My advices to travel cheap

12/2/2015

Hello! This is an answer-post that many people ask me to write: How am I able to travel this much?

Well, if you have read the About section, you know that I have visited quite a bunch of countries, but how do I do this? You're going to learn it now! I want to add that this is my method, you can agree or disagree with it, but it is just my example, use what is worth for you.

In order to make it easier to read, I will write it as a list

Well, before the list starts there is Requirement #0: Save some money, it doesn't need to be a lot, for 200€ you can have a lot of fun for more than 5 days in many places, you don't need a huge budget. So here we go:

1) Plan in advance

Very important for traveling (and for kinda everything) is planning things in advance, last minute trips can be funny too, but the chances of making it cheap are much lower (but real too). Get info about your destination, about low/mid/high season and average prices, once you have enough info proceed to check the flights and hotels, and try to book 2-3 months in advance for continental flights and 3-5 for intercontinental.

2) Suit your trips to your personal timetable

It's good to have a yearly timetable so you know which seasons are better for traveling, if you spend one afternoon doing a timetable (I use MS Excel for example) you can save lot of money, for example: If you know in which days you are going to have holidays and exams, you can start to clean the previous days for getting a nice spot for a trip.

3) Get information before traveling

It's essential to know how things work where you are going, and what's worth seeing, as well as security/food advices, I know there are several pages doing similar stuff but I personally use Tripadvisor.com with it, in just 2 minutes you know what to see, simply google "What to do in ---" and a commented ranking of the attractions will appear, you can also read about what we spoke before in different sections, for security I also use Tripadvisor because if you read your government exterior ministry page about safety, you will probably want to stay home (alarmist as hell).

Ok, so until here I didn't invented the wheel, didn't I? So now I will continue with more specific ones

4) Budget list

It can be hard to make at first, but it is the key to know how much your trip will finally cost, your budget should include at least Flights, Accommodation, Transport, Main attraction tickets and average food costs, including these last 2 in the section Extras will prevent your wallet from bleeding and not knowing why. I attach my personal budget list for my trip to Israel, so you can get the idea.

5) Save money in your everyday life

The things I'm going to say now are harsh, skip them if your main priority is not traveling (most people's priority is not traveling, thats why I'm saying this), and this is my method, so you can adapt to you as you see fit (I'm not imposing this)

First and very important: Save in technology (don't buy apple products) (Or do and don't complain that I travel a lot), you will just pay 60% more for a phone or laptop which do exactly same as others, because face it, you use it for FB, Whatsapp, Cloud storage, Documents and watch movies: Something every cheaper machine does at same quality... (Based on my personal experience 80% of Apple product owners do exactly the same things with their machines as my cheaper phone and laptop).
Also try to save in alcohol consumption (your liver will be happy) specially in cocktails since it is where your money flies at night, personally I just drink beer (cheap :D) and shots. Same applies to cameras, If you are no expert, don’t get an oversized camera to shoot in Auto, just use any compact portable digital camera for more than good results (I use my phone Xperia Z1 camera 21 mpx and my compact camera Canon PC 1732, which was 80€ 3 years ago). And the very same applies to smoking. Extra info: You can use this saved money for what you want, this is just my method.

6) Ryanair or Wizzair as homepage for your browser

Yes, get any of these companies site as homepage for your browser (I use Ryanair), so you force-check their crazy offers every day (you don't really open their mails, be realistic). This is especially useful and will just cost you 1s more everyday to move the mouse to the search bar instead of the Google bar.

7) Follow offer FB pages

There are many FB pages that every day post offers to public, and some even post info about crazy cheap flights. My advice is to follow all of them because when you will use one offer, you will forget about the spam in your main FB wall thinking about all the money you can save (like 220€ go/back to Thailand for example). The FB pages I follow are (but there are other too):
English: Rushflights.com Ryanair.com Wizzair.com
Spanish: Guia Low Cost, Viajeropedia

8) Travel with associations or volunteering projects

Most of my long trips are with student associations, thanks to them I can have trips like 2 weeks in Athens and Ionian islands for 185 € all included except 1 daily meal, but bear in mind that when you go with an association is not a tour agency, you can't free roam or do what you want, but usually the program is much better than a 4 times more expensive tourist trip (as it happened during my Trans Siberian trip, for which I payed 490€ for 2 weeks compared with 1500€ which is the cheapest touristic option), for that I joined AEGEE 4 years ago. There are small projects (find them in Youth in Action FB page) which even refund you 70% transport costs and have all included. You can even get payed (or maintained) by volunteering projects such as European Volunteering Service or Work and Travel

9) Use Apps to get around

There are many apps which can help you to travel, many, too many, there are probably better ones then what I use but they work for me:

For Offline map: Citymapstogo
For City guide: Tripadvisor city app (for main cities, it is very heavy but offline)
For Accommodation: Booking.com

Also you need to know the local bus/train app or website, but if you don't find it, use Rome2Rio

10 ) Contact locals

In most occasions, locals are the key for a good trip, if you have a friend in the city you want to visit, send him/her a FB message and tell about your plans, most probably he/she will correct them and add some interesting stuff too, but don’t do the typical mistakes many people do:
Many people ask me about every little town in Spain, and while I have some information about a big bunch of them, because it is a part of my hobby, an average man from Barcelona will not know anything about best tapas bars in Cordoba as a Berlin girl won't probably know where you can find the best beer in Munich. Also, don't trust people who doesn't seem too trustworthy (logical right?) if somebody is kind of a disaster in general, he/she will be also recommending you stuff (I saw people who didn't recommend to visit my city castle, for example, not even mentioning it, so some people didn't know about its existence, but before you start thinking that it is some kind of shitty stuff – check the pictures).

Therefore, these are my personal methods to travel cheap! They are really working for me, they may work or not for you, but at least you know some tricks now!