Travel Tips

Welcome to my travel tips & resources section! This is where I get into the nitty gritty of travel and hopefully provide lots of useful tips on making your trip the best it can be, travel hacks, packing guides, resources for living abroad, and of course plenty of budget travel tips and practical advice on how to save money and take that trip of a lifetime.

I pride myself on bagging bargains, finding fantastic flight deals and acing accommodation. Even though we often stay in hostels, I can honestly say we’ve very rarely stayed in a bad one and it’s saved us bags of money. I’ve travelled to Paris for £10 return by bus, flew to Hawaii for $300 (and only spent $300 while we were there), and I’ve done a handful of fun day trips to Europe for £40 return.

I also live for street food, take overnight journeys so I can make the most of my days (AND save a night’s accommodation) and we’ve even slept in the car for free.

Who said travel needed to be glamorous?

I make exceptions for bucket-list opportunities – isn’t that why we travel, after all? – but cutting costs on everything else means I’ve been able to travel to far more places than I would otherwise. This page will show you how to do the same!

My best resources for finding cheap deals are:

Flights: Skyscanner, Kayak, Jack’s Flight Club (UK, although for Americans: Scott’s Cheap Flights), Secret Flying. Signing up to your favourite airlines will also mean you get top deals and sales alerts emailed straight to you! For Skyscanner, you can also set alerts for when flights go down in price, enabling you to book at the best time. Skyscanner is also brilliant for the “everywhere” search option!

Accommodation: Booking.com, Hotels.com (I always compare these two), Hostelworld. You can often find better prices by finding a property on those and then booking direct. We found better deals for Asia on Agoda but haven’t used it for Japan. You can find some good deals and unique accommodation with Airbnb, but generally I try to avoid them and they often don’t work out that cheap anyway.

Trains/buses: Megabus (UK/USA), trainline (UK), Flixbus (Europe)

Tours: My go-to these days is Get Your Guide – if you use my affiliate link here, I’ll earn a little commission!

Other: For local deals such as restaurants or UK breaks, I use Groupon and itison has become a particular favourite too. Unfortunately, as of 2024 Travelzoo now charges a yearly membership (I’m still a member right now as the first year for existing members is free).

And don’t forget cashback: I use cashback sites for almost all of my online shopping! I’ve got hundreds off my purchases for doing nothing extra. I also use it for some of the above sites, including Hotels (they no longer have Booking.com, annoyingly!), Megabus, trainline and even Groupon, meaning I get even cheaper travel! If you sign up using my link, you’ll get an extra £10.