I have
found that most people I talk to want to travel, but they believe it is too
expensive. I used to think so too (me, a broke college student, travel?). But
in the past few years I have found some amazing ways to save money and bring
travel costs down immensely. Traveling cheaply means that you won’t have the
luxury resort experience. But that’s usually not a genuine experience of a
country or place or its true culture anyway. For those of us who can enjoy a
more down-to-earth itinerary that focuses on the sights and the people of the
places we visit, here are a few tips to cut down on costs when you travel for
pleasure or for study.
1. Don’t stay in
hotels.
Many of those looking for ways to travel on a budget will come across
the concept of a hostel fairly quickly. Especially in Europe, this type of
lodging has become more and more popular in recent years. I have stayed in
several and though they are not always the most comfortable arrangements, they
are cheap and common, meaning that you can find one in most major cities within
the U.S. and Europe. The site I use most often, Hostel World, has ratings based on guest feedback and
lists all the facilities, prices, property descriptions, map directions, and
everything else you would need to know. As I prepared for my trips to London and
Paris in September and December respectively, I was easily able to filter
results in both these cities by the facilities that were most important to me:
24 hour reception so I don’t have to worry about my plane or bus arriving after
check-in time; free breakfast (I don’t eat heavily and the hostel breakfasts
are perfect for me); and proximity to popular areas in the city. For me,
Victoria Coach Station in London was a place I wanted to be close to, and I got
a hostel five minutes away.
For three nights in both cities, my hostel charges were just under $200
dollars, and I did not even choose the cheapest dorm rooms. Had I tried to get
a hotel for one person, even a cheap one, I would have easily paid $150-$200
for each city.
Hostels aren’t for everyone, of course. Only a few are family friendly,
as most cater towards young people of university age or slightly older. For travellers
who have trouble sleeping in the same room as strangers, hostels would be a
poor fit, though they sometimes offer private rooms at twice or triple the
price of dorm rooms. For students, though, hostels are great places to make
friends, park your bags, and save your money. I am a huge fan of The Hostel Girl's blog, which provides in-depth hostel reviews, travel tips for female travelers
(and travelers in general), and much more useful information.
2.Don’t buy the
first ticket you find.
I applied for a scholarship to study abroad in the fall, and the
application asked me for an estimate on the standard airfare from my nearest
airport to my host country. In a quick search of Expedia and similar booking
sites, I came up with a ticket from Washington, DC to Rabat, Morocco for around
$1500.
For anybody just briefly researching a trip to see if they might be able
to afford it, or how much they would have to save, numbers like that can be
daunting. However, the first ticket you find, even if you look early, might be
twice as much as you really need to pay. The secret to finding good tickets is knowing
how to play the system. The first thing you need to know is where to look.
For some time, I used the site Flight Hub to search for tickets, and it
worked well for me. (I was able to find tickets from DC to Sacramento for around
$350, about $200 less than the average price.) Not long ago, however, a fellow
traveler taught me about the site Skyscanner. Both these sights do
essentially the same thing; they scan a host of other booking sites and find
the cheapest flights offered for your days and destinations. I’m not sure what
magic Skyscanner’s program possesses, but it’s price findings are the cheapest
of any other site I have found. Using it requires some finagling, outlined
further in following tips. Just make sure to always search these sights using
incognito mode on your computer, so the site can’t save your cookies (and keep
feeding you higher prices).
A similar site for cheap bus tickets is Busbud. Here, I found
tickets from Paris to London for around $18 plus a small booking fee. Wanderu
also has good prices on bus and train routes, particularly in the US. The
Washington, DC to New York City route is a well-traveled one, and cost me
around $15 round-trip. In other words, it was cheaper than the gas would be for
me to drive! Taking advantage of these more popular routes is my third tip:
3. Utilize world
hub cities.
Knowing which cities are the most popular destinations for business and
leisure travellers can help you lower the cost of airfare (or trainfare or
busfare). With more planes flying into a city, travellers have more options and
the price of airfare is forced to stay lower. Airfare to cities like London,
Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, NYC, or Madrid is often much cheaper than airfare to
Fargo, ND or any other less-popular city. So if you find one ticket price to your
destination on Skyscanner or Flight Hub, look at the cities around it. See if any
of them could be hub cities and if flying into those cities would lower the
price of the ticket. (You must also take into consideration the cost of
transport from that city to your destination: more on that in a moment).
For example: the price on Skyscanner for a ticket to Rabat was around $1,200.
That’s less than the first price I found, but I still believed I could find it
cheaper. Since I know that Rabat isn’t a common destination for Americans,
especially Americans flying out of DC, I figured that it might be cheaper for
me to cross the Atlantic on a different, more popular route. I checked flights
to London and Paris and found that these were each about $650 roundtrip: almost
half the price! Of course, that left me with finding a flight from London or
Paris to Rabat, but since Morocco is a much more popular destination for
Europeans, these tickets were around $300 roundtrip. Because I am a bit of an
overachiever, I decided I could do one better, and checked the prices for London
or Paris to Casablanca, which I knew to be a huge tourist destination. I wasn’t
wrong: the tickets roundtrip were around $200. After looking up the train prices
from Casablanca to Rabat, I found that they would set me back about $7-10 one
way.
In total, then, my airfare was around $875 from DC to Rabat, a more than
$500 discount from the first ticket I found, and around $300 less than Skyscanner’s
first result. A quick Google search can tell you what the most popular cities for
business or tourist travel are in your region or country of interest. It takes
more searching, but the effort is a nice pay-off.
4. Always check one way prices.
I have found that sometimes when I put in dates for a round-trip flight,
I get an amount that seems somewhat high, but when I switch to a one way flight,
I get a fare that is less than half the amount. This can be because of faults
in the program, or because one of the dates you chose happened to be an
off-season, or any host of reasons. Either way, I always check one way prices to
make sure that my dates aren’t driving up the price (in which case, if
possible, I might change them) or that I’m not booked for both trips with the
same airline, which may be charging me a little extra.
In the case of my Morocco trip, I am flying round-trip into London, flying
one way from London to Casablanca, flying one way from Casablanca to Paris, and
then taking a bus from Paris to London before flying home. It’s quite the
itinerary, I know! But flying one way into Morocco did save me a small percentage
of the cost, and gave me the opportunity to do something else:
5. Take advantage
of proximity.
Since I will be crossing the pond, I decided that it was best to take
advantage of being on that side of the water. After all, flying from Morocco to
Europe is about $200 or less, while flying from the US to Europe is $650 on a
good day. Thus, I purposefully arranged my itinerary to allow me to spend a few
days in Paris and London on either end of my semester abroad. If you are
planning a trip and can afford extra time, try to get in as many destinations
as you can (giving each due attention, of course). I would have loved to spend
some time in Barcelona or Rome as well, since bus, train and airfare between
European cities is so much cheaper than flying from DC (obviously!), but I am spending
a whole three months in Morocco and I know by the time I leave Paris I will be excited
to see home again. Especially in Europe, where EU and US citizens rarely need
visas, it’s a great opportunity to visit several countries and cities at once.
If I was flying to Thailand or the Philippines (hopefully someday!) I would also
try to visit some other countries in Asia to save the round-the-world airfare.
Even with the hostels that I booked in London and Paris, my itinerary
(outside of my tuition, residence, and living expenses during school) cost me
about $1,100 plus spending money. If I wasn’t flying to Morocco, it would be
about $900. But I had to make the trip anyway, so subtracting the airfare I
would have originally had to pay to get to Rabat for school, I am up $300.
6. Lastly, know
when to look.
I was told by my friend who is a flight attendant that airlines drop their
prices on Tuesday afternoons after 3 pm, and the cheapest time to get tickets
is six weeks in advance of your trip. I wanted to have all my affairs settled
early, so I did not wait that long for my Morocco trip, but I found evidence
that she was right when I traveled to California earlier this year. I got a
ticket for around $350 because I booked five weeks in advance. One week
earlier, I had been searching the sites and found a ticket for around $300, the
lowest I had seen in several (I’d been watching them for some time), but I hesitated
to buy it because I was still not sure I would get time off from work. By the
next week, every ticket had gone up a little more. It’s not as significant, but
it can make a difference.
Futhermore, understand when the best season to visit your destination
is. When looking into flights for the Caribbean, I found that flights and hotels
were remarkably cheaper in May-December, when weather in the States is more
mild and fewer Northerners are trying to escape the snow (and also when the
hurricanes are more frequent). Flying to California during spring break meant I
had to pay a bit extra for tickets, which tend to go up in March. If you are
flexible, try visiting your destination at a less popular time, as long as the
weather or the absence of people won’t ruin your trip. In this way, you can pay
less for flights, hotels, and hostels that are just eager to be booked.
Finally, if you can be flexible with your dates, see which days have the
cheapest tickets for departure and return. (Hint: not Fridays, Saturdays, or
Sundays.) Flying back and forth on a weekend can cost you quite a bit extra. The
cheapest days are often Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
I hope that these tips were helpful to you as you plan your future
trips! Thank you for reading this long post and please stay tuned for future
posts as I document my semester abroad to Morocco: what I’m packing, my
itineraries in London and Paris, my hostel experiences, etc. Please comment to tell me what you want to hear about! Also, if you’re
interested, follow me on Instagram @raehollister, where I will be documenting
my journey through pictures!
With love,
Rae
