookings.
We are not last minute lovers , but many travelers take advantage of offers of this type: however, you will have to be very flexible and have the possibility to leave at any time .
4 – Take your time to evaluate the offers
One of the most important tips on how to save on travel is this: take your time planning your vacation .
Evaluating the different flight offers, hotel prices, museum costs and site visits, but also the cost of living in a given destination is essential for spending little on vacation.
You will need time, but if you organize yourself a few months in advance, you will have no problems. Spend a few hours on the weekend or in the evening and don’t rush. Write down the prices on a piece of paper and then compare them. You will see how much this will help you choose the perfect destination to travel for less than expected.
There are some very interesting platforms that will be able to help you do this job. In fact, there are price comparison sites that will help you find the best airfares for a specific destination or that will be useful for looking for hotels on a limited budget.
For flights we suggest Momondo and for hotels definitely the Booking.com platform .
Some of these platforms are also available as mobile applications: we talked about them in an article dedicated to the best apps to download on your smartphone to save money on the go .
5 – Evaluate alternative accommodations to the hotel
Among the tips on how to save while traveling we must certainly also include the possibility of evaluating alternative accommodations to the hotel .
In fact, a hotel room, despite being a comfortable solution, is not always the best idea. For example, you might consider renting a small apartment or room with a kitchenette – this will help you save on meals.
If you are young, with a family or you like adventure, however, there is always the possibility of camping : in a tent, of course, but also in a bungalow for greater comfort. Even the hostel is always a valid idea: in addition to shared rooms, today many structures have private rooms.
If, on the other hand, you want to meet other people and save substantial amounts of money, Couchsurfing is a useful platform for finding a bed in someone’s home .
The recommendation we give you in any case is to always read the reviews of a place carefully : this will avoid unpleasant surprises. Except in rare cases, in fact, reading the reviews helps to understand if the place we are about to book is really the right one for us.
6 – Not just restaurants! Cook, go to the supermarket and enjoy street food
On vacation, an important item among expenses is certainly that relating to meals. In fact, eating on the go can get quite expensive if you’re not careful.
We always suggest taking a look at the menu before choosing a restaurant : you can do it online, on Tripadvisor for example, or by stopping to read what is generally on display outside the restaurant. That way you won’t have any nasty surprises once you’re seated at the table.
Having lunch and dinner at a restaurant every day , especially during a holiday longer than a couple of days, can become economically unsustainable , especially in some places in the world.
Don’t worry, though, because there are so many alternatives . There is local street food, the possibility of preparing a sandwich or buying something ready-made at the supermarket or you can cook something yourself if you decide to rent a small apartment or a room with a kitchenette. All this will allow you to spend less and not have to eat every day in some fast food chain (which maybe, after all, isn’t even that cheap!).
7 – Get around on foot or consider public transport season tickets
If your next trip is a visit to a big city, you’ll need to factor in the need to travel from one place to another.
Obviously we advise against using taxis , which are generally very expensive (except in very rare cases!) and we suggest that you move on foot as much as possible. In fact, walking , in addition to saving you money, will allow you to enjoy the city in every corner: you can stop, take a detour and take the time necessary to make the most of the day.
When getting around on foot becomes too challenging, then, there is public transport . If you are staying in a capital or large metropolis, we recommend that you inquire in advance, or on the spot at a tourist office, about the various passes. Usually you can choose between the classic tourist cards (bus + attractions) and season tickets for public transport . The latter are perfect if you don’t want to visit many museums, for example.
If you manage to take the time to inform yourself in advance, you will be able to compare the different solutions and really understand which one is right for you.
We talked about this with regard to the Berlin Welcome Card : the tourist card is convenient if you have numerous visits planned, otherwise it could be more useful to buy individual tickets for the attractions and make a subscription to public transport.
To find out all the ways to save on transport while traveling, we refer you to our in-depth article.
8 – Take advantage of the Free Tours
In recent years, more and more free tours have been born to visit cities. Free Tours are fun and low-cost opportunities to discover a place.
We suggest you take a look at the Civitatis Free Tours , a very valid platform with a wide range of free and paid tours. The strong point of Civitatis is that many of the free tours offered are in Italian, which is truly fortunate because generally this type of visit is carried out in English.
We always recommend that you leave a tip at the end of the Free Tour to thank the guide: the amount will obviously be up to you to decide depending on your possibilities and how much you enjoyed the tour.
Another nice opportunity are shared tours. Tour sharing is an idea that has been developing in recent years and which provides guided tours at fixed rates, the price of which for customers varies according to the number of participants: the more you are, the less you pay .
We talked about it with the guys from Guido Tour Sharing , a startup that carries out a beautiful inclusive and accessible tourism project.
9 – Find out about free museums and attractions
In addition to Free Tours, another tip on how to save money on travel is the possibility of visiting museums and other attractions for free .
Does it seem impossible to you? Do some research online and you’ll find that many museums around the world are totally free (in the UK, for example, all state museums are) and that others offer a day or a time slot in which it will be possible to enter for free.
There are many ways to save on tourist attractions while traveling and these are just two of the main ways to do it.
10 – If you travel abroad, find out about roaming costs and currency exchange
Finally, we want to warn you about two of the lesser-known aspects of a trip abroad that could seriously affect your budget: your smartphone and payments.
First of all, remember that calls, messages and use of the internet outside Italy are often subject to very high tariffs. If you want to save money on cell phone use on vacation , the advice is to turn off mobile data and not make calls . Only use WiFi when available.
As far as payments are concerned, however, you must know that changing cash into another currency is an operation subject to costs, which are often unclear. Even paying with credit cards and debit cards involves an additional expense, usually calculated as a percentage by the same banks that issue the card. For this we refer you to a complete in-depth article that we have prepared for you dedicated exclusively to how to save on travel payments .
