Traveling is wonderful, but do you know what's even better than traveling? Doing it without emptying most of your wallet. There are tricks to save money while traveling, to save money on the road, leveraging both new technologies and human knowledge to enhance your fun and experiences.
We at Meeters, thanks to our event organization activities, eventshave become quite expert on the subject and have always found new ways to save. We strongly believe in the importance of vacation as a driver for new friendships; allowing people to take more vacations per year means enabling them to create more experiences to face everyday life, which is undoubtedly more boring than the rest.
With that premise, let's take a closer look at 6 simple tricks to spend less money when traveling.
Planning Is Important...
One of the best-known tricks is undoubtedly the good old planning of your activities.
Planning means sensibly choosing the actions to take instead of waiting until the last possible moment to make purchases. The reasons are simple: availability of transport, services, and accommodations varies over time and prices are most attractive when availability is high and demand is low.
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Usually, high season corresponds to the period when most people are on vacation, while low season corresponds to times when people work (or simply when the weather isn’t suitable for the activities the place is known for).
Organizing yourself according to these concepts makes it very easy to save up to 70-80% compared to what you would otherwise spend during high season.
But Catching the Right Last-Minute Deal Is Just as Crucial!
The phrase last minute has quickly become a great friend to travelers wanting to save as much money as possible. It refers to all those offers made just before the service is provided, with a huge discount.
This practice helps companies fill the last spots in hotels, trains, planes, and accommodations by offering an irresistible economic proposal to attract as many people as possible.
How to stay informed about last-minute deals? There’s no exact method since you’d need to track a huge number of opportunities simultaneously; fortunately, there are aggregators and specialized pages online that can help.
Use Aggregators to Your Advantage
Sites like Skyscanner or Booking can work wonders for saving money while traveling. The reason is simple: they act as aggregators, meaning they analyze offers and prices from a very long list of sites searching for the best economic deal.
By visiting these sites, sometimes even in advance, you can book your holiday trip paying very low ticket prices; they prove it’s possible to take many trips with little money by knowing the right tricks.
Save on Accommodation
Once upon a time there was couchsurfing, today there’s Airbnb, hostels, and low-cost solutions. The best advice to save money while traveling involves cutting down as much as possible on so-called fixed costs.
Accommodation is definitely one of these, and there are many ways to save something; the most social and aggressive way to save money traveling is to take advantage of hostels, where you sleep in dormitories with other people. These options are safe in the vast majority of cases and allow you to drastically reduce accommodation costs, which are notoriously among the highest expenses of any vacation.
Travel Smart
Let’s put it this way: you’re on vacation exploring a place. Is it really necessary to take public transport every time? In most cases, with long walks, regardless of the location, you can have a more complete and deeper experience, especially if you’re in a city.
If you need to travel between two different cities and public transport is available, instead of renting a car, this is the right choice. You spend more time traveling and your vacation is a bit less freewheeling, but you save a lot of money.
Especially since the pandemic, renting a car means committing to paying significant amounts; better to avoid lightening your wallet by reaching your destination through public transport bookings, don’t you think?
Make Do With Food
Different country, different cost of living: this means that if you’re in an expensive city, a smart move to keep your budget low is to make do a bit with food, instead of going to pricey restaurants for typical dishes.
How can this be summed up? In most countries, there are places similar to our delis and grocery stores. In terms of pure quality, it’s not top-level food, but it still offers tastes and experiences worth trying.
In expensive cities like Paris, for example, the easiest way to eat is to head to a boulangerie to buy one of their ready-made products. An even cheaper alternative is to go to a grocery store to eat baguette and cold cuts, maybe stretched out at theEsplanade des Invalides or the Champ de Mars.
In other European capitals, perhaps less expensive like Warsaw, Athens or Zagreb, restaurant costs are even lower but this doesn’t stop savvy tourists from finding ways to save even more.