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The Traveling Fool
Traveling off the tourist path. Talking about those places most tourists just don't know about because, well, nobody ever told them. Also travel tips and news about travel and tourism to make your trip a little easier, cheaper and more memorable.
The Traveling Fool
You'll Want To Use These Websites To Unlock Serious Savings On Travel
Unlock the secrets to affordable travel as I share a wealth of money-saving tips for your next getaway. Discover how a simple browser extension like can transform your booking experience by scouting for the best coupon codes, and learn about exclusive resources for active, retired military and veterans. These tools could be your ticket to a more budget-friendly vacation, whether you're planning a solo escape or a group adventure.
Craving a bargain on flights and accommodations? I will tell you about sites where you can score the best deals on airfare. And, when it comes to booking hotels I will give you sites and strategies that even the thriftiest of travelers can explore new destinations without breaking the bank.
Intrigued by the possibility of saving even more? I will give you some more tips on how to save money when it comes to traveling.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Traveling Fool.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, bob Bales, and today we are going to talk about how to save you some serious cash on your next travels. I've already given you a couple of tips in the last two or three episodes, and today we're going to give you some more on how to save some serious money when it comes to traveling, so stay tuned. Hello, this is Bob Bales of the Traveling Fool, and I want to welcome you to this week's podcast, where we're talking about saving money for travel. Travel is expensive. Every time you want to take a break, you got a big four-day weekend coming up. You're thinking, man, I would love to go spend some time at the beach, but to do that, I got to catch a flight, then I got to get a hotel, and by the time I do that, I might as well just sell a kidney, because it is expensive. However, there's a lot of ways that you can save money on travel, and everybody has a suggestion, but I'm going to tell you about some websites that can save you some serious money when it comes to travel. Now, I'm not getting paid for any of these recommendations. These are all sites that I use or have used in the past, and they can save you some serious money when it comes to travel. So let's get into it Now. This first one I'm going to give you could actually save you money anytime you're shopping online or buying anything, but it also works on travel. It's a browser extension for Chrome called Karma K-A-R-M-A. Now Karma is absolutely free. You download it. It sits in the background, but when you go to sites like TripAdvisor, expedia or Hotelscom, priceline, tripcom and a whole bunch more, they search in the background for the very best coupon codes to apply at checkout, so you can save anywhere from $40, $50, $60 a night on a hotel room, because it's searching for a coupon code that you would have not known otherwise. Now it doesn't just stop at travel, it also does prices on, like I said, amazon and a whole bunch of other sellers. Karma saved well over $300 million for their consumers. And it's easy. It doesn't cost you a dime. Just pop it up in your browser and it sits there and looks at the background. It's well worth checking out, trust me.
Speaker 1:Now, these next two I'm going to give you. Not everybody's going to qualify for them, but I would be willing to bet a whole lot of people will. Now I'm retired military, so this is how I found out about these years ago. The first one is called Armed Forces Travel. Now it's supported by Priceline and it is a US Department of Defense official online leisure travel site for active military guard, reserve Coast Guard, retired military, reserve Coast Guard, retired Military and everybody that's eligible for their MWR program, which is Morale, welfare and Recreation. So if you qualify under those criteria, it will save you a bunch of money. It looks at hotels, flights, car rentals, cruises and even event tickets. I did a little quick search on it and found results ranging from Lakers season tickets to a King Tut exhibition at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. All you got to do is go to their website, which is AmericanForcesTravelcom. Now, at the end of the podcast, I'm going to list all of these websites in the show notes, which will be on the blog, and you can check them out so you don't have to worry about taking notes Now.
Speaker 1:The next one is called Armed Forces Vacation Club. This one is really cool. Military, including Gold Star families and civilian employees of the Department of Defense and the immediate families of all those above. That's a whole lot of people that qualify for this one. Now you gain instant access to their R&R resort rentals worldwide, and they start off at just $419 a week. Now, that's what the website tells you, but it gets even better. The regular R&R resorts give you locations around the world, places like the Sands Ocean Club in Myrtle Beach or Banff Rocky Mountain Resort in Canada. Plus, there's other places just all over the world. You can search by R&R resorts, high-demand resorts, short-term resorts and a bunch of others. Now you will occasionally find resorts less than $419 a week, and some are more in the really high-demand areas. I went on there just before I taped this and I did a search and found Calypso Cave Resort in Kissimmee, florida, listed at $379 a week. Now, that's not bad if you're going to go to Disney World. Or how about $579 a week for the Interlux Club Royale in Thailand or the Le Club? No, no, I'm going to screw this up.
Speaker 1:Mugins M-O-U-G-I-N-S big fancy club for $500 a week just outside Cannes, france, right next door to Monaco. And the prices now? Now here's the kicker the prices are not per person, but for the entire room, so when you do the search, it will tell you how many people can stay in the room. For example, the room in France. The one for what was it? $500 a week is one bedroom with a partial kitchen and it sleeps four. So I'm assuming it's got like a pull-out couch or something. So four people can stay in Cannes, France, for $500 a week at this resort. Now you can also spend $669 a week and get a two-bedroom at the same location with a full kitchen that sleeps six people. I mean, good Lord, that's $100 a person a week. You can't even get a hotel room in Houston for that price.
Speaker 1:Now just look at some of the information section on each property Down at the bottom. It'll tell you more information and when you do that, it'll give you all the criteria for the property, because some of these are all-inclusives, some may require deposits. The all-inclusives actually require an extra fee per day, may require deposits. The all-inclusive is actually required extra fee per day. And I've looked at some of them and they're like anywhere from $10 or $20 a person per day and each one is different. Some of them have absolutely no restrictions. Everything's up at the top but down at the bottom and the more information will tell you about it.
Speaker 1:Now, this company has been in business for over 20 years and I've known a lot of people that have used him and been extremely satisfied. It's a great website. You can find properties all over the world and it's well worth checking out. That one is the Armed Forces Vacation Club. Now for flights Now.
Speaker 1:I previously gave you some tips on finding cheap airfares and how to do it using Kayak and Google Flights, but there's some other sites that can also save you money. The first one is Skyscanner. It's been around for a long time. I've used it in the past. With Skyscanner you can do a search by putting in your departure airport, the destination section. You just put everywhere and then put your departure month and your return month and hit search and you will find all kinds of flights at some really good deals. It's worth checking out.
Speaker 1:If you say you know I'd love to go on vacation somewhere, don't really want to know where I want to go, do a search for two or three months out and just hit it and you'll say'll see all these flights come down. You're like, oh my Lord, you mean I can go to London for $300 round trip, because it'll find them for you. The other site is Momondo M-O-M-O-N-D-O. This one you go to the explore section in the left-hand column you put in your departure airport. You leave the destination to anywhere and the dates to any time, and it'll do the same thing. I found flights like Houston to Tokyo for under $600 round trip and a lot of other really great deals.
Speaker 1:So, just like searching kayak or Google flights, you need to check on them daily If you're looking for deals. It takes two or three minutes each one. I just leave an open tab on my browser and once a day I go in there and hit it and go oh, look at this, there's a cool flight. Living there Doesn't take very long at all, just check them. If you don't want to check them daily, check two or three times a week Takes a couple minutes and you can find all kinds of deals. I've been thinking about taking a trip to South Korea and, depending on when I check, I've seen prices ranging anywhere from $1,400 round trip down to $790 round trip. I haven't narrowed down the time frame I'm looking to go, but I just keep monitoring it to see when I can go and things like this. It's a great tool. So Google Flights, kayak, momondo and Skyscanner those are the sites you want and if you're flexible on your travel dates or if you're adventurous and you're just looking for a great deal on flights.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of other sites you can sign up for that offer both free and paid plans. Now I'm signed up for both of these. The first one is Matt's Flights, A fellow named Matt M-A-T-T Matt's Flights. You sign up for his email alerts with Matt's Flights and you will get deals on flights from your home airport. It'll ask you what airport you want to put in there. You might get three or four emails a month. Sometimes you get a few more, and what they do is they'll send you an email anytime they find a really good deal. That's leaving out of the airports that you designated Deals like Austin to Denver for $48 round trip. Now they also offer a two-tier paid plan. For $97 a year, you get domestic and international flight deals from your home airport.
Speaker 1:Mistake deals, which are the mistake airfares that sometimes the airline will publish a deal and they'll screw up on the pricing. There's also economy class deals and up to five times as many deals as the free membership will get you, and you get that for $97 a year. Now, for $149 a year, you get all of that. Plus, you receive the best airfare guaranteed for your specific travel plans. All you have to do is email them your trip details and they do all the work, so you don't even have to search for the flights. You'll also receive business and first class flight deals and their custom itinerary services. Now they have some great business class flights. You'll find business class flights in a lot of cases are cheaper than some people are booking for economy, which you won't do unless you pay them the $149 a year.
Speaker 1:Now you book the flights directly with the airlines, not through Matt's Flights. They're just searching for the deals and they say that they will save you an average of $500 per flight. Now I'm assuming that they mean international flights, since you can get domestic flights for a whole lot less than $500. I found some fantastic deals and all you have to do is go to Matt's Flights, subscribe to their newsletter. Now there's another one that works the same way, sort of. It's called Secret Flying. Secret Flying is another email deal alert program where you select the airport you want to fly out from and they show you deals, including the air airfares, and they give you a link that goes directly to Priceline and Skyscanner. They partner with these two companies, so that's how they get paid and you're booking with Priceline or Skyscanner Secret flying lists, deals flying out of your selected airport and some are short notice.
Speaker 1:So it's not the best if you have a particular travel date or destination in mind. But if you can book a flight leaving in the next month to a dream destination at half the normal advertised price, it might be worth it. Destination at half the normal advertised price, it might be worth it. For example, boston to Dallas for $127 round trip with JetBlue, and it had dates going out two, three and four months. Now both sites are really good to sign up for and you get deals directly into your inbox. Those are the best ways that you can save some money on airfares.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to give you a couple of sites to save money on hotels. One works everywhere in the world. It's a travel site that not a lot of people have heard of, but it's been around for a long time. It's called Agoda. The deal with Agoda is it works best in Asia. You find the very best deals for rooms in Asia with Agoda, but they also have deals that are comparable to bookingcom and everybody else if you're looking in the US or in Europe. But what? I was traveling a lot to Asia. That was my go-to site. It has listings all over the world, like I said, and sometimes you can find a better price in the US if you go to one of the other websites. But for prices in Asia, agoda does the deal, man, for example, the City Garden Hotel in Manila, philippines, which I personally stayed at. You go to Bookingcom and they list it for $140 a night, but Agoda the price is $48. Now, not all their hotels have such a huge difference in price, but you can almost always find the best price on anything in Asia by going through Agoda.
Speaker 1:Another site that works worldwide is Hopper H-O-P-P-E-R Hopper. Hopper is actually an online travel agency and they offer an app that you download and use on your phone. Now the way Hopper works is they've collected an archive of millions of flight, hotel and car rental prices. Then they analyze the data to produce predictions with a 95% accuracy. To produce predictions with a 95% accuracy and they notify you of when they predict the price will be at its lowest point. So you can book it quickly right from your phone, helping you find the best possible deal. They encourage you to use the app. The website works, but it doesn't work for all of the things. I think it only works for hotels, but for flights, car rental prices and everything else, you've got to use the app. Now they've been in business since 2007 and Hopper has done this algorithm thing. They're like the Google of the travel industry and they have got this down to a science and they will find you some excellent deals. So go to Hopper, download it. The app's free to use, doesn't cost you anything, and if you book it, you just book it through them, so that's how they get paid.
Speaker 1:Now, on a previous podcast, I gave you an app that I use for road trips, and I'm going to tell you about it again. It's called Gas Buddy. I use it all the time whenever I go on a road trip. All you got to do is download the app and it does a search of the gas prices near you, and they have a couple of plans also. They have the free one, which is what I use, but you could also get a free Gas Buddy card, and what that does is, if you use that card, it debits it directly from your bank account and it saves you a little bit more money than just using the free app, and they also have a credit card, which you could earn even more savings.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I just use the free app, but once you open it, all you got to do is hit find gas, and it uses GPS to figure out where you're at and searches all the gas stations around you. You can hit I want to look for regular premium or diesel, and then it gives you the prices of the gas at multiple gas stations that are near you within like five or ten mile radius, and you can review those results on either a list showing you from the cheapest all the way down to the most expensive, or you can open up the map and see where they're at with the prices, or you can open up the map and see where they're at with the prices. Now, the thing about this is the prices are reported by the users. So while you're getting guests, you can input the price that you paid and it updates the app. So when you get the results, it'll tell you the station, the price, the user that reported the price, his screen name and when it was reported and it's usually been reported either that day or one day previously. I did a quick search next to me and prices differed anywhere from 13 cents a gallon and that's within a five mile radius. So if you're going on a road trip, you can say, okay, I can pay $2.87 a gallon for this off the highway, but wait a minute, if I take this little side road, go down three blocks, I can save 20 cents a gallon. Well, that adds up if you're on a long road trip. So that's the best way to save money on gas when you're traveling. So here's just a generalized tip and this will save you money. Generalized tip and this will save you money.
Speaker 1:Trust me, if you're looking to book a hotel in another country, try using a VPN, a virtual private network. All it does is it masks where you're logging into. It shows you logging into somewhere else. I've got one installed. They're great for security. I use them all the time, just so I have it. I mean, I use one at home, but I especially use one when I'm traveling. But I can go into my VPN and log in from anywhere in the world. If somebody were searching and says where's this guy logging in from, it could say Moscow, london or Dallas, texas. But use a VPN and log into the country that you're looking at hotels for.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to Germany, log into Germany on your VPN and then search for rooms on the websites that you go to search for. It doesn't always work, but I've found drastically different prices by doing this. You do a search from where you're living in Philadelphia, because you're fixing to go to Frankfurt on vacation, and you're seeing hotel rooms for $140, $150 a night on this website. Well then, you open the web browser in incognito mode, which is easy to do. You just go up on the right-hand corner and hit search incognito, turn on your VPN and do the same search with the same website out of Frankfurt, germany, and you'll see prices $20 and $30 cheaper than the price you just saw in America. Why, I don't know. I guess they're doing that foreigner's tax. I have no idea, but it doesn't always work. But it does a lot.
Speaker 1:And if you book a room using a different currency than US dollars, it also helps. So up in the top it'll say what currency are you looking at? Well, I'm going to book it in euros. It'll give you a different price than if it would if you were booking it in dollars from Philadelphia. Now, if you're using your credit card, the credit card company will convert it and in some cases they might charge you a foreign transaction fee, which ranges around 3%, but more and more these days, cards are having zero foreign transaction fees, so sometimes you can get a whole lot cheaper rate and save a good chunk of money on your hotel just by searching, using a VPN and booking it from the host country currency. I've done it numerous times and it saved me a bunch of money.
Speaker 1:Now the other one can get real complicated, so we'll keep it simple. There's what they call, you know, hacking points. You sign up for a travel rewards program. You get credit cards which give you multiples of the deals, and you rack up your credit card to get multiples of travel points. And people get hundreds of thousands of airline miles and things this way by juggling three or four credit cards, and there's websites that deal with this.
Speaker 1:I personally don't have the patience to do it, but I do have travel rewards cards. For me, the simplest way to do it is every time I buy something, I use my credit card. If I'm going grocery shopping, I use my credit card. If I'm filling up my car, I use my credit card. Go out to eat use my credit card. I don't pay cash or debit cards or checks for anything. You could also pay your bills with it. You can pay your rent with it. You can do all kinds of things.
Speaker 1:The key is don't spend any more than you normally would if you were writing a check or using your debit card, and pay off the balance at the end of each and every month. So if you spend, we're just going to pick a number out of the air. If you spend $2,000 a month on bills, gas, groceries, everything else all combined, and you're using your debit card to do it, you're keeping track so you don't overspend Well, just have the wherewithal to say I'm not going to spend more than $2,000 and I'm not going to go crazy buying stuff just to buy it. I'm going to use my credit card for what I would normally use my debit card for and rack up the same $2,000, but pay it off at the end of every month. So you don't owe any interest. Works out great and you wind up racking up a bunch of miles. That's a simple way to do it.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing if you don't want to do all that, you can still get good deals just by checking out the sites that I mentioned. Now imagine going and telling your co-workers after a four-day weekend that, hey, I just got back from this great beach resort and the flight, the hotel, everything cost me less than $500. And that was for four days. I flew to another state and had a blast.
Speaker 1:Now, if you go to thetravellerpoolcom, this podcast is going to be there along with all the others and all these websites are going to be posted in the show notes and, like I said in the beginning, I'm not getting paid for any of these recommendations. The links on the site go directly to that site, so I hope you got something out of it. Please hit the like or subscribe button, check out a few of the articles on thetravellingfoolcom and next time I'm going to tell you about four or five destinations that you can go to this winter, not even have to use a passport, and enjoy a great, warm beach vacation. So stay tuned until next time and safe travels. Thank you you.
