Saving on something — This is not the greed or poverty of a person, but the reasonable receipt of benefits. And benefit is nothing more than income. I have already written an article on this topic: how to save on food while traveling and created a page — tourist reminder. Continuing to develop the topic of travel life hacks, today I will add some more tips. Let’s immediately clarify what the word life hack means.
A life hack is practical, practical advice or a trick that allows you to save money and time. Your trip can become not only cheaper, but also much brighter.
This article contains tips and recommendations received not only from me and from my travel experience, but also from the experience of my friends and acquaintances. And so, let’s go.
Life hacks for booking accommodation abroad
1. Look for apartments through airbnb with great reviews. The review must be written by a Russian-speaking person with a photo. I save the photo and “run it” through the site for searching people by photo. I find people and write to them – please give me the direct number or email of the owner of the apartment.
Saving 10-20% percent, because Having the WhatsApp number of the owner of the property does not require you to pay airbnb commission, taxes, and you can also get an additional discount by communicating with the owner directly. In this way, without commission, airbnbs were located in many European capitals.
2. It is almost always more profitable to book all chain hotels on the website of hotel chains, and not on search aggregators. You can write a small book about this: hotels have an obligation to maintain price parity, but on their websites they introduce new room categories that are not present anywhere else or change the included services in order to get out of the comparison conditions.
A prerequisite is to register in the loyalty program, then you will immediately receive rates for participants who are also not included in the comparison program. In addition, even within individual chains there are differences: Design hotels is part of Marriott (in fact, it almost entirely belongs to them), but on the chain’s website the prices are 30% cheaper (and until recently they also offered an upgrade to 1 category – now they don’t).
Don’t forget about promotions
And of course, check all sorts of promotions, even if you can’t reduce the price, then in some cases up to half the cost of the room, or even more, you can recoup points or get some paid services for free. You can read about all this in the hotels section on Belka.
3. In Germany and Austria, the cheapest way is to find hotels on Maps.me and write to them directly. Relevant for small Guest Houses.
4. In small hotels in some countries you can negotiate a discount if you pay in cash.
5. For personal trips, I always book accommodations through Arbnb. Only the first experience was unsuccessful, then it became clear how to choose housing correctly. And in almost all cases the apartments were luxurious and inexpensive.
Early booking
Life hack – owners often give a big discount for 7 days of booking. And even if you plan to spend 5 days in some European city, sometimes it is cheaper to book an apartment for a week than for 5 days. This is especially true for Holland and neighboring countries that are expensive to live in.
And there is also a rule on this resource – if at least one of the parameters specified by the owner does not correspond to reality, he is obliged to move you at his own expense to another housing. Example. In Lisbon, from a one-room apartment in a residential area, we moved for a whole week to a luxurious two-room apartment in the very center of the city. Moreover, the windows were noise-insulated, so not a sound could be heard from the bars and clubs below.
6. If you prefer to book on your own, it would be a good idea to look at the cost of a package tour for comparison. They are often cheaper than the flight alone. And it’s also suitable as a plane ticket.
7. Book apartments on airbnb or rooms on Booking.com with new accounts.
Each time I registered new accounts on airbnb and received a discount on the first trip of 2100 rubles. Now they have started tracking. But if you are traveling with a group, then register for someone who does not have an account.
Invite a friend
Booking also has an “invite a friend” referral program. He will receive 1000 rubles. and you will receive 1000 rubles. To use it, a friend must book and check in. A month after leaving, you and your friend receive real 1000 rubles on your card. It helped me a lot when we were traveling in Europe as a group.
Remember, if you buy something on the Internet, it is often easy to find a promotional code for a discount on a particular resource on the Internet. Just type into a search engine, for example: ozon travel promo code and this applies not only to tourism, but to all online stores in general.
8. An excellent hotel tonight application – an aggregator of suites and good hotels at a standard price. They post rooms that no one booked (on the day of arrival or the day before) so they vacationed in Paris in a two-story suite with a tower view for 100 euros per night.
Trains
9. For those who like to travel abroad by train, look not only for a direct ticket, but also a separate ticket to a border checkpoint in the Russian Federation and a ticket on the same train to your destination. Often the amount is cheaper than one ticket. Tested on the Moscow-Tallinn train.
10. They also suggest that using a similar scheme it is profitable to buy tickets for schoolchildren; the discount does not apply to direct communication, and if you split it up, it will go to the Russian part of the route.
11. Advice for Thailand if you are traveling not only to Phuket and Pattaya. We arrive in any city by bus. And without going far from the bus station, we look at hotels nearby. As a rule, they are not available on Booking, because… they do not have a license to accommodate travelers. Their prices are usually almost half the price of those listed on Booking.com, and the amenities are the same, with a price tag for locals. Many of these hotels are listed on Maps.me.
Lifehacks for profitable purchase of air tickets
12. It’s trivial and known to many, but overall it’s a “top” life hack. “Nesterovsky train”. Or to Chernyshevskaya or to Kaliningrad as a last resort. And get off in Vilnius. It turns out to be much cheaper than a direct train. And Ryanair low-cost airlines fly from Vilnius and Kaunas around Europe for pennies.
13. Buy a special bag for low-cost airlines. Google the size and airline name and you’ll easily find deals.
14. On airline ticket search engines (skyscanner, aviasales, etc.), choose Norway as your country (the currency can be rubles and the language is Russian), oddly enough, in expensive Norway, agencies sell tickets cheaper than everywhere else, sometimes the difference is significant.
A treatise can be written about currencies. It works exactly if you indicated prices in a currency, you know for sure that the debit will be in the same currency and your card is in foreign currency. What is written off from the card in another currency is not the same as what you see after the purchase in the Internet bank. The amount will be calculated in 5 days and debited from the card again. When the ruble was either 80 or 60, such “cunning people” got up to 30,000 rubles (the bank will never allow itself to be deceived)
15. At the beginning and end of the seasons you can fly and fly to the Dominican Republic for $100 from Moscow and to Moscow. Applies to all tourist resorts.
16. Take an empty bottle with you to the airport. Refill it at the drinking fountain after security. Now you have drinking water for free.
Read my article free air tickets.
Lifehacks for bank cards
17. Call your bank before traveling and ask to open the possibility of conducting transactions in all countries. Before inserting a card into an ATM, anywhere, check the buttons and card slot for skimming devices. Nowhere has cache been as useful as when traveling (especially somewhere in the world)
18. Be sure to take a spare bank card with you. Before withdrawing money from an ATM, transfer the amount you need to a spare card. The ATM can swallow the card, and you will be left in a foreign country without money and with problems, and at least you will get away with a little blood.
Miscellaneous life hacks
19. Tip for those who like to sleep in with breakfast included at the hotel. When checking in, immediately specify that you will have breakfast in your room. This will not be a lunch box, but a normal breakfast in plates. In good hotels they will even set the table.
20. Photos of documents, tickets, insurance, accommodation, etc. store in the cloud and remember access. Helpful in many situations. For example, in case of loss, theft, loss of phone and documents.
21. Most likely, many people know this and it works in many Asian countries. We go to eat where there are no signs in English, it’s usually two or more times cheaper. This applies not only to food, but also to repairing electronics, dental offices, etc.
Documents, SIM card receipts
22. If there is no space left in your passport, peel off completed visas. You free up an entire page.
23. Don’t throw away receipts from KFS, Burger King, McDonald’s. Both in Europe and in Asia, on the receipts below there are links to the site for sending a review. Leave a review and they will give you a digital code for your next purchase. This could be a 10% discount, ice cream, two chickens, fries, etc.
24. Also known to many, but not everyone. If you have debts and an evil bailiff has restricted your travel, you can leave through Belarus, on the same “Nesterov train” to Lithuania (if Schengen is available). Or to Minsk. Continue flying without any problems.
100% works by train, most likely by bus too. By plane it’s a more difficult question; many got through, but some were turned away. They say that the bases have been united or are about to be united.
25. Buy a SIM card for travel, it’s much more profitable than roaming!
26. Take the medications that you personally need. In Europe you can’t buy almost anything without a prescription.
Applications
25. I always download the maps.me application for offline maps. And be sure to take excursions from the App Store, so as not to spend money on a guide.
27. Even introverts sometimes feel sad, so if you don’t want to explore new places alone or spend money on a boring guide, download Tinder and go see the city with a local handsome guy.
For mountainous terrain and trekking, download only ViewRanger with an elevation map if you want to live.
28. I advise everyone to use the Google Translate application. And first of all, its ability to automatically translate through the camera. In countries whose language is very far from English or Russian, this feature is very helpful when choosing products in stores or reading signs.
Just note:
- Download the desired language in advance for offline use
- It’s better not to try to translate into Russian, it’s not always clear, but into English is a different matter.
Voila! Now you can rummage through, for example, Finnish hand creams and choose the one that suits you.
29. Here’s another cool service, go to eatwith.com. This is a site where you select the city of arrival, and they offer you a dinner-party from the locals. Each organizer has their own card, video, menu, etc.
A unique opportunity to feel the atmosphere of the country, and for extroverts to broaden their horizons, practice English and meet new people. In Rome, for example, you can visit Barbara. Usually this is 30-40 people from all over the world. For the price of dinner in a restaurant, you can meet so many new acquaintances at once. Especially relevant for people traveling alone.
30. Don’t put off your journey until later!
Life is short, you just might not have time.
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