Traveling can be crazy expensive. You have the travel costs to worry about, then you have to worry about lodging, food, rental cars, and any excursions you want to do while on your trip. Here are some ideas that might help the financial burden be a little lighter. Full disclosure, many of these tips will only apply to aspiring travelers who are flexible with their travels—those more interested in traveling the world with no particular destination or time.
Try Using Cashback Sites When Booking Your Trips
There are sites out there that give you cash back when you book through them (hotels or flights) or buy travel gear. Ebates is an example of one of these more widely known sites. Ebates has arrangements with Expedia, Hotels.com, booking.com, and Hotwire. Find more cash back sites here.
Save on Hotels
Heard of Express Deals? Express Deals are offered on Priceline, mystery hotels where you do not know where you are staying until after you have paid for it. Sometimes top hotels are offered in this deal. This site can help you investigate which hotels you might be getting, so you are prepared beforehand.
Stop Buying Bottled Water
When traveling to some foreign countries bottled water is the way to go. But the cost is unbelievably expensive. Like anything, it adds up really fast. There are reusable water bottles with their own filters built into them. You could also bring your own filter. This site has tips and tricks to saving yourself from drinking expensive bottled water.
Cook for Yourself
Pack some essentials for cooking: knife, cooler bag, cutting board. You will be able to cook for yourself practically anywhere and with the cooler bag you can keep your leftovers. Here are more tips and tricks to save money on food while you travel.
House Sit and Watch Pets
While traveling there are opportunities to house sit and watch people’s pets for free accommodation. The more flexible you are the better this will work. You can travel to a variety of locations and stay for free. If you are interested in this, find out more here.
Work Exchange
Work exchange is an idea that can get you traveling around and lower your cost of accommodation or even allow for free accommodation. There are all different kinds of jobs out there. All you have to do is look.
Hide Your History
Most booking sites for flights and hotels can track your history. If you have searched them before than the rates are often higher as you revisit them. Work around this as best you can. One option is to use Google Chrome’s Incognito browser. When using this, sites cannot detect your search history.
While some of these tips seem useless to the regular family, this is not geared towards family vacations. These tips would probably work best for the young adult traveler, or the couple with no particular ties to keep them in one place, or just anyone with flexible schedules looking to travel around.