Travel Cheaply By Not Caring Where You Go

It’s officially summer (in North America), which means sun, short days at the office, short skirts, and vacation!  Most people have been looking forward to their vacation for months now, and have planned accordingly.  Consequently, they’ve spent a fortune on airfare and hotel costs to trendy resort towns and admission to gaudy tourist attractions and swanky museums across the pond.  Suckers.  Being frugal and adventurous lads and lasses, you know how to have an even better vacation for a fraction of what your stuck-up co-workers will end up paying.  

Be Flexible

The number one secret to vacationing on the cheap is to not care where you end up.  Literally.  In today’s competitive environment, airlines are tripping all over themselves to offer often-astounding last-minute deals in a desperate bid to squeeze every last bit of revenue from each and every flight.  Paris is expensive this time of year, but how about the Caribbean?  Just a few days ago I snagged a $240 round-trip ticket from Atlanta to San Juan, Puerto Rico and back.  Even better, even rooms in luxury hotels right on the beach are currently going for $130-150 per night.  Slum it a bit and you can stay much cheaper.  Paying twice that would be considered a steal in Europe, especially with the value of the dollar being what it is.  Also, feel free to pack 6 people into a two-bed hotel room.  It’s not gay if you sleep head-to-foot.  George Bush said so.

You should start looking for deals about a month out.  Every airline website has a “specials” or “last-minute bargains” page where they tout empty seats on flights to and from almost every city imaginable.   Here’s the Airtran specials page, for instance.  Delta, Southwest, US Airways, and every other major airline have something similar.  Once you get there, click on your city and browse down the page looking for a city you might like to visit.  On Airtran, I can currently fly to almost anywhere worth going in the US from Atlanta for less than $100 one way.  European readers might want to try Ryanair, which is the cheapest airline I’ve ever found.  In fact, it’s not uncommon to find FREE flights on Ryanair.  Currently, you can fly from London to Oslo, Norway, Frankfurt, Germany, and Valladolid, Spaim completely free.  Can’t beat that.  Also, check out this list of the top 10 discount airlines worldwide.

Another way to get good airfare deals is to try some of the larger travel sites.  While Expedia and Orbitz can sometimes work well, I tend to have much better luck on Travelocity, Hotwire, and my favorite, Kayak. 

Book A Room

While you can sometimes save money buying packaged flight+hotel deals on the large travel sites, that’s usually not the case.  Since you’re going to off-season locations, you’ll probably do much better waiting to secure a room after landing.  You won’t have to worry about everything being booked up, either, because again, you’re only going to off-season locations.  Once you land, you can take one of two tacts:  either find a computer and log onto Ratestogo.com (which specializes in last-minute hotel accomodations) or just find the local tourism office and ask them for the cheapest accomodations available.  Since there won’t be many tourists around, there are likely to be a lot of empty rooms and hotels, especially smaller ones, are going to go to surprising lengths to get your business.  For them, renting a room at 1/3 normal price is still better than an empty room.  I have used both these methods to great success all over the world.

Act Quickly

When you happen to come across an exciting bargain (sometimes it can take some searching), you need to be able to make a decision quickly because some of these deals last a matter of days if not hours.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a steal disappear before my eyes because I took a day to make up my mind.  That’s why this sort of travelling is suitable only for the more adventurous amongst you.  Just think of all the crazy places you could end up you’d likely never travel to otherwise.  Would you ever think to travel to Port Of Spain, Trindad or Panama City, Panama?  You can get to both for less than $200 right now from almost anywhere in North America.