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 and splash out on those once-in-a-lifetime moments. 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 after all their fees they often don’t work out that cheap anyway. I only really use them for something quirky.
It’s worth noting that Booking and Hotels have rewards systems. Booking.com has Genius levels which can save you loads of money, and even on the first level you get 10% off a lot of hotels. Hotels.com changed their rewards recently so you essentially “earn” money on each stay, and it’s actually pretty good.
🚂 Trains/buses: Megabus (UK/USA), trainline (UK), Flixbus (Europe)
Related: the best app for getting around cities is Citymapper. It’s often more reliable than Google Maps!
🚀 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. Wowcher has some good deals, but take their travel ones with a pinch of salt; they use some unscrupulous tour operators who have unreal prices for a reason. I have however had some good hotel breaks within the UK with them.
Travelzoo is no longer free but some operators they regularly feature are Best Online Holidays, Travelodeal (both mostly Europe) Blue Bay Travel (Caribbean).
💰 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.com (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.
One other quickie: cash. I always use Money Saving Expert’s tool to compare foreign currency – this has saved me loads! Never buy cash at airports, and never use Euronet cash machines. Try to withdraw from bank affiliated machines. I also have a Revolut card which has zero foreign fees and good exchange rates, as well as some free cash withdrawals. On that note, when paying by card, if it gives you a choice of currency, always select the local currency.
I also love finding unique, weird & wonderful things! My go-to resource is Atlas Obscura. I also love HostUnusual and UniqHotels for unique accommodation.
I have lots of other tips for saving money to travel and while travelling below.
