Probably the second biggest excuse I hear from people is how expensive travel is and how they could never afford it. If this applies to you and you haven’t read “So You Want To Travel?”, please go read it now.
The mindset of “I could never” and “expensive” are useless ways to think about something, so I want you to change how you phrase this. Instead, you should be saying “How can I afford this?” and “How can I make this possible?”. Without making this mindset shift, you won’t travel or be so worried about the finances that the travel will be less pleasant with all the stress that surrounds it.
The High-Level Overview
I am going to treat you like intelligent adults and assumed you’ve heard the classic financial advice – skip the lattes, don’t eat out so much, sell your first born, etc. You may heed advice like this and they may have some effect, but I don’t think this is a realistic approach when it comes down to it.
Instead, I am going to turn to one of my favorite financial advisors and authors – Ramit Sethi. I highly recommend you read his book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” if you haven’t yet. Yes, the title is a bit scammy, but look past it because not only is Ramit hilarious, his content is gold.
So inspired by his mindset, we are going to look at how to optimize the financials of travel. There are four main costs when traveling:
1. Accommodations
2. Fights
3. Tours and Other Tickets
4. Food
In the next few articles in this series, we’ll look at each of these topics and try to break down each on how to optimize them to work with your needs. Today, we are going to focus on accommodations.
Accommodations
When you are traveling, you have to sleep somewhere. This is probably where most of your money is going to go. The first part of optimizing accommodations is really stepping back and asking yourself a few questions.
- How easily can you sleep?
- How much do you value privacy?
- How much time will you be out exploring vs spending time at the place?
- Do you feel comfortable taking public transit?
- Are you afraid of having to communicate with people whose first language may not be English?
- How immersed do you want to be with other travelers or locals?
The first three questions really determine what type of accommodation you may want to look into while the other three speak more to location.
Accommodation Types
There is a reason why accommodation is one of the top expenses when traveling; it is probably the most important investment you can make when traveling. If you are not comfortable in your situation, you are going to enjoy your trip less, so it is important you don’t skimp on comfort for a few hundred bucks unless you are sure it is a situation you are fine with.
If you are already 100% set on your accommodation type, then skip down to accommodation location.
Hostels
The very cliché answer to the costliness of accommodations is “Why not do hostels?”. Hostels are almost always going to be the cheapest option out there, but this comes at the cost of privacy and comfort. Maybe you rather not be woken up in the middle of the night by the French Canadians who partied until 4 AM. You also might sleep through tornados like a zen master.
If you can sleep easily and don’t care too much for privacy, this may be a good choice. This may be a good choice if you plan on being out all the time, since you will only be there to sleep anyways. I could go into a lot more detail about hostels, but there are so many articles and travel books out there already that I am not going to, especially since I am not a hostel traveler anymore. All I have to say to my American readers is that no, it is not like Hostel the movie 😛
Home Sharing
Typically people think about two options only when traveling: hostels and hotels. But there is a whole other market that has completely changed travel for me – home sharing. Home sharing is basically Airbnb and any similar service where it allows you to rent out shared rooms, private rooms, or entire houses from the owners. Some of the services include Airbnb (my favorite), VRBO/Homeaway, and Wimdu.
Depending on what you are looking for, this option can be priced as low as hostels or higher than hotels. The typical price falls between the two, making it the next step up. They also tend to offer much more privacy and comfort than a hostel does, which is why it is my ideal choice.
I think a lot of people tend to be afraid of this option because it is less known and comes off as a bit less formal. You have to understand that it is mostly an irrational fear to be afraid of renting from a home sharing site, and it is costing you money. I have never had a bad experience with home sharing and many of my rooms were on par or better than hotel rooms. I’ve even been lucky enough to find rooms cheaper than hostels.
The other benefit this has over both hostels and hotels is that this will likely introduce you to some locals, which could result in some great connections. I highly recommend this option for you if you don’t want to do hostels, but want to still save some cash.
Hotels
This type of accommodation really needs no explanation since it is so mainstream. Expect hotels to be the absolute most expensive option, but with the most privacy and comfort.
The other trade off that turns me off to hotels is the tourist bubble that comes with staying in a hotel. You will not meet as many people in a hotel as you would in a hostel or in a some home sharing situations.
There are other types of accommodations you could look into like Couchsurfing, but that deserves a whole post within itself and is a very different experience than the options above.
Once you have your type of accommodation picked out, now its time to do some searching. During this search, the other variable for price is going to be location.
Accommodation Location
The easiest way to save money when booking your accommodations boils down to this; don’t stay in areas frequented by tourists. Don’t be afraid to stay outside the main tourist areas and catch public transit or walk to them.
The main tourist areas have the demand, so they can set prices much higher. Other areas will be priced lower because they aren’t premium real estate to the tourists. Now this suggestion is pretty broad. There may be huge chunks of the city that are not “touristy”. I’ll help you narrow it down in a few simple steps.
- Pick your city
- Search for “Districts in X”, X being the city
- Find a recently updated site that describes the districts of the city you are going to
- Read through the districts and find a district that is described
- You are looking for districts described as
- Reformed
- Revitalized
- Up and Coming
- Trendy
- Once Blue Collar, Once Slums, etc. and now home to new trendy cafes, bars, etc.
- You are avoiding districts described as
- Tourist Center
- City Center
- Industrial
- Anything signifying it may still be a rough neighborhood
To put it simply, you’re basically looking for districts that are undergoing gentrification or clean up. They are probably going to have a bit of edge to them still, so it attracts locals, but no tourists yet. You will find some pretty sweet places to stay using this technique, just make sure the sites you use to research are up to date and look up a secondary source for your district to verify it is fine.
When you do start looking for a location, be conscious of where the locations are that you want to visit relative to where you are considering staying. Most cities in first world countries (except US cities) have good or decent public transit, so it is easy to get around without a car, so just check out Google Maps to see how long it would take on public transit to get around. Make sure you aren’t staying an hour out of the city center just to save $10 a night, as that is time lost you could use to explore.
Well, that ended up being much longer than I thought it would! Next time I write about this topic, I am going to explore optimizing the next most expensive part of travel – the flight.
Cheers
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