Frugal Fridays: Vacation - Had to Get Away!
Fri Jun 15, 2007 at 12:20:50 PM PDT
Welcome to "Frugal Fridays" where we share money saving tips, discuss living frugally and generally talk about personal finance issues. I may not be in school anymore, but I still think of summer as the time for vacation. As the weather has turned warmer, my thoughts have turned to planning a getaway. I thought I'd take this week to share some of the good ideas I've heard and used for saving money while traveling. Please use the comments to share your tips and memories. Everyone has a different idea of the perfect trip, so if my ideas aren't be so helpful to you, share yours they may be great for someone else who's reading!
Guide Books and Maps
Planning is an important part of the trip for me. It helps me build in anticipation and makes me feel like I am getting the most out of my experience. That said, not everyone enjoys the process of planning, and there is a certain allure to just jumping in the car and seeing where the road takes you sometimes. If you are using guidebooks, first check out the library. Any book older than 3-5 years is probably pretty out of date and not too useful. Ask friends and family if anyone has visited the place you are going to. Not only can they recommend their favorite cafe or beach, but they are usually happy to let you borrow any books or maps they have left over. Used book stores can be a good source for cheap relatively recent guide books and maps as well. Here are some guidebook series I've found useful in the past:
- Lonely Planet: designed for the younger traveler on a budget
- Moon Handbooks: I liked the info in the one guide of theirs I read (Australia)
- Unofficial Guide: nice information you don't normally find in some books
- Eyewitness Travel: Lots of pretty pictures to give you the feel of the place before you visit. Way too heavy to actually take with you on the trip.
- Frommer's: The original budget travel book (his Europe on $5 a Day changed how people looked at travel)
- Fodor's: Great discussion board on their web site, but I can't say much about the books, since I don't use them.
- Karen Brown: great resource for small charming inns and B&B's but they aren't cheap places to stay usually.
- Hawaii Revealed: I'm planning our first trip to Hawaii right now and these came highly recommended by multiple sources.
If you are a member of AAA (or you know somebody who is) you can get free guide books and maps through them. They even have some maps for places outside North America. If you are planning a long road trip in America, you may want to invest in a membership so that you have the security of roadside assistance as well as access to fresh maps and guide books at offices around the country. And although it's nice to have a map of a city before you get there, you can often pick up a free, or very cheap, map at the local visitor's center once you are in town. You can get other free local information there as well.
On-line Guides and Maps
On-line sites can be helpful in planning, but they can be even more out of date than printed materials, since no one ever takes down their web pages and links, no matter how defunct. I've recently found Budget Travel's web site and I like that the articles are all prominently dated so you can tell if the info may be out of date. I like to look at message boards and personal reviews, to get other visitors' impressions and suggestions. Here are a couple that I've found particularly helpful:
- Trip Advisor: my first stop when looking for hotel or other reviews.
- Fodor's: I've found great advice here from what shoes to wear for walking in Europe to what tour boat to use when visiting the Great Barrier reef.
You can use Google Maps and Google Earth to get a better notion of the area you want to visit and find out exactly how far from the ocean that "water view" hotel really is. For some cities, Google Maps Street View can show you street level photographs in 360° view, but keep in mind these photos can be years old. One Bag is a site full of hints and suggestions for traveling light. Their annotated packing list is a great resource.
How to Get There
If you are looking for cheap airfares, rental cars or cruises, you can usually find the best prices on-line, but if you have a complicated itinerary, a human travel agent may be able to find you a better deal. Expedia and Orbitz are the two biggest on-line agents, but there are some sites you can use to compare airfare deals from multiple agents; I've never booked a flight using any of these, since I've only heard about them recently: Side Step, Travel Axe, Kayak, and Booking Buddy. A slightly different site that compares fares for a given route from different airlines, not from different travel agents is Fare Compare. This can help you select which airline you want to use. If you book directly from the airline, you will save the extra fees that travel agents (including on-line agents) tack on.
Priceline allows you to set the price you are willing to pay for hotel or travel. I've never personally used them since I don't really know how to work that system well and I've heard too many stories of people getting stuck with bad itineraries or hotels because they didn't know what they were doing. But I just found the web site Bidding For Travel that helps you get a better deal on sites like that, so I may try it soon.
You can sometimes save significant money by booking a package deal (air+car+hotel, or some combination thereof) but you should price out the individual components for comparison's sake. If you don't mind traveling on a tour bus with a bunch of strangers, you can sometimes find some amazing tour deals that allow you to go places you could never afford on your own. I know people that have had great experiences and met wonderful friends on trips like that.
For rental cars, if you sign up with a company's free customer loyalty program, you can get benefits like faster checkin or even better rates. For European rental cars, I've been very happy with Auto Europe.
For cruises, I've found the website Cruise Critic has both editor and user reviews of lots of itineraries and ships. You can book cruises on-line through general travel agent web sites, but you can sometimes find better deals through specialized sites like Cruise Cheap, Cruise411 and Cruises.com.
Where to Stay
While camping or youth hostels are usually by far the cheapest ways to find lodging, there are still ways to save money while indulging in a little more luxury. The latest issue of Consumer Reports (July 2007) has an article on finding the best hotels in all budget levels. If you know which hotel in particular you want it stay in, you can generally get the best rate available by calling the hotel front desk directly (not the 800 reservation number for the chain). Ask if they have any discounted rate when you call. For online comparison of different hotel rates, I've found Trip Advisor very helpful. They search multiple websites to find the best available deal. When I was planning our trip to Australia, I found the coolest site to find great deals on hotel rooms for relatively short notice (up to 28 days in advance): Wotif. I would love to find something similar for America.
Las Vegas hotels are constantly offering specials and deals. Some of these are only available to individuals who have previously gambled in their establishment, but others are open to anyone who knows the right code. Here is a running list of active codes on the discussion board a Fat Wallet and here blog devoted to just this topic. (See below for another Vegas hotel tip.)
If I'm staying any place for longer than 3 days, I've found it's usually nicer and cheaper to rent a short term apartment rather than stay in a hotel. While you generally give up the daily maid service, you often find yourself staying in a residential neighborhood surrounded by locals, instead of in a tourist enclave. When you add in the convenience of having a kitchen (which saves money on breakfast) and often laundry facilities (which lets you pack lighter) it's a total deal. However, you need to look out for cleaning fees or other fees that can be tacked on. I've found some good places all over the world on Vacation Rentals By Owner.
Other Stuff
- If you are willing to pay a little extra, you can sometimes get upgraded to a much better class of service. You don't get something for nothing, but you can get an awful lot for a little fee. Here's an article on how to get airline upgrades. For Las Vegas hotels, evidently giving the check-in clerk $20 can usually get you a great room upgrade. Front Desk Tip is a website devoted to cataloging the hotels where people have been most successful at trying this technique. They explain in detail how to pass the tip discretely as well. I'm definitely trying this the next time I go to Vegas.
- Cell phones can be very handy when you are traveling. I've used mine as an alarm clock, a flashlight to find the bathroom in the middle of the night, a wrist watch, a currency converter calculator as well as a means of communication. When traveling in a foreign country, rather than using your US cell service, it can be much cheaper to just buy a pre-paid SIM card at a cell phone store in the local country and load that with enough minutes to last your visit. If you run out, you can always top it off. You need to make sure that your phone is both able to communicate on the local bandwidth and that it is unlocked so that it will accept a new SIM card. If your US phone is not compatible with foreign networks, you can buy a cheap phone in the country you are visiting. It's usually a lot cheaper than renting a phone or buying from the US over the web.
- Being frugal by cheating someone else out of their livelihood is not cool. In America, some folks depend on tips as their main source of income, so omitting their tip is like stealing their work. In other countries however, it's not only not expected, it can be insulting to tip someone. Here is a good list that shows the expected tips for restaurants, porters, and taxis for many different countries (including the US). If you are feeling generous or well served, in the US it is also customary to tip your hotel maid and the concierge, but again, that's only if they provided service above the norm.
- Recently I was looking for 3 oz plastic bottles to comply with the new TSA carryon restrictions. It turns out they are really hard to find. While 2 oz and 4 oz bottles are plentiful, 3 oz are rare (and expensive when you do find them). I discovered though that sometimes you can find sample sized products, like dishwashing liquid, that do come in 3 oz bottle. Decant the product into another bottle and voila, you have a TSA compliant bottle.
- Although this isn't exactly a frugal suggestion, I have to share this very cool camera gadget I found a while ago. The Gorillapod is a tripod with articulating legs that can grip onto anything: a tree, a rope, you name it. It's great for getting shots of yourself or low light shots from any surface. I even used it to attach a camera to my bike and took little movies of biking through Sydney.
Looking back over this, it seems that I've somewhat diverged from frugal suggestions into the realm of general travel advice today, but I hope this has been of use. Share your favorite travel tip (money saving or otherwise) in the comments below!
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