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More Travel Variables = Better Vacation Deals

Portugal castle hotel

A $120 luxury castle hotel in Portugal, after a cheap flight

Do you want to really get a great travel deal? The kind of bargain you’ll talk about for 10 years? The kind of deal that is so great that when you tell a cocktail party couple what you paid, one person’s jaw drops and the other starts choking on their drink in disbelief?

I can get you a deal like that.

But I’m not going to ask you to buy anything, sign up for anything, or join some secret club. Almost anyone trying to sell you insider secrets that will unlock the hidden bargains is not to be trusted. There are no secrets anymore unless you count “mistake fares” and opaque booking sites like Hotwire.

But there is a formula. It looks something like this: 6v – 0v = 10,000

That won’t hold up in algebra class, so don’t try to solve it. It’s really symbolizing a travel truth: 6 variables – 0 variables equals 10,000 possibilities. More than that in many cases, but let’s pick a number. Here’s the illustration of this truth.

travel variables

Whether they have expressly thought about it or not, this truth is what guides those travelers who always seem to find the cheap vacations, the fantastic deals, and the experience of backpacking around the world for a year. Often by trial and error, they’ve stumbled upon the way to get “lucky.” The more travel variables you leave open, the less you are going to pay.

The more options you have, the more travel deals you will find.

Many Options Means Much Better Travel Deals

If you want to travel better for less, the simple solution is usually to avoid painting yourself into a corner with your plans.

If you insist on traveling to Florence and Venice for a week in July, you are going to pay top dollar, period. If you instead set “Europe in autumn” as your goal, now we’ve got something to work with. 

I get interviewed a lot by the media as a value travel expert, usually looking for tips and tricks on how to travel better for less money, how to squeeze more out of a limited vacation budget.

One of my goals with the Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune book was to show infrequent travelers how to travel better using some basic strategies. One key one is understanding that the more variables you leave open, the greater your savings are going to be.

Now let’s look at why I can barely help most infrequent travelers who ask me for advice on how to score better travel deals. After a little prodding, it usually ends up that they’ve already decided they’re going to fly to x place during y time period and are staying at hotel z they read about somewhere. They think, however, that there’s some secret I can tell them that will miraculously shave half off their trip cost, even though they barely have any variables left to work with. If they had a chart it would look more like this, with what’s already been decided grayed out:

traveling variables

Those two visual representations aren’t really even accurate though because not all travel variables are created equal. The 40 decisions they may have left are just fringe around the edge of the budget. The small stuff.

Most of the time, your destination will have an outsized effect on the budget because that will impact the cost of everything else on the list. If you can be flexible on one thing, make it that. If you’re flying to an international destination for a week or two vacation, airfare may be the biggest tangible budget line item.

If you’re going somewhere you can drive to or take Megabus, then the lodging probably will be. Leaving what you’re going to have for dinner open will have a relatively small impact in comparison.

travel costs and travel variables are not created equal

Which Are the Biggest Travel Expenses?

You could revamp this quite a bit though depending on your particular situation. If you’re going skiing for a week, the “what you do” part will be a bigger expense and you could maybe cut that cost in half (and lodging too) by picking a smaller ski resort with better package deals. (Or skiing in Europe for cheaper instead.)

If you’re going from New York to New Zealand, airfare is going to be expensive no matter when you go. It’s just a matter of how much it’s going to hurt.

If you’re a long-term backpacker, a day at one of the wonders of the world like Petra is going to wreck the budget for days, whereas changing hotels to a worse one might only save you $2.

If you are traveling through Southeast Asia overland, moving like a slow traveler will cost far less than staying in a different spot every night or two. That’s because transportation becomes a disproportionally high expense for backpackers taking a bus or train several times a week. Part of the reason multi-country Africa travel seems more expensive than it should be is because the vast distances are often best traversed by plane.

Travel Flexibility Pays the Greatest Dividends

The key is to recognize these variables and leave as many as you can open—especially the ones that will have the biggest impact. The higher the potential expense over the course of your vacation or backpacking trip, the more savings you can wring out by leaving that option open.

Can you fly into a neighboring country or leave from a different home airport? Can you move your trip up or back a few days? Could altering your itinerary a little cut your lodging bills in half? Could seeing fewer places in the allotted time knock a few hundred dollars off the transportation expenses?

Paris France stopover one night

“I want to go to Paris the third week of July and then do wine tastings around Bordeaux” is going to be expensive, no matter how emphatically you say, “but I don’t mind staying in simple hotels.” If you visited one of the cheapest wine destinations in Europe instead, you could literally cut your vacation cost in half. 

“I’m thinking of heading to Central or South America sometime late this year and I’ll figure out an itinerary after we check flight prices” is a whole different story. If you’re that second person, let’s grab a beer together because with those travel variables open, I’ve got lots of advice for you.

Here’s a good place to start though: use the map feature on Google Flights or Skyscanner to see where the cheapest flights are from your home airport. Then start figuring out where you’re going to go. Do that backwards and you’ll pay far more. 

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callum

Tuesday 26th of November 2019

Heres a little hack i came up with recently to get travel deals. You can access travel deals from abroad in the case that they are not available in your country. You can do this by using a VPN. Im using purevpn myself and theres currently an 88% Off on it for blackfriday. Its a good accessory to have, whoever wants to try.