When the 4th edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations book came out in January, I posted some advance review comments from various other writers and bloggers. Now that a few months have gone by, here’s what people have said in the early reviews.

 

“Even as an experienced traveler, with some 60 countries under my belt (many of them cheapies), I still was able to find the book useful and interesting.

The World’s Cheapest Destinations will be helpful for travelers at different stages: newbies who would like to start traveling to other countries for the first time, individuals with some international travel experience who are looking to push their comfort zone a little bit, and folks just looking for a little more luxury without spending more money. This book tells you where and how to look.”

- Stephen Bugno of GoMad Nomad

“If you’re currently considering traveling to destinations where your ‘travel money is worth a fortune,’ I highly recommend you pick up the fourth edition of Tim Leffel’s well-researched, chock-full-of-details book The World’s Cheapest Destinations.”

- Kara Williams, The Vacation Gals

“If you’re up for a wry sense of humor and aren’t put off by the occasional unabashed assessment, The World’s Cheapest Destinations is not only an easy read and a money-saving Bible, but also a veteran traveler’s look at places that many travelers in the U.S. tend to leave off their dream lists.”

- Kristin Mock, freelance travel writer

“The 4th edition of Tim’s book has totally inspired us to travel even more by visiting cheaper places.”

- Ashley Steele, Wandering Educators

“Leffel wastes no time outlining some of the world’s cheapest destinations in a concise and honest fashion. Refreshingly pointed, this compact guide is an ideal handbook for those looking to stretch their money further.”

- Stuart McDonald, editor of Travelfish.org

“His advice ranges from the common sense (albeit often forgotten) to the wise been-there-done-that genre. The most intriguing reason to pick up this book is its nature to inure interest in destinations that may have been left by the wayside on your travel itinerary, but are an absolute must-see for any global traveler worth his weight in passport stamps.”

- Ramsey Qubein, Examiner.com

“With a little ingenuity, a bit of creativity and this book, you’ll be able to travel many places in the world you never thought possible. The World’s Cheapest Destinations is hands down the best guide to traveling the world on a budget.”

- Beth Whitman, editor of Wanderlust And Lipstick

“The very first step to saving money when on the road is to figure out where you can stretch your money the furthest. Due to the ebb and flow of international finance, wars, and natural disasters… the cheapest places are always changing. Tim offers a great way to hit this moving target.”

- Doug Lansky, author of more than 10 travel books including First Time Around the World

“Tim is correct: where you travel has more to do with saving money then how you travel. The cheapest hostel dorm bunk in Zurich will be more expensive than a large, quality hotel room in Bangkok. I’ve been to most of the countries outlined by Tim and can attest that they are great value destinations. This book is a must for affordable travel planning.”

- Gary Arndt, editor of Everything-Everywhere.com

 

Get Your Copy!

So where can you get this book? Pretty much everywhere 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.

If you’re in Australia or New Zealand, you can order a copy from Fishpond.

Take a hit of the April issue of Perceptive Travel and you might reach enlightenment. Or at least be entertained.

We’ve got weirdness all around this time, starting with a story about an archaeological site in Panama where the caretakers believes it’s really a place the aliens visited way back when. See What to Do About Barriles?

James Dorsey is back with another tale of stumbling into a village in Africa and finding himself the instant elder. He wants to buy a souvenir pipe. They just want him to smoke khat with them. So it’s time for Passing the Pipe in Ethiopia.

Anja Mutic makes her debut with a tale about her first trip to India—and therefore her first impressions—being part of a luxury travel press trip designed to only show the edited version of the country. See India of Light and Darkness.

Naturally we’ve got the scoop on new books and music worth checking out, so see the April travel book reviews from Susan Griffith and the April world music reviews from Laurence Mitchell.

Win some travel gear!

Each month we give away something cool to someone who follows the webzine via the monthly e-mail newsletter or the Facebook page. See links for both on the home page and enter. Last month two readers won a nice new Armitron watch and this month we’re giving away some $100+ hiking shoes from Wolverine. What are you waiting for?

If you know someone about to hit retirement age, like your parents maybe, here’s a good travel book for them that has a chapter from yours truly.

65 Things to Do When You Retire – Travel is a collection of essays on various aspects of travel for the older set. Yes, there are 65 essays in here and the list price is 20 bucks, so a great deal. (It’s only $11 at Amazon as I write this.) All the profits go to cancer research charities too. (We submitted our work pro bono.)

It’s broken up into sections on prepping, deciding where to go, ways to travel, voluntourism options, and much more. It’s a primer on the possibilities and how to get the most from travel in the golden years.

My essay will not be a surprise to readers of this blog or my books. It’s called “Pick the right place and traveling is not expensive.” Hopefully I’ll convince a few seniors to go beyond Western Europe, RV travel, or a Caribbean cruise.

I was happy to appear alongside some other writers I know of and respect. Ed Perkins actually has a guest section in one of my books. Here he does an overview of senior travel deals.

Janice Waugh heads up the Solo Traveler blog and does an essay on traveling alone.

Rick Ingersoll writes the Frugal Travel Guy blog, one of my favorites for finding points/miles opportunities and he shares some advice on leveraging good credit for lots of frequent flier miles and free hotel stays.

I was on a trade show panel once that TV host and author Richard Bangs was moderating  and here he talks about the bucket list topper Machu Picchu in Peru.

Donna Hull of the boomer travel site My Itchy Travel Feet contributes a piece on being so taken by Montana when visiting that she moved there.

Barbara Weibel of Hole in the Doughnut talks about making local connections when traveling.

I met Judith Fein at an adventure travel conference and now she writes for me sometimes, including this Azores public art story recently in Perceptive Travel. Her story is on finding a spiritual connection in Israel.

As you can tell just from these examples, it’s a delightfully mixed bag, without repetition. Editor Mark Evan Chimsky did a nice job of picking people with something interesting to say and then keeping them from ranbling on for more than six or seven pages. Get 65 Things to Do When You Retire – Travel for the friend or relative who can use it. This is a thoughtful gift that won’t set you back much and it’s helping a good cause.

Get it at Amazon U.S., UK, or Canada. Oddly, there’s no Kindle version so far.

Want a copy for free? Sign up for the new RSS feed or e-mail version top right of this page—rss icon or e-mail box—then leave a comment below on why you would want the book. (I’ve switched from Google Feedburner to Feedblitz, so you can delete your old feed and keep the new if you end up with both.) Deadline April 15.

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.