backpacking

Savor Your Trip and Save Big With These 5 Slow Travel Tips

Nick Wharton — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 11:00:40 +0000

I've been on the road over five years in total and in that time I've seen 45 countries. This may sound like a lot of places to see, but it averages around six weeks per country. And that slower travel rate has served me well.

In my experience, by staying put and traveling slower, I've not only formed a better connection and understanding of the places that I visit, but I've also saved a lot of money along the way. Here's how.

1. Accommodation

Where you'll stay is one of your biggest travel expenses — and a great place to look for savings.

Long-Stay Discounts

If you know you're going to be staying at the same hotel for more than a couple nights, you can ask for a long-stay discount. I've had hotels offer many free nights just by asking!

Vacation Rentals

Whenever you're booking a hotel or resort for a two-week or longer stay, you're spending a lot more money than you need to (even if you get a discount). If you decide to stay in one place for two weeks or more, you may just find that vacation rentals will give you much more bang for your buck.

Local Apartment Rentals

Vacation rentals are cheaper than hotels, but if you stay in one place for two months or more, you can save even more money by renting a local apartment. Once you start getting into local rentals and out of the vacation rental space, you can find some amazing deals. Vacation rentals are generally reserved for short stays (two weeks to two months) and are often owned by expats, meaning they are more expensive than regular apartments.

On my recent two and a half month trip to Mexico, I paid $50 per night for a small room with a double bed at a hostel. That's $1,500 per month if I had stayed for 30 days! Luckily I only stayed for a couple of nights while searching for an apartment. Vacation rentals were charging at least $1,000 per month, but within three days of looking around I had found a lovely, Mexican-style, two bedroom, two-level local apartment with a large kitchen and dining room for just $400 per month! I landed this price because I was staying "long-term."

House Sitting

Longer stays in each place will also give you the ability to easily find house sitting jobs. It's not easy to line up one-to-three night house sitting gigs while you're moving around a country quickly, but if you plan to stay in one town for a couple of weeks, you may be able to find a house sitting job and get free accommodation.

2. Transport

Your transportation costs can add up quickly, so be smart about how you choose to get around.

Car Rental

It's no secret that the longer you rent a car, the less you pay. A few years ago, I rented a car for five weeks in South Africa and it only costed me $20 per day, including all insurance! All major car rental companies will offer significant savings when booking a car for a month or more.

If you're traveling to a new country every week, you won't be able to take a long-term rental because most car rental companies don't want you to cross borders with their cars. Drive around one country for a few weeks or months and watch the savings add up.

Public Transport

You won't actually get a discount on public transport tickets by traveling slower, but you'll definitely be buying less bus, plane, and train tickets. Many buses and trains cost around $5 per hour or more depending on where in the world you are ($1 per hour in Asia). These costs quickly add up if you're taking a seven-hour bus ride every two days. That's $525 a month!

3. Tours

You don't need to spend all your dough in order to explore your chosen destination.

Time to Shop Around

I can't count how many times I arrived in a city in the afternoon, booked a tour that evening, and left on an excursion the next morning. There's nothing wrong with this kind of speedy shopping, except when you return to town and find the same tour for half the price at another agency! Traveling slower will give you time to shop around and find the best deals on tours.

Spread Out Your Sight Seeing

Taking a tour every day and trying to see everything in a short visit can be expensive. If you give yourself a bit more time, you can spend time doing things that don't cost money, like an independent walking tour or a relaxing beach day.

Taking Advantage of Free Days

Many museums, galleries, and historical sites around the world have special days each week when entrances are either discounted, or completely free. By staying in a city longer, you'll have a better chance of being able to take advantage of these days to save money.

4. Food

Food is a major part of the fun when it comes to traveling, but don't spend all your money on one meal!

More Time to Find the Local Joints

Sometimes it takes some searching to find the best, cheap restaurants in a city. The more time you spend in each place, the more time you'll have to explore and find your favorite hole-in-the wall restaurants with the most delicious food and the best prices.

Discount Days and Festivals

Just like museums and galleries, restaurants almost always have special discounts on different days of the week. If you are traveling quickly, you may miss these days, or not even find out about them. Festivals are also on fixed dates and so you'd have to get lucky to catch one if you're moving from place to place every other day. Stay in one town for a month and you're likely to witness some sort of festival or event that's offering free food and free entertainment!

Cooking in Apartment Kitchens

This is one of the best ways to save money while traveling and it goes with the first tips in this article about renting an apartment instead of booking a hotel. When you have a kitchen, you'll be able to buy your own groceries and cook for yourself. A cheap breakfast in a restaurant may cost upwards of $10 (depending on where you're traveling), while a similar breakfast cooked at home won't likely break a dollar.

5. Visas

More border crossings means more transportation costs, and of course, more entrance visas. Depending on what part of the world you're exploring, visas can range from free, to $150 per entrance. When I was traveling in Central Asia for three months in 2013, I spent over $300 in entrance visas and invitation letters alone because I was moving to a new country every two weeks. This is an extreme case because of the heavy bureaucracy and high cost of visas in this area, but visa costs add up no matter where you're traveling. Stay in one country longer and avoid getting charged (and paying border guard bribes) so often.

Slow and Steady…

Travelers often like to pack multiple cities in one trip to see as many places as possible, but not only can you save money by staying in one place, the experience of living in a foreign place longer than a few days can be just as exciting. See our favorite travel rewards credit cards that will help you get to your dream vacation sooner!

Are you a slow traveler? Where have you been? Where are you going?

This article is from Nick Wharton of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Secrets to World Travel (and Blogging About It)

Nora Dunn — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:00:03 +0000

Note: The Secrets to Successful World Travel e-book reviewed in this piece is no longer available.

There’s a lot to know — or rather to learn — about traveling the world. Whether the trip is a month long, a year long, or a lifetime, winding your way around the world requires some skill and a whole lot of knowledge if you want to travel — and blog about it — effectively.

Having been on the road since 2007, I’ve become somewhat complacent about the travel knowledge I’ve amassed over the last few years. For example, although I feel like I’ve known about “WWOOFing” forever, I only heard about it a month before I started traveling. I forget that there was a time when I could barely define what a travel blog was, much less create and maintain one. I’ve come a long way since then, through a lot of trial and error, and a little bit of luck.

However trial and error doesn't have to be the way you cut your travel teeth. If you’re tenacious enough, you can become an expert by sifting through blogs and books, but it’s a time consuming process.

If you’ve decided you want to do a big trip (for example for a month or two, or around the world, or even to adopt travel as a lifestyle), there are two e-books that may help you cut through the fat in your journey of research and education: Secrets to Successful World Travel and https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?ii=1195639&c=ib&aff=21326&cl=63168
">How to Build a Travel Blog.

Both are authored by Nomadic Matt, who is a fellow full-time traveler and location independent entrepreneur. He’s been on the road since 2006, and learned all his lessons about traveling and blogging the hard way. Now, he’s condensed his knowledge into some easily digestible e-books. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Secrets to Successful World Travel

This book has three main chapters: Pre-Trip Planning, On the Road, and Coming Home. There is also a short FAQ chapter at the end that is pretty useful (for example, I learned something about visas for my upcoming trip to Europe that would have been a shock had I not known about it in advance).

Each chapter further breaks down into sections that follow along your own journey: planning, executing, and concluding your own trip.

If you are relatively new to the travel scene and like the idea of backpacking, this book is for you. You’ll learn things like:

How much it costs to travel in various regions of the world on a budget
What to look for in luggage and what to pack
How to organize your finances
Tips for booking Round-the-World flights
Frequent flyer plans, and how to maximize their usage
Hostel etiquette
Transportation options and recommendations for each region of the world
How and where to do your travel research
Finding work overseas (including Teaching English, WWOOFing and Volunteering)
And how to reintegrate on your return

This e-book is not, however, for you if you have a huge amount of travel experience already, of if you are interested in a financially higher echelon of travel. Nomadic Matt flavors the book with his valuable personal slant of experience, which is that of backpacking on a (relative) budget as a solo traveler. He lives life to the fullest on the road, but also does it frugally (how very Wise Bread!). I appreciate his ability to know when and where it’s worth spending the extra money, instead of cutting every corner he can. And this is the sort of knowledge he shares with his readers in the book.

On a picky note, I would have liked more page breaks in the format. Chapter 1 and 2 take up most of the book (120 of the 135 pages), and although you can navigate to each subsection from the table of contents, there aren’t any page breaks or white space between the subsections.

Matt also includes an interesting section on possible itineraries and time frames (which is beautiful if you want to know what to see in various regions of the world and how long you should plan for it), but it’s not entirely inclusive, omitting the whole of Asia and Canada for example. Being based on personal experience, maybe he didn’t feel right about covering places he hasn’t toured himself (I’m not sure). I value the fact that everything in the book is truly experience-based.

Overall the information provided is concise and very practical. If you have decided to hit the road, this book will help you do it step-by-step, while saving money and avoiding many of the typical mistakes we tend to make when we start out on the road.

Secrets to Successful World Travel

Length: 135 pages (jam-packed!)

Cost: $9.99 (a fabulous introductory price, but only for a limited time)

How to Build a Travel Blog

So your departure date is looming, and you’d like to keep in touch with your family and friends with a blog, while documenting your trip. Or maybe you have even higher aspirations of reaching a wider audience and making money with your travel blog. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and right now you don’t know exactly what to do to set up your travel blog.

You can find out everything you need to know if you spend long enough researching the internet. But if you want to cut through the fat and get to the good stuff, this e-book will help you do just that.

If you want to build a self-hosted Wordpress blog, this book will take you through the process step by step. Diagrams are even included to ensure you don’t get lost along the way. The book was written as an answer to the flood of questions Matt received after publishing his e-book How to Make Money with Your Travel Blog (here's my review). A lot of people who want to make money with travel blogs bought his first e-book, but realized amidst the html jargon and advertising lingo that they don’t even know the basics of setting a blog up. How to Build a Travel Blog is a rudimentary supplement to How to Make Money with Your Travel Blog.

You will learn:

How to get a domain name
How to integrate your domain name with Wordpress
Recommended Wordpress plug-ins, and how to install them
Various options for themes, and how to install them
Tweaking your blog settings, with miscellaneous SEO tips

Although the title of this book has a travel theme, the contents therein can apply to any kind of blog. There is very little (if anything) that limits this book to the travel genre, aside from Matt’s own expertise in the travel — and travel blogging — realm.

How to Build a Travel Blog

Length: 39 pages

Cost: FREE with the purchase of How to Make Money With Your Travel Blog ($37), or $4 on its own

In the cases of both e-books, Matt adds value by inviting readers to email him with any questions they have. This accessibility makes the e-books interactive and adds even more value. If you’re ready to travel the world (and blog about it), these books may be just the impetus you need to get going.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the e-books for review, and there are affiliate links in this post.

This article is from Nora Dunn of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

How to Save Over $1000 on Your Next Backpacking Trip

Jeff Rose — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:00:11 +0000

I wish I was writing this post from the standpoint of how I saved money on my most recent backpacking trip, but alas, I cannot. I can only write it from the standpoint of how I could have saved money on my backpacking trip. While this isn't the first year that I've gone backpacking with my buddies, it was the first year that required a bit more planning. We decided that Yellowstone National Park was our destination and that involved buying plane tickets, renting a car and paying extra attention to our pack load. Hopefully, for any of you that are planning on going on a backpacking trip sometime in the near future, you can learn from some of my mistakes and save yourself over $1000.

1. Book your tickets in advance.

We knew approximately what part of the month we were leaving, but hadn't narrowed it down to a specific day. When I first had checked plane tickets, about three weeks in advance, round trip tickets were running approximately $220 from Saint Louis, Missouri to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. When I checked the flights the very next day, ticket prices had increased from $230 to $260. Initially, I thought it was a typo or there was some mistake, but quickly realized there was no mistake. Airfare rates were increasing that quickly! Within a week of looking at the initial price, tickets were well above $300. By the time the flight was booked, the total round trip ticket cost me $460. I was literally sick to my stomach. Through our procrastination and not being able to pinpoint the exact time and day cost me over $200. I assure you that won't ever happen again.

Could have saved = $200

2. Borrow your gear.

Packing for a backpacking trip is extremely important and will require you to bring "the essentials." Some of the essentials include sleeping bag, hiking shoes, hiking clothes, canteens, water filters, camping stoves, and food. If you've never been on a backpacking trip before and aren't sure if you'll ever go again, I would suggest borrowing some gear to help save a few bucks. A few of the things that I don't own are a sleeping bag, poncho and waterproof bags. Luckily, I have a close friend who's still a member of the National Guard and he had the equipment that I could borrow. He loaned me the items mentioned above and easily saved me another $190 to $250. if you know anyone that's an avid hiker, go to them first and see what you might be able to borrow to save some dough.

Could have saved (and did)= $250

3. Rent gear.

This was the first backpacking trip for one of my buddies and he knew that he probably wouldn't go again, so he didn't feel that he needed to purchase some of the hiking gear. The biggest piece of gear he rented was his backpack from the local REI store. Renting his backpack for seven days only cost him $50, as opposed to $200 for a brand new pack (which I paid). While $200 sounds like a lot to spend on a backpack, having been on a previous backpacking trip, I knew that it was well worth it. But to my friend, the savings of $150 made complete and total sense, and could make sense for you.

Could have saved = $150

4. Buy in advance.

As I mentioned before, paying for the plane ticket in advance could have saved several hundred dollars, but there are also other things that you can buy in advance, too. For example, we purchased Mountain House meals to eat while we were camping. We didn't buy them until we actual got into town, and I noticed that by getting it there, we paid an extra $2 to $3 per meal, as opposed to to buying them cheaper at my local Wal-Mart. We could have purchased other things like beef jerky and nuts at Wal-Mart, too, instead of buying them at a convenience store. These are a few of the items that you can buy in advance to save a buck.

Could have saved = $25

5. Check the clearance racks.

Just like finding a good deal at your local department store, be sure to check the clearance racks at your local sporting goods store as well as the sale section of your favorite online store. I purchased a brand new backpack from REI and spent $200 for the backpack. Having had a miserable experience with a far less superior pack the year before, the purchase was well justified. Although, I did realize that if I bought an older or late model pack off REI's website, I could have saved anywhere from $50 to $100.

One item that I was able to save money on was my backpacking tent. Instead of paying the full price of $300, I did what I should have done with my backpack and checked the clearance section of REI's site. I ended up finding a tent that only cost me $99. I was also able to pick up hiking shirts and pants by checking the clearance racks at the local Dick's Sporting Goods. All in all, I saved about 60% off the retail price for an additional savings.

Could have saved = $100
Did save = $250

6. Use all your resources.

The last night before coming home, we had decided to stay in a hotel because we had an early flight. After many failed attempts of finding cheap hotel rates, it finally dawned on my friend who's a pilot, that there was a hotel that his airline had an agreement with. Initially, the quoted prices that we were getting from all hotels was anywhere from $150 to $200 for one night. Using his employee discount, we were able to book a room at a resort for the low cost of $70. Talk about a huge savings.

Did save = $130

A serious backpacking trip requires the necessary gear to make it a successful one. But that doesn't mean you have to blow the bank to have a good time. Learn from my mistakes and save some serious money and enjoy the outdoors!

Total potential savings = $1105

Like this Post?Pin it!

This article is from Jeff Rose of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: