Sara gave me a wonderful idea to talk about budget travelling on the cheap, considering that most of our trips end up being only around $1000 per person, sometimes $1500 for 2 cities, per person.
And since we each pay our own way 50/50, it’s quite cheap for us to travel.
So… without further ado, here are a couple of our basic tips.
Be Flexible.
Easier said than done, really. But much easier when you are one half of a freelancing couple! BF and I get lots of free time (extended in months at a time) because we are on and off contracts.
We treat it more as a relaxing time, rather than stress-out time, and when BOTH of us are off contract, we get the urge to travel.
Just this year alone (2009), we went to Dallas, NYC, Boston, Chicago (Part 1 & 2 and the shopping) and we are now planning on visiting Europe and Asia.
While many of you don’t have the breadth of time that we do, you can at least be flexible with your travelling.
Don’t always think that vacations HAVE to be in the summer. That’s when travel agents jack up the prices.
We have found that the best months to travel are: April, May, October, November.
These are all slow periods and slow times and being flexible, means you can score some pretty great deals on flights just because travel agents are trying to drum up business for those periods.
The worst months to travel? March, June, July, August, December.
These are the super jammed periods when people go back and forth to visit family for the holidays or for New Year’s Eve, or when kids and college students are free in the summer from school or if they’re going on Spring Break.
Be Patient.
Good deals don’t come along every single day.
Keep an eye out for them.
If you are planning on visiting a SPECIFIC destination, start keeping track of the prices, so that you will know if something is a great deal or not.
If it normally costs $1500 for a flight to Paris, when you see it on for $900, you’re going to be able to be flexible and jump on it.
It’s how we saw the deals for Chicago and Boston, and we jumped on getting a ticket because it was so cheap, and one of the few places we hadn’t seen in the States yet.
Pick off beat or unconventional ways to travel
This is part of being flexible. Unless you really have your heart set on NYC to go shopping, think about other major cities, like Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, Houston … there are more places to visit in the States than San Francisco or NYC.
I know, shocking!
And the hotels and cost of touring there is a pretty good deal, because it isn’t a city that is filled with tourists all the time like NYC.
If you are planning on visiting Europe, get the cheapest flight there to the a sort-of centrally located area, and then figure out how to take the train (apparently very comfortable) or visit other countries once you’ve landed.
For example, we managed to get a dirt cheap flight to Boston, but then we wanted to make the most of it and head to another city in the area, so we took the Greyhound for 2 hours to get to a smaller airport to fly to Chicago.
It ended up costing around $200 or so for the second flight to Chicago instead of whatever the normal price was.
We were willing to go by train or bus for a short distance, and fly the rest, instead of only being set on using planes the entire time.
Take the public transit.
We never. Ever. EVER take cabs any more.
We find the cabs here to not only make BF’s back hurt (the seats are too old and much too soft to sit in for him), but also that they have a special knack of making me nauseous within a couple of seconds.
So our new philosophy is to go cab-less, which has turned out for the best.
To get from the airport to our hotel, there’s usually always a transit system available, so we research that ahead of time.
We also calculate the price difference between taking the transit ad hoc, or buying week long passes if the city is huge like in NYC, but in Boston for example, we just walked everywhere.
We also don’t pack much, so a little backpack or a carry-on is the most we have to lug around on the transit. We don’t go crazy.
Only in places with really steep hills, do we consider renting a car. But renting a car or taking cabs each time you want to get somewhere, can get expensive.
Food is food is food.
We’re big foodies. I mean, HUGE. Our food bill was originally $600 – $1000 a month for the household, and that’s with cooking organic, sort of gourmet-ish meals. (No worries it is now at $400 a month).
But, the point is that we’re not willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money for gourmet meals at restaurants every night.
And generic restaurants in the States like Applebee’s don’t appeal to us. Too much fat, the quality is usually worse than what we can buy in a grocery store (they sometimes use cheap ingredients) and the price does not justify the end result for us.
I’m not knocking it, or saying it’s a stupid idea… but it’s just not what we’re into spending the majority of our money on.
I think I may give something like Chipotle or Red Robin a try just to see what the fuss is all about, but I wouldn’t go there daily to eat while on vacation.
To us, food tastes good if it’s prepared correctly, whether it costs $500 for a meal, $50 for a chain restaurant or $20 in a hotel room.
And in the end, I cannot re-taste that $500 meal in my belly, so I might as well make an excellent meal for $20 and enjoy it without stabbing my wallet.
We cook in the hotel rooms, or buy pre-made foods and eat in grocery stores. (We even have a little plastic traveling rice cooker that cooks rice perfectly in a microwave oven!)
It may sound like a silly idea, because if you go on vacation, the whole point is to SPEND on local gourmet restaurants or food.. but we just don’t put a high value on going out to eat. Period.
We also try a bit of the food there as a “just to say we had it” kind of deal, but we don’t eat it every day.
So when we visit a city or travel, we hit up the best grocery stores first. BF loves doing research on this, and we normally have a map of all the Whole Foods in the area (LOL!!) when we go to the States.
Once we get there, we are like kids in a candy store. The food is fresh, quality is superb (most of the time) and the pre-made meals are amazing compared to what we’d get back in our home city.
You will not believe how enchanted we are with Whole Foods, because they sell things we can’t find back home without paying for it with an arm and a leg.
I’m more of the type to spend money on trying new foods like the gourmet pizzas at Whole Foods, organic juices I cannot find in Canada, or little treats like that.
BF is more conservative than that. The guy goes out and buys a whole roasted chicken, some heirloom tomatoes (cannot find them here for a decent price), some fleur de sel (or we bring our own) and has a meal with that.
To me, I’d rather taste the local flavours on a budget, but he’s more into cheap and tasty, even if it isn’t in the style of the local food there, so I always end up spending double what he does on food, but that’s my concession, as BF is way more of a tightwad than I am.
But if the local flavours are mostly Applebee’s or generic dishes without real flair, then we don’t bother. We just hit up Whole Foods.
Oh, and don’t forget drinks. We end up buying drinks on the go, and paying $2 each time, and if we drink a lot while walking, it adds up in the end.
Pick a couple of $$ sites to visit.
I find a lot of vacationers try to cram everything they can into one trip and that’s just crazy, because you can’t really spend time enjoying each attraction to the fullest without running to the next and spending time like a true local.
They say: LET’S GO NUTS!
How many times are we going to come back to [insert city here]?
Once in a lifetime, bla bla bla…
Throwing caution to the wind like that can be a dangerous thing… especially with a family of 4 or 5. You have to pay 4 or 5 times what you’d pay normally to see something.
So if seeing a sight is $20 per person, that’s $20 x 5 = $100, just for ONE touristy thing.
We tend to research on all of the FREE sights available in the city, and hit them all… and then we each pick 2 major attractions that cost money to visit.
BF likes the attractions where it brings him up above the city like the Sears Tower, CN Tower (no for real, we paid for that last month *groan*), Top of the Rock in NYC .. you get the idea.
I prefer attractions like flowers or special museums, especially the aquariums. It’s my true love!
So between the both of us, we pick a couple of things to do, we work out a budget and spend about $75 – $100 just on sightseeing each, but that’s the MAXIMUM.
And if an attraction is above $35, we both have to really be on board to see it, or else we can sort of discourage or veto each other if we don’t see the appeal that the other does.
Generally speaking, we’re game for anything, so we tend to go to those anyway.
What we DON’T go to, are experience attractions, like baseball games, musicals (BF really hates them), or anything like that.
Personally, I love going to the theatre, but we’re in this trip as a couple, so I cannot realistically ask him to spend money on something he hates going to, unless I am willing to pay for the both of us, which can get expensive.
Try and act like a local tourist.
Sounds weird, but we generally try and walk around all parts of the city A LOT. We pretend we’re locals, and we imagine what locals would do on a regular weekend.
To us, that’s the whole point of being in a new city — to see what we cannot find in our home city, be it the sight of the mountain from the top, walking along the piers for a new experience, or being in a gorgeously landscaped park.
Go to the park? Check. (Always free!)
Visit downtown and absorb the atmosphere? Check.
Not go crazy and try to spend as much as possible? Check.
Shop the sales a bit? Half Check. All for me. I love window shopping and BF just tags along.
We like to spend time just absorbing the energy of the city (which is why we loved Chicago so much), and taking pictures with our cameras.
The only 3 websites we frequent
- Hotels.com (this is the best site for hotels. They have everything.)
- Airport websites (they show all the airlines and companies that stop at that airport)
- Direct Airline pages (once you get the list of airlines that stop at the airport, go to the airlines)
Getting the perfect website to get travel deals on is not the biggest money saver of a vacation.
You want to go to Paris? You have to pay the same price as anyone else. There’s no choice there other than which airline you pick. They’re all charging around the same price, and no website like Expedia or Travelocity will help you get a better deal on a flight.
Where you can save money, is in the cost of the hotel, the attractions you choose, the food, the shopping and the transportation. That’s it. It’s always the variable stuff that gets you.
Really, everything but the flight.
We’re just efficient searchers and we don’t like to waste time on sites like Expedia or Travelocity.
They charge you a fee each time you use their site to book something, and you can just go directly to the airlines themselves and probably get a better deal.
Don’t be fooled by package deals. Split out what you’re getting and do the math that way, before assuming it’s a good deal just because it says: PACKAGE DEAL.
There is no one special site. They all tend to be in the same range of prices throughout the web, so there’s no point in spending more than an hour or two, researching prices.
Where it gets interesting, is if you find a city that has a good deal on a ticket there and back, and you research into hotels in the area.
If Expedia or any of those sites are giving a deal on a hotel, don’t book right away with Expedia. The trick is to go to that hotel’s website and check the prices directly on their site.
It’s how we scored The Hard Rock Hotel in Chicago for $69.50 a night. Just by seeing the super low price on an aggregate budget website, and going directly to the hotels instead.
The motel or hotel chains we prefer are: Marriott Residence Inn (they normally have an ensuite kitchen or at least a microwave and a fridge), Motel 6 and other 3 star or higher establishments.
Sometimes, just Googling the place you want to visit with the word “travel”, yields some great results.
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