How To Prioritize Experiences Not Expenses With These 4 Travel Tips

I want you to come home from your next holiday with amazing memories, not an amazing amount of debt; no bills or outstanding expenses to dampen your holiday glow. Here are four of my favourite ways to ensure you do just that and get all the experiences not all the expenses. These tips can help you both save money on your next adventure AND budget, save and pay for your trip BEFORE you go. 

1. Plan, Book and Pay Ahead 

Planning ahead can also help you look at things like avoiding peak times, although this isn’t always possible with school and work schedules. When our kids were in elementary school, we chose to take them out of school to visit Maui in May, it was a fraction of the price of going at spring break. Even if you aren’t flexible on the time of year you can travel just being flexible on the day of the week you leave can make a huge difference on the cost of flights. 

2. Discounts  

A little time spent searching for travel discounts can go a long way in reducing your costs. Discounts come in many flavors. Here are a few of my favourites. 

• Points and Extras:  I take advantage of airline points programs and sign each of my family members up for the frequent flyer programs for the airlines we use most often, although these points don’t go as far anymore, I have been able to redeem them for free flights. I’ve had even more success by choosing a credit card aimed at travellers, this lets us earn points quickly to redeem on travel, provides extra insurance, and covers baggage loss. Even though we didn’t have enough points for the family to travel to Europe, we were able to redeem these for one-way flights, which helped reduce our costs. Taxes and fees aren’t covered by points and can add up fast, so it’s important to look at when is the best time to use your points. We also use a private car insurance provider that extends our insurance to rental vehicles, which has been another cost saver when travelling. 
• Discount Travel Sites: There are so many sites (Kayak, Expedia, Trip Advisor, Booking.com) that you can use to find discounts, get ideas and recommendations from other travellers, and plan your holiday.  With accommodations, I often have a look at these sites to get ideas but typically buy directly with the hotel, they will often match the online discounts you see on the travel sites. For flights, I use Google Flights, which shows me all the airline options and compares costs. I then typically buy direct from the airline I have chosen. I also have a few favourite blogs that I subscribe to that alert me to last minute or highly discounted travel. My favourites are YVR Deals and Vacationstogo.com, though you have to act fast, you can find some amazing deals. I found cheap flights to Hawaii over Spring Break (I know, I couldn’t believe it either) for less than we could fly anywhere in Canada. It’s worth the time to find a couple of local sites that do all the deal hunting for you.  
• Coupons and Savings: Before I make most travel purchases, I do a quick online Google search that can save me even more. I search for my purchase (hotel, attraction, tickets) with the word “coupon code” e.g., Cursed Child Theatre Tickets London Coupon Code. It takes me about 5 minutes but can often result in a discount code or tips like signing up for a newsletter and getting 10% off your purchase. I also look at whether there are any affiliate discounts, often you get an additional discount because you have an AAA membership or a Costco Card. We just booked a rental vehicle through Costco Travel and saved about 150$ off the posted rate. 

3. Free is Good 

As you can tell by now, I am willing to do the work ahead to enjoy the most amazing holidays with my family and friends without all the extra costs. Here’s how: 

• Whenever possible, we say no to all the extras, we don’t pay for luggage, we travel with carry-on, which is honestly easier. We don’t pay to select our seats in advance, although you can do this for free when you are travelling with kids, you get the idea.  
• We embed ourselves in the local culture, we often stay at Airbnb’s so that we can get to know the community we are staying in. The local knowledge, recommendations and tips that we have gained from our hosts has been invaluable.  We seek out free experiences that let us get to know the place we are visiting. In London, we visited the Skygarden, a free public rooftop garden with a view of London, that allowed us to orient to the city on our first day. In Maui, we’ve checked out the Shops at Wailea who host free public events daily, like lei making, weaving and music lessons.  
• We take public transportation; this one is fun for kids of all ages. We were on a bus in Montreal a couple of summers ago and told our kids to push the button to get off and they looked at us like we had two heads, clearly, we had failed our kids as they didn’t know how to get off a city bus. At the end of our trip, they said riding the metro was one of their trip highlights (all this because we chose to stay in a less expensive suburb of Montreal instead of staying right downtown). 
• We skip the tours, but not the experience. There is so much great information online that you really can choose and create your own adventure at a fraction of the cost. Our family LOVES food and I noticed that many cities have food tours and cooking lessons to experience a new place. We considered booking one of these, but it was pricey for the four of us, instead a friend sent us a travel food blog for a couple of the cities we were visiting, we watched it with kids, picked our favourites and then visited these spots on our own food tours in both London and Paris. We also looked at whether we needed to hire a guide to deepen our experience of some of the historic sites we visited in Europe, in the end we chose not to and instead listened to some of the free guided tours available online, you can find these for museums as well. We also looked into the City Pass options that are available in most cities but usually found it didn’t include enough of the places we wanted to visit to make it less expensive than buying tickets directly.
• We choose accommodations where we have the option to make our own food. While not free, we have to eat, even if we don’t go anywhere. It quickly gets expensive for a family to eat out three times a day, so we rarely do. Instead we usually pick a meal each day to eat out or try some local treats, remember our motto, it isn’t a holiday if you can’t have gelato or ice-cream all the time. When our kids were younger this grew out of their pickiness, no one likes splurging on a meal out where your kids don’t eat anything or the alternative where they end up eating chicken strips and fries at every meal. As our kids got older and we found ourselves more focused on experiencing the places we travelled (no judgement here, some of our best trips when the kids were younger were to all-inclusives, where our biggest decision was pool or beach and we didn’t have to do the dishes, now that is a holiday) we found that vacation rentals allowed us the best of both worlds, access to a kitchen and laundry, which cut costs, and a way to really get to see how the locals live. One of our favourite things to do when we visit a new country is check out the grocery store and see what different things we can find.    

4. Local Adventures 

I’ve talked a lot about holidays that require a lot of travel and planning and while these are amazing adventures, they don’t happen all the time. I am a firm believer that you don’t have to go far or get on an airplane to have a trip you will remember forever. Some of our favourite trips involve a tent and backpack, a road trip across Canada with the grandparents and cousins, or better yet are right in our own backyard. One of the gifts of not being able to travel during COVID was the invitation to get to know our own island and boy did we, we visited so many new places and made great memories.  If you are interested in learning more about our favourite spots on Vancouver Island check out our posts on that topic. 

There you have it, a few of my favourite ways to have an amazing holiday with your friends and family without all the extra costs. Trust me, this way you get to go on even more holidays so get dreaming.