Got it for Cheap: 5 Tips to Travel Like a (poor) Pro!

Alright, it’s no secret that I think traveling is one of the best ways to Make Your Own Lunch™  (click here for my true feelings). While traveling, you’ll get to experience stuff that you could  never have experienced sitting on your mom’s sofa watching The Hills or playing Halo 3! And  those experiences are what Make Your Own Lunch™ is all about!

If you Google the words “cheap travel”, you’ll end up getting over 34 million hits! That’s a little intense. Let’s make this a bit easier. Here are my secrets to traveling for less than it cost you to go watch the Hanna Montana movie in a theatre. (You thought nobody saw you?)

1) Say no to the resort: Resort cans be cool… If you are over 60 and your skin has been in a tanning salon so long that it’s now actual leather. Too many people book their trip to a resort and then never leave the pool. Such a waste! If you want to travel for cheap, don’t stay at a resort.

Stay in hostels, ask friends if they have relatives you can stay with or sign up at couchsurfing.org and see if you can crash on someone’s couch! It can sound dangerous at first but the hostel sites always have reviews and couchsurfing.org has a system where members can vouch for other members and leave reviews on their couch surfing experiences. By using some of these tips I was able to find a place to stay in Bratislava, Slovakia for $7/night and $3/night in Semuc Champey, Guatemala – sure it only had electricity for 4 hours everyday but that was part of the experience!

2) Big Streets = Big Bucks: Here’s a rule, never eat on the main street (I am a rhyming genius!) Restaurants on the main streets of just about every city will charge you a lot more than some of the smaller “off-the-path” restaurants and often for the exact same food.

When in Paris, I had a meal on one of the busiest streets and paid quite a bit but the next day, when eating at a smaller restaurant away from the crowds, I paid a lot less and got a lot more. My French didn’t improve but my stomach got filled.

NOTE: If you are traveling in a developing country, always make sure that your meals have been prepared with purified water – or else you could be first in line for a trip on the D-Train. Yup, I really JUST wrote that.

3) Make a Friend: Friends are good, unless they encourage you to light forest fires. Then, they are criminals.

We live in a big world made small by technology. MySpace, Facebook, Couchsurfing.com, Bebo, YouTube, Twitter, these all make it really easy for you to make friends around the world. I have had friends who have joined Facebook groups for the countries they were visiting and by doing so, made friends who met them at the airport, gave them travel tips and even sometimes gave them a place to stay.

It’s all about the experiences. By making some friends, especially local friends, you will save a bunch of money and also increase your chances of having an experience that wasn’t listed in Lonely Planet or on Travelocity and who knows? You just might meet a lifelong friend. Isn’t that better than the invisible friend you hang out with every Friday night?

4) Early or Late – Never on Time: This one is simple. Book your flights either really early or last minute! Really early is good because you can have time to prepare but sometimes last minute can be really fun too!

I once booked a trip to Japan on a Thursday and then left two days later on Sunday.  I saved about $800 on the flight and also had an awesome experience while I was there because it was completely spontaneous!

5) The Path Isn’t Always the Path: The path is the path for a reason, most people travel along that path. Sometimes it’s good but other times, if you just follow the crowds, you will pay what they pay – always more if the areas are busy. You will only see what they see and experience what they experience.

Get off the path and explore. Always make sure it’s safe first (some countries have marked paths because off the path is still littered with land mines – not good) but then get off the path.

When I was in Kauai, Hawaii, I took my rental car off the path onto a really rough dirt road, through some sugarcane fields and ended up at a 17-mile long beach with nobody else on it. It was one of the highlights of my trip and it cost me nothing but the little bit of gas I used to get there and some gratitude to the couple that used their truck to pull my Cobalt out of the sand.

When I travel, I almost always spend less money per day than I would if I was at home. On a recent backpacking adventure through Central America I spent about $15/day. Next time you are planning a trip, don’t rule things out because you are afraid it will be too expensive.  There is always a way to do it for cheaper than you think.

Do you have questions about traveling for cheap? Let us know!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 8:27 am and is filed under Get Lost, Get Found. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.