Holiday Travel Budget Tips and Tricks
Planning to Travel for the Holidays?
Everyone knows the holidays can be tricky times to travel and expensive as well. Particularly in the winter, around Thanksgiving and Christmas, domestic and international travel can skyrocket. Approximately 37% of the United Kingdom’s inbound flights occurred around that time of year in 2016. In the United States, domestic travel tends to be the most popular, and many prefer their own personal vehicles. However you choose to travel, it can be an expensive adventure any time of year. Here are a few tips on creating and maintaining a holiday travel budget so you won’t break the bank!
Creating Your Budget
As with any budget, creating one specifically for holidays all depends on your personal preferences. How much do you want to allocate for eating out at restaurants versus cooking wherever you may be lodging? What about for entertainment purposes? Don’t forget about travelling within the location of your holiday. All of these factors are important to your budget, and it may vary depending on you or your family’s priorities. If the holiday requires gifts (such as Christmas), are the gifts going to be part of your holiday budget or purchased before? These are all necessary elements of your own plan. There are numerous websites available to make life a little easier when creating a budget.
Maintain Your Budget
After creating your budget and embarking on your holiday, it is imperative that you track your spending to make sure that you stay within the outlines of your budget. Sometimes you may go over budget in an area, but as long as you track your spending (either with receipts or a little notebook, perhaps), you can still stay within the overall total you have set aside specifically for your holiday travel.
Now that you have your budget, here are some tips concerning travel itself.
Tip #1: Travel on Off-Peak Days and/or Cheaper Times
This mostly applies for flights and trains, but can be applicable for car trips as well. Though travelling in December may be unavoidably more expensive than flying in, say, April, you can still use search engines and certain websites to find the cheapest options available to your holiday travel budget tips and tricks.
For flying, websites such as Google Flights or SkyScanner are especially useful in narrowing down the cheapest and still reliable option. Off-peak days tend to be days outside of the Thursday-Friday range, especially Mondays and Tuesdays. If you can afford the loss of work time, these days are much cheaper and quicker to travel.
With car trips, be sure to avoid leaving or being stuck in large cities around the end of the 5 o’clock workday, as that can impede your progress.
Tip #2: Make and Bring Your Own Snacks
Flying, trains, and car rides can all be made a bit cheaper with premade snacks. It is a given you will get hungry during your journey, so save yourself from inflated airport prices or ridiculous gas station snacks by bringing your own.
Tip #3: Take a Look at Hostels and Airbnb
Though this option may not be for you or your situation, hostels do offer private rooms with locks, safes, and ensuite bathrooms that can still be significantly cheaper than hotels. Be sure to check out the reviews of the hostel or AirBnB, but typically the undeserved reputation that comes along with these is ill-informed. Hostels and AirBnBs can be just as comfortable, and they tend to be cheaper, clean, and offer amenities that even a hotel might not. Do not limit your options, especially when it comes to saving money!
These tips, and more you can find online, could prove instrumental in your endeavor to save money and keep to a budget on your holiday travels. Happy travels!