My fiance and I are constantly on an airplane visiting different parts of the world and exploring. One of the questions I field most is how I can afford to take so many trips around the world and stay at luxury hotels/have luxury experiences. (For reference, this post is publishing while my fiance and I are in Copenhagen! Travel guide to come 🙂 )
So, I decided to share my ultimate travel money saving hacks with you all. They are split into two categories: What I do ahead of travel to save money and what I do once I am in a foreign country to save money while there. Read on for our favorite money saving travel hacks.
Saving Money Before Traveling:
Maximizing Work Travel for Personal Travel: One of the best things you can do is reap all of the rewards from the work travel you do in any given year. Whenever I fly somewhere for a conference or work trip, I try to book my flights with Delta, if possible. I also try to book a hotel in a Starwood property. Why? Because this is a surefire way to rack up points at both Delta and Starwood that we can then use for personal travel. I should note, when I travel for personal reasons, I am not loyal to a specific airline — we tend to pick the airline that is cheapest and most convenient. I am a hotel snob, so we also don’t tend to stay at Starwoods. But, I will cash in both the airline points for free flights for our personal travel and I tend to use the Starwood points when I have to stay at a hotel for a friend’s wedding, so that it doesn’t cost us money.
Have a Travel-Friendly Credit Card: One of the best things I’ve done is open a J.P. Morgan Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card. Yes, it has a $450 yearly fee, BUT in my opinion, it is well worth it. Their points program is the best in the business. You get one point for every regular dollar spent, and three points for any dollar spent on travel. These triple-point categories include: restaurants, taxis, ubers, airfare, hotels, museums, etc. I’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of points on this card and redeem them for more travel. Honestly, it’s rare these days that I actually pay for a flight because I just keep using these points I’ve accumulated for airfare.
You can also trade the points in for cash back, but if you use the points on travel, you get a better exchange rate.
Now, the $450 fee is misleading. Each year, you get $300 in travel credits. So, once you have a few meals at a restaurant, take some taxis or book a trip, you are reimbursed $300. Also, this fee includes free Global Entry or TSA precheck for you, which makes travel so much less painful.
Use Your Personal Credit Card for Work Expenses: This is one I wish I had started doing sooner, because it has created SO many points for me. For more than a decade, I’ve had a work Amex that I use for expenses. On average, I spent around $1,800 per month on it, one months that I don’t travel for work. On months that I do travel, that number is much higher.
Earlier this year, a work colleague mentioned that he puts all of his expenses on his personal credit card and has work reimburse him. This was mind blowing to me, since most of my expenses are items that will get me triple points: restaurants, coffee shops and travel! So, I switched to this and have been steadily racking up extra points ever since.
Book Airfare Early: Our leisure travel is usually determined by which places on our bucket list have cheapest airfare for the time of year we want to go. That means we plan out our trips at least six months in advance to secure the best airfare. This works. Case in point, we booked our flights roundtrip from New York to Tokyo and back for less than $600. We also just booked our honeymoon airfare from New York to South Africa and back for less than $1,000. These are long haul flights, but if you track airfare early, you can get some great rates. This is less important when booking hotels, which don’t fluctuate as greatly.
We use Skyscanner pretty frequently when picking airfare, because I find it gives us the best rates and it also is creative with mixing and matching airlines for the lowest fares. They also have this wonderful feature where you can say what dates you want to travel and where from, and then it pulls up airfares during that period around the world.
Saving Money While You Are Traveling:
Public Transit: One of the single most important travel hacks to save big bucks while traveling is to use public transit. Cabs in other cities can be prohibitively expensive (In Tokyo, the cab from the airport to downtown is around $150!). So, we always try to figure out how to get from the airport to the city center via public transit, usually saving around $70 or so. Then, once we are situated in the city, we tend to get an unlimited public transit card that gets us to all of our destinations without having to pay for cabs.
In addition to saving money, this is a great way to see the city. Rather than being in the backseat of a cab playing on our phones, we are actively exploring a foreign country, mingling with its people on the subway and it is usually a lot faster than driving. My friend and I have fond memories of taking a city bus in Hong Kong as the only non Chinese passengers,, so it leads to some fun travel memories.
Airport Lounges: We are part of the Priority Pass program that gets us free access to airport lounges at hundreds of airports globally. So, we tend to check into the lounge upon arrival (I’m actually writing this from a lounge in Copenhagen!). We then have wifi until the flight and free coffee, alcohol, snacks, etc. rather than paying for overpriced airport food and drinks.
City Tourism Cards: If you’re going to a city that is rich with history, and you intend to museum hop and the like, look into whether the city has a tourism card. I’ve bought these cards in London and Paris, and for a flat free, it offers you unlimited access to some of the best museums and touristy spots and skip-the-line privileges. In Paris, my girlfriends and I used this card and it saved us north of 50 euros daily.
Airbnb: So this is a hack that paid for our travel and then some. Until we moved into our new place, my fiance and I would Airbnb our Manhattan apartment any time we traveled out of town. We would get around $100/night for it, so it totally offset the cost of our travel abroad. If you have the flexibility to do this yourself, we highly recommend it. You can read my guide to Airbnbing your apartment here.
Would love to hear your travel saving tips, as well. Leave them in the comments or email us!
More Of Our Travel Guides:
Travel Guide: London’s Notting Hill
Travel Guide: Where to Eat & Apres Ski in Zermatt
Travel Guide: Zurich’s Hotel Glockenhof
Travel Guide: Zermatt’s Riffelalp Resort