Tips For Low Budget Traveling
Although nowadays the internet is full of blogs and other travel-related websites sharing tips on cheap flights and various other advice on how to travel cheaply, I keep running into many people asking me basically the same questions and telling me the same excuses for why they can't travel.
I want to encourage and help everyone to travel, thus I've also put all the useful information and experience I've gathered during my travels, and would like to share my personal tips, recommendations and mainly know-how here as well to make your travels easier and cheaper, and to show you that (I know it sounds like a cliché).
Traveling/Transportation
Before I give a particular attention to the individual means of transport to help you save the money, let me start from the very bottom. I travel a lot, but I really don't know everything. Neither does Google thought. But thanks to the internet we have lots of other options - helpful tools. Here are the websites I use to find connection/tickets between A and B.
Rome2Rio - this is a website that uses a very good algorithm to help you find connections between two places. It searches for any kind of transport, including buses, trains, carsharing, and even ferries and planes. Like anything in the world, Rome2rio is not perfect, but it words very well, shows you the particular companies and estimated ticket price. I'm sure in majority of cases you will make do with it.
Omio (formerly GoEuro) - based on a pretty much similar principle as Rome2rio, but unlike the previous, Omio allows you to book the tickets directly after you've found your connection
Bus Radar - it works better in terms of comparing prices of the individual transport providers
1. Plane
I know this sentence sounds like a cliché, but it applies to traveling by airplane too. Traveling by airplanes is easier (and cheaper) than before, especially in Europe. The times when flying was something noble are a history. Nowadays, you can travel to many places of all around the world for pretty reasonable prices. If you still haven't found out, let me help you now.
Use flight search engines to find the cheapest flights
The flight search engines - aggregators - are websites using an algorithm that is able to crawl the entire internet, search and check all the booking engines, airline websites and travel agencies to bring you the cheapest possible price of the desired fly ticket, so you don't have to do it manually by yourself. If you learn to use them right, they may really help you save a lot of time and money as well.
There are many other flight search engines on the internet, but I'm pretty sure in most cases you will just make do with those. They are the best anyway.
All over the internet, you can also run into many websites on which you will find actual good deals. Behind these websites are usually people whose hobby is to search the internet and airlines websites and find the cheapest flights thanks to sale, but most often system errors. If you are quick, sometimes you can flight to places you would never think of for a ridiculous price.
For the Czech market, you can also check out these:
While the mentioned flight search engines may give you an idea of most of the lines and prices, their drawback is that they won't always cover all low-cost airlines. Another thing to take into account is that they are very useful for finding cheap connections, but the options shown on their website are not always the cheapest way. And that's why I usually use them to find flight connections and airlines between destinations, but then I go and search manually on the airline's websites.
Jirka's additional tips for cheap flying
- Delete cookies! Most of the (low budget) airlines use various algorithms. Very often, if you return back to the search, the price of the flight you are looking at will be higher. It's because the automatic system rise the price for popular destinations. Just delete your cookies so it looks like you just come for the first time. You will see the price will be different again. You can also try it from a different computer. In fact, you can bear in mind and apply this to anything on the internet.
- Many low budget airlines change their prices in the evenings of Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays For example, at Wizzair they do in the evenings of Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday
- Traveling by plane will be in most cases much more expensive on weekends (Friday, Saturday), whereas plane tickets are usually cheapest in the middle of a week (especially Wednesday)
Here is the list of the low-budget airlines. Low-cost (European) airlines
