Getting ready to take off on an extended round of travel or a round-the-world journey? Picking up How to Travel the World on $50 a Day will be one of the best investments you can make.

Ever since I put out the very first edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations more than 10 years ago, I’ve been continually recommending other travel books that are more general in nature, with tips on planning, budgeting, and traveling well for less. I even wrote one called Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, published by Travelers’ Tales. Apart from philosophical Vagabonding though, there hasn’t been a good current one aimed at backpackers except Rough Guides’ First Time Around the World, from Doug Lansky. All the others have gotten dated and less useful over time or were obscure titles written by people without much authority.

I’m happy to report that How to Travel the World on $50 a Day by Mat Kepnes is a different story. He certainly has plenty of authority, running the popular NomadicMatt.com blog, plus he’s been continually traveling on a budget for years. He also goes to conferences, meets lots of other travelers, and responds to feedback regularly. He knows the issues backpackers face and the mistakes they frequently make.

This book is a straightforward, sometimes opinionated guide subtitled “Travel cheaper, longer, smarter.” It lives up to the promise with sometimes hard-won advice based on screw-ups not repeated and lessons learned from others. The $50 a day pitch is an average, not something you can necessarily do in every country easily. As Matt admits, you can get by on half that much in Southeast Asia or India, but it’s hard to scrape by on $50 a day in northern Europe or Australia even if you’re Couchsurfing much of the time.

Cheap travel inclusions and omissions

It’s hard for me not to read a book like this and find flaws—even in ones I write myself—but the flaws here are minor. There’s no index, which seems odd, and there’s barely a mention of huge costs travelers get surprised by like vaccinations, visa charges, and airport exit fees. Some of the generalizations are overdone (“Trains around Norway cost about $70 USD” or for Sweden “Grocery shopping here will cost around $70 USD per week.”) The blog writing style of short, declarative sentences doesn’t work in a book as well as it does online when people are skimming and have short attention spans. It’s also squarely aimed at people who travel like Matt does: solo.

Quibbles aside, the book is organized well and covers most of the bases. It starts out with the argument that traveling is cheaper than just living at  home and backs it all up with solid evidence. It then goes through how to do it all right in the planning stages, from getting the right credit cards and bank accounts (worth the book price by itself in money it will save you) to flights to buying the right backpack.

This section is followed by 28 pages of saving money on the road, solid advice from someone with experience on shaving the big expenses: accommodation, food/beverages, transportation, and activities. I especially like his advice on knowing what’s important to you. He will shave on accommodation in order to have a good meal, but others may want to do the opposite. Some people hate museums, some consider that the main reason to visit a big capital city. Figure out your priorities so you’ll enjoy your time on the road with a limited budget.

The largest section of the book is a regional breakdown, lumping continents or travel areas together and trying to estimate specific costs. This is a tall order, but in general Matt handles it well, showing the major differences between East and West in Europe, for example, and explaining how taking different transportation options between countries can have an impact on your budget and your enjoyment.

A few tacked-on sections at the end include specific gear and city-by city hostel recommendations (where a link to one page on his blog probably would have sufficed), a packing list, and a few pages of medical advice.

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day lists for just $15, so even if you only use one section of advice in here, it’ll pay for itself several times over. Even with 20  years of travel under my belt, there were still pages in here I dog-eared to reference later and websites to check out that I had never heard of before. Get it at Amazon (around $10 for Kindle or paperback), Barnes & Noble (Nook & paperback), or at your favorite store.

By its very nature, family travel is more expensive than a single person or a couple hitting the road. This is especially true if you need to fly, which you pretty much always need to do if you’re leaving your own continent.

It doesn’t have to be as expensive as many parents believe, however. You don’t need a $25,000 tour and you also don’t need seven nights in an expensive resort. If you visit The World’s Cheapest Destinations and take your time, in the end you can spend far less than you would have driving to Disney World for a week.

Family travel requires more work, however, and you can do a lot better with proper planning than you would just winging it. So if you’re a new parent or one that would like to travel more, spending a little time and money on the right book can save you plenty of cash—and hassles.

I’ve been checking out a new book called Family on the Loose that does a good job of answering any questions you might have and answering a whole lot of others you should have had. It’s a thorough, well-organized book that leaves no travel stone unturned.

It’s by Bill Richards and E. Ashley Steele, two blogging parents with two daughters they’ve taken with them to 13 countries away from home. Obviously they hadn’t read The World’s Cheapest Destinations before embarking on these journeys since all of them were in Canada or Europe, so if there’s anything lacking in this book it’s advice on traveling in countries less developed than our own. With all the less savory aspects that go with it.

Most tactics for family travel are similar no matter where you’re going, however, so as a primer on how to do it right, Family on the Loose is a great resource. It is organized in three sections: Ready, Set… (planning); Go (flights and on the ground); and Traveling Home (preserving memories, international exploration at home). Packed in there are very useful chapters, text boxes, and checklists for what to remember or at least consider.

I especially like their advice on getting the kids involved at any age and there’s a cool packing checklist that uses pictures—so non-readers can still grab what they need from their dresser. There are table games to play at a restaurant while waiting for food to arrive, city scavenger hunt forms, museum activities, and other nice additions besides just advice on how to book a hotel and get around town.

Family on the Loose lists for $13.95 paperback and is under $10 for the Kindle. Get a copy here.

While I’m on the subject, Dale and Michelle Bartlett handed me a copy of Have Kids—Will Travel when I was speaking at the last TBEX bloggers convention. It took me a while to get to it and this family travel post was my incentive. 

As with the authors of the first book, this family also spent most of their travel time in Europe, so it’s focused on metros, trains, and budget airlines that are so prevalent there. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with a book like this though as even an experienced traveler like me will find tips and websites that were unknown before. I found myself dog-earning pages to go back to later when I was online.

This was a family of six people on the road, so if yours is too large to cram into a typical hotel room, this book will get you thinking about other options like home exchanges, park cabins, and using loyalty points for connecting rooms. With that many people to transport, this family has learned a thing or two about cheap flights and making the most of frequent flier miles as well.

You can see more at their site Havekids-Willtravel.com or get a copy of the book at Amazon.

If you do want to venture out with your family into the developing world, where things are cheaper but sometimes more difficult, my go-to recommendation has long been the Rough Guide book on Traveling with Babies and Young Children, but it seems to be out of print now. Next best is Lonely Planet’s version, but they devote as much of the book to destinations as planning and travel. Your best bet is probably to pull up the website for your local library and see if they have one or both of them. If you love one after checking it out, buy it.

You may have noticed the photo of my book, The World’s Cheapest Destinations, got switched out a while back in that picture to your right. It was a bit of a tease since the new version has been trickling out to different online retailers at different times, but now it’s out almost everywhere. This popular guide to the cheapest places to travel in the world is now in its 4th edition.

Prices fluctuate but don’t fundamentally change all that much in a span of three or four years unless there’s really high inflation (as in current Argentina), so if you have the 3rd edition it is still a good guide to how countries compare in terms of costs. If you have the 1st edition though, you might want to just put it in the recycling bin—I released that one a decade ago!

As I mentioned in this recent post on what has changed in the cheapest places to travel, I have made a few country changes. Turkey and Argentina are still great values for mid-range travelers, but are not the good deal they used to be for backpackers. To take their place, Cambodia’s infrastructure improvements enabled it to move from “honorable mention” to its own full-blown chapter and Slovakia replaces Turkey in Europe.

That means Asia gained a country and Latin America lost one, which wasn’t my intention, but unless people suddenly start finding a reason to visit Paraguay or Chavez gets replaced by a reform-minded president in Venezuela, I think the status is not going to change there. Apart from Chile and Brazil, the mainland Americas south of the U.S. are a great value, but Asia just has more bargain-basement destinations than anywhere else.

Get Your Copy!

So where can you get this book? It’s not yet online at Fishpond for Australia and New Zealand, but it should appear there in a week or two. Meanwhile, get it almost everywhere else online:

Direct from the publisher – paperback ($15,95 plus shipping) or PDF ($8.99, no shipping)

Kindle version from Amazon, Nook version from Barnes & Noble, Apple version from iBookstore  - all around $8.99.

Paperback from Barnes & Noble, paperback from Amazon.

Early Reviews

Want to know what a few other bloggers, editors, and book authors have to say? Here’s a random sampling of a few advance reviews.

“This is the book that anyone planning a vacation should read because it’s exactly what travelers who circle the globe all year long already know: it can be really cheap to travel, you just have to know where.”
- Christine Gilbert, editor of almostfearless.com

“As dollars get ever tighter, this book becomes all the more precious. But what’s most brilliant about it is that Leffel really doesn’t just think “cheap” – he thinks “smart.” As valuable a travel book as you’ll find today, in ways too numerous to even count, no matter what your budget.”
- Chris Epting, author of Led Zeppelin Crashed Here and Marilyn Monroe Dyed Here

“It’s no fluke that the world’s cheapest destinations are often also the most amazing to visit. This valuable guide inadvertently attests that money can’t buy happiness by recommending countries where the locals smile without it.”
– Bruce Northam, author of The Directions to Happiness: A 125-Country Quest for Life Lessons

“Warning: this book is hazardous to your ability to stay in one place. With your copy of The World’s Cheapest Destinations in hand, you can see the world while leaving your savings account untouched.”
- Chris Guillebeau, author of The $100 Startup

Buy this before you buy a plane ticket–it’s the best first investment for a budget traveler. Leffel provides real numbers and practical money-saving tips, and he wisely weighs the appeal of a country as well. As a result, The World’s Cheapest Destinations are places you really want to go.
- Zora O’Neill, author of The Rough Guide to Cancun & The Yucatan and Moon New Mexico

The World’s Cheapest Destinations is an entertaining read sharing the secrets that long-term travelers and backpackers have known for years. No room for excuses now, this book you’ll give the tools and information you need to travel the world in comfort on a budget. It’s an excellent resource for planning and researching your next vacation destination or around-the-world trip and is something that we’ll be using regularly for reference whenever we do our own travel planning.
- Deb and Dave, editors of ThePlanetD.com

“Tim Leffel has long been a guru of balancing the practicalities of cheap travel with a keen sense of judgement about the aesthetic value offered by varied countries around the world. In this newly researched and expanded edition, Tim’s easy conversational style turns the book into a page-turner, leaving you hungry to set off on the many paths he opens up to the traveler’s imagination.”
- Gregory Hubbs, editor-in-chief, TransitionsAbroad.com

“Tim is writing from the voice of a ‘Real Traveler,’ a person that has actually traveled the world for three years and lived in other countries for extended periods. This allows him to have the insight into what is the essential information needed.” – Andy Graham 15 years of Perpetual Travel and 90 countries – HoboTraveler.com

I’d be a pretty lame writer if I didn’t read a lot, so I try to read real books regularly. Here are a few I’ve checked out lately that are worth a look.  One travel book, one travel e-book, and one that’s a kick in the pants in any media.

First up, one I should have read before I ever went to Mexico City, or moved to Mexico for a year, but finally got to this past month after meeting David Lida twice. First Stop in the New World is the kind of book that only a bilingual, long-time resident of the city could write. It’s insightful, probing, and full of telling details the author went after like a real journalist. (For a while he was editor of a major magazine in the city.) It’ll teach you more about the world’s second-largest city than you knew you wanted to know and it does it in an amusing and enjoyable fashion. I’m certainly not the first to rave about this book; just check out the media reviews on Amazon. It’s a keeper.

He’s got a great blog on D.F. too. See DavidLida.com

This next one will be hard to read in bed unless you find a way to get it onto an iPad. It’s a landscape-layout e-book with lots of photos, so even if you’re geeky enough to convert it to ePub it won’t work on the Kindle. So curl up with your laptop and check out Surviving the Indian Railway.

It was written by Drew Gilbert, otherwise known as husband of the Almost Fearless blog‘s Christine Gilbert. This isn’t an exhaustive how-to book on traveling throughout India by train really, rather a travelogue about his 16-day whirlwind circumnavigating Inda by rail.

There is some good planning information though, including how to deal with the inherent frustrations of trying to be a flashpacker in a developing country. (Hint, you are a slave to scarce electrical outlets.) Plus there are plenty of essentials, like buying an Indrail pass, figuring out meals (you won’t go hungry), and dealing with the dreaded squat toilets on a moving train.

Reading this fun romp brought back lots of memories, some pleasant, some intentionally buried, but it shows you that traveling by rail in India is still one of the world’s most interesting adventures—and a screaming bargain. This is one of the best-looking e-books I can remember reading, with interesting photos on almost every page. That means of course, that there’s not really all that much text in the end. You can read the whole thing in an hour or two. But the price is right: $10. Click here to view more details

This last one doesn’t have much to do with travel unless you’ve had trouble actually making those travel plans a reality. The simple title is Do the Work and that’s what it’s imploring you to do. If the author was just some motivational guru this pithy little book wouldn’t have much merit, but he’s a successful fiction author, screenwriter, and author of The War of Art.

As you can probably guess from all the plates I have spinning in the air and the books I’ve published, getting things done and out the door has never been one of my biggest problems, but still I struggle now and then. I’ve also been involved in some group projects lately where some of my teammates definitely should have read this book, then read it again for good measure. Ideas are great, but if you’re not overpowering the resistance—from friends, from relatives, from partners, and from the little voice inside your head—then you’ll never meet the milestones and turn those ideas into something that matters. You won’t ship the product, you won’t make the investment, you won’t launch the promotion that’s going to make a big splash.

Or you won’t actually take that big trip around the world you’re planning. There are a million reasons not to go traveling and no shortage of people who will readily supply those reasons whether you want to hear them or not. Learning to power past the resistance and bring great things to life is the real key to success—and maybe to happiness too. Do the Work is good medicine on how to get there.

(In an odd pricing quirk, the hardcover of this book is actually cheaper than the Kindle version—and easier to read because of all the typeface changes. Get that one if you’re not on the move.)

After a long wait, my Travelers’ Tales book Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune is now out in a Kindle version. Subtitled The Contrarian Traveler’s Guide to Getting More for Less, it’s packed with advice on always getting more for your money every time you hit the road. It’s all about figuring out the variables and then exploiting them, any season or any place.

Sure, it’s a few years old, but it holds up fine because it talks about strategies to traveling well for less money, not about which particular website to visit to find the best airfare deal or where to turn for the best price on a room at the Marriott.

If you’re a seasoned traveler already, you don’t need this. Most of your relatives probably need it though, so remember that you can easily gift a Kindle book: you buy it and enter their e-mail address.

If they don’t believe I know what I’m talking about, send them to this Travel + Leisure article where the book just got mentioned. It’s on your local newsstand right now if you want to check out the print version.

Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune – Kindle version.