10 Helpful Tips to Stretch Your Travel Budget
Updated: Aug 4, 2022
The advent of the internet made holidaying simultaneously more complicated & confusing and more accessible & affordable. If you know how to play your cards right, the internet can be an incredibly useful tool to save yourself time and money when planning a trip. My top 10 tips below:
Flights and Trains
1. Google Flights
Always start here. If you don’t know exactly where you want to go you can search a region and find affordable flights at the times that work for you. This was an incredible help for us when trying to find cheap flights when exploring Europe
While Google flights will help you find an ideal destination, sometimes you’ll need to find the best city from which to travel from. This is especially true when planning multi-destination trips or when trying to figure out the best way to return home when travelling in peak time. In these cases use this Kiwi link. Just click the reverse search button (in green) so you search from a larger area to one destination
3. Consider stopovers
Laying over somewhere on your way to your final destination can both save you money and help you explore a new place. In order to make this work, you need to stopover for at least 20 hours (short layovers are just annoying). Use Google Flight’s filter for stopover length, and you can use https://airwander.com/ to cross check this. You’ll often find stopovers in airline hubs like Milan, Amsterdam and Frankfurt
Trainline is the easiest way to search for tickets. Before you book, check prices on the operators’ website because these can sometimes be significantly cheaper (and they often don’t require booking fees). Search here
Accommodation
5. Google hotels
As with flights, start here to see your options and get an initial sense of the area you’re visiting including the hotel locations, prices by location and prices by hotel class. Narrow down your target list but go through the below in order before booking
I’ve found that Snaptravel usually offers some of the lowest prices in the market. On top of this, after you complete a stay you receive a percentage of the cost back as credits which you can use towards your next stay. Start your search here
7. Hotwire
Hotwire’s ‘hot deals’ offer you secret hotels for very good prices (in some cases). I’ve found Hotwire to be especially helpful in destinations where accommodation is an important part of your experience (e.g. beach & resort destinations). There are ways to backsolve the identity of the mystery hotel because Hotwire often shows you ‘three hotels you could end up in’. If you open three tabs of the same link, just find the hotel that shows up across all three. When Hotwire doesn’t show you the shortlist of three hotels, you can use things like image searches or trip advisor reviews to help. Have a look here for more (https://www.frommers.com/tips/hotel-news/how-to-figure-out-the-name-of-that-anonymous-hotwire-hotel)
8. Expedia and Booking.com smartphone member prices
You can find some great deals here, but only if you sign up as a member. In addition, both websites offer ‘mobile only deals’ which include discounted prices, bonus points or both. Search here for Expedia and here for Booking.com
9. Hotel websites
You can often get between 5 - 10% off if you sign-up to a hotel’s loyalty program. In some instances, prices on hotel websites are hiked up but in many instances they are the same as on other aggregators. Sometimes booking through the website directly can also get you freebies like water and even breakfast.
10. Other aggregators
If none of the above three sites return anything attractive, return to Google hotels, select your target hotel and you’ll be able to see the lowest publicly available prices. The reason we don’t do this in the first instance is that all the tricks above aren’t necessarily available to Google (e.g. Google hotels will show you the typical Expedia price but not the “Expedia member mobile-only” price) so you risk missing out on great bargains if you do this.
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