Introduction
Many people want to know how to travel cheaper and do not know how to plan their trip. These things are related. So, it was important to combine them in one article.
The first thing to say right away is that 7-5 years ago it was possible to turn on a VPN (or even a private page in the browser) to get different prices for air tickets. It’s not working anymore. I have experience working in companies that try to maximize profits in any way. And I know that any advice on buying tickets that can be given now will be irrelevant in a year or two, because data analysts collect information about how you buy tickets, analyze the information, develop new strategies to increase sales, test them on small groups, and update pricing algorithms. Usually in such a business, such updates occur with a frequency of six months to a year and adapt to user behavior. Those tips on how to travel cheaper that were a year ago are not relevant this year. Current relevant advice will be useless next year. Nevertheless, what I will write in the article will be relevant shortly. And then I’ll just write a new article on how to travel cheaper. 🙂 Yes, in this article, you will get more advice not from a typical travel blogger but from a gig IT guy. 🤓
Small instruction
- Try to book flights, hotels, and car rentals on the same day. When you use any website to buy tickets or hotels, you agree to the terms of use, which state that the information will be transferred to third parties. In practice, this means that the information that you bought an airline ticket will be transferred to hotel booking sites. And you can be sure that they will definitely use this information to sell you a more expensive hotel.
- VPN does not help. Free VPNs simply sell your information to search trackers. Paid ones may not do this, but even if you turned on the VPN, and at that moment, you have an opened YouTube/mail client/site with an open form for sending a comment via Facebook – Google already knows everything about you. And since Google is an information aggregator with which all aggregators of air tickets and hotels cooperate and buy information, you will not see other price tags.
- Do not rush to buy air tickets if suddenly they are sold at a good discount. Always make a preliminary check of the average price of the hotel and car rental (if you need a car) and estimate the total expenses. Quite often, if hotels are completely booked and vacant rooms are sold very expensively, air tickets drop the price due to low demand. You will save on one, but you will very likely lose on the other.
- Never get tied to a single hotel booking aggregator. New businesses appear regularly, and if they have good investments, they will definitely start working at a loss by selling reservations at cost. In my memory, two banks, of which I am a client, launched their ticket booking services, and they were the best prices (but not for a long time). But be careful with suspicious price tags and unknown sites. There is also a lot of fraud.
- When you are looking at the weather in the place you are going to visit, do not search for example: “weather in Da Nang (Vietnam) in October”. You are highly likely to open the website of a travel agency or something similar, where it will be written, “In October, the amount of rain increases, and it gets a little cooler, which is great for travelers who do not like the heat.” That’s a lie! October is the worst month to visit this location, and it rains there literally every day. It will be correct to search for the query “weather in Da Nang by month”. Then, you will be taken to a website aggregating meteorological statistics for this region and will be able to immediately understand which months are good and which are not. Trying to visit a country “out of season” can turn into a bad experience. Always pay attention to why it is “out of season”.
- Use hotel aggregators only to search for hotels, but when you find a good option, look for the hotel’s website (quite often, you can find it on google.com/maps) and book directly with a good discount. Don’t believe in the “customer protection” and money-back guarantee that aggregators advertise. In 99% of cases, if you have booked a bad hotel and run into problems, booking.com, and Airbnb will not help you, and they will only write to you, “We are very sorry for your bad experience”. Just look at the reviews and don’t book the cheapest choice.
- If you are not a budget traveler, register on the websites of large hotels like Radisson, Hyatt, and Hilton, and do not use booking.com to book these hotels. Large chain hotels give bonuses to their regular customers, much better than what booking.com can give. Read more about booking.com below.
- Never set a goal to visit a specific country. Just make a list of what you would like to see and the countries you would like to visit. If you are specifically going to visit a country, there is a risk of accidentally getting to some event (Taylor Swift concert or F1 stage) that you did not plan to visit, but this will affect the prices.
Step-by-step instruction
How I choose a destination for a trip:
Data collection
I collect a list of places I want to visit on Google Maps. I do this completely by accident when I see a video on YouTube or an Instagram story with a beautiful location. I just mark the point on the map in the “I want to visit” list and forget about it (in fact, my wife does this because I am not a big fan of Instagram). Ideally, you should already have a list of such points. If not, just look at the map and think about which locations might be interesting to you. But gradually collect the list of interesting locations. This list will be useful to you in the future.
Weather
Google the weather in the locations you are interested in by month. Decide which location is best to fly to at what time of year. For example, here is the amount of precipitation in Da Nang (Vietnam) from the example above. We can say that from February to September there is not much rain.
If it’s important to you, then also look at the temperature and determine the time period that suits you. Ideally, it would be good to get a table with countries (locations) and time periods, something like this:
The “perfect” period is highlighted in green. The months with not the best weather, but suitable, are marked in yellow. This example is not real; do not copy it 🙂.
Hotels budget
Go to booking.com and select the search for hotels in the locations you are interested in to get a rough idea of ​​the prices for hotels in the coming year. From year to year, some destinations may be more popular than others. For example, in 2024, the fall of the Japanese yen initially made the country relatively inexpensive, but soon everyone began planning a trip there (precisely because of the fall of the yen), bought up all the available hotels and prices, on the contrary, became higher than they were.
At this stage, we need to filter out a few countries that we can go to at a time that suits us. Let’s use the booking.com tool to understand the price of hotels (not for booking hotels) at different times of the year. They provide a very convenient budget selection tool that you can use to understand when there are more/fewer tourists in a given location. For example, here’s what the price tags for hotels in Osaka (Japan) look like:
February is not very interesting for tourists (it’s quite cold).
May is much better (cherry blossoms are blooming and there are more sunny days).
July is very popular (many people like to fly somewhere in the summer).
Suddenly, October is the most expensive. Why? It’s quite chilly there. I know why because I was in Japan in October when it wasn’t so popular. Autumn in Japan is gorgeous. Now, you can see many people who have discovered autumn in Japan and post photos of yellow and orange trees near temples. I have some too 🙂. What can we conclude from this? People have cooled off to the cherry blossom season in Japan and want to see Japan in autumn and even winter. Maybe if you’ve never seen cherry blossoms, now is a great time to do it.
Flight budget
Let’s look at the air tickets. I don’t have much to recommend except skyscanner.net and kiwi.com (this option allows you to be flexible with dates). There is an opinion that buying air tickets in advance is the most profitable. This was true a few years ago. Prices were determined approximately like this:
The airline would “put up” a new flight on the route, and as the seats on the plane were filled, the tickets would become more expensive. At the same time, shortly before departure (1 month), the prices for “empty” seats would start to decrease, but very close to departure (2 weeks), on the contrary, they would start to increase because only those in a desperate situation would buy them. BUT! When the flight was completely sold out, and there was still a lot of time before this flight, the airline could put up another plane on this route with the same dates. And the tickets would become inexpensive again.
The situation has changed (however, it is better to know how it was before because pricing strategies are used in a circle), and now the prices are determined as follows:
The price does not change at all during the year before departure and starts to increase only 3 months before departure. At the same time, there is still a chance to get suddenly cheap air tickets a month before departure, but this happens rarely.
Car rental budget
Not everyone and not always needs a car, but if you are going somewhere to Thailand / Vietnam / the Philippines, and other countries with poorly developed transport, or you have arranged a car tour of the Scandinavian countries, then look at the price tag on the car in advance (don’t forget about gasoline, but this is more for understanding the overall costs).
Booking time!
So, we have an understanding of where we can fly according to the weather; we have an idea of ​​the prices for hotels and air tickets. We have decided on the ideal destination for the trip. Time to book! It is important not to rush and be sure that we are ready to book all the air tickets, hotels, and car rentals in one day. The fact is that thanks to the agreements you signed, Google/Facebook/LinkedIn, etc., all your data is sold to third parties. Without going into technical details, I will simply say: When you buy flight tickets somewhere, hotel and car rental aggregators will know about it pretty soon. Everything is moving towards the fact that in the future, they will know about it instantly. But at the moment, I have not noticed any impact on the price within one day.
- Booking airline tickets – just book through aggregators. Prices on airline websites are almost always high (I don’t understand why), and it makes sense to use them only if you are a regular customer of some airline and accumulate their bonuses.
- Booking hotels is a much more complicated process. Booking through aggregators should only be a last resort, if there are no other options. In a private conversation with the owner of a small hotel in Thailand, I learned that booking.com takes a 35% commission from them, because they do not have their own website and cannot attract tourists in any other way. At the same time, the prices for booking a Hyatt will be the same as on the Hyatt website itself, because this is a very large group of hotels with its own customer base and good marketing. Nevertheless, I do not recommend booking large chain hotels through booking, because for regular customers they always have cumulative bonuses, which ultimately turn into additional days at the hotel or room upgrades. I recommend searching for a hotel on booking.com, then finding it by name on maps.google.com, and finding the official website in the list of booking links (sometimes new services can give discounted prices lower than the official website). The main thing is not to use agoda. They always show the price without taxes and add them at the end (as a result, they always become more expensive than other aggregators).
After booking planing
It seems that everything is finished, but unfortunately, it is not. Fortunately, this step can be postponed a little and not done on the same day as booking everything. On the trip, you will need the following:
- A local SIM card;
- Offline maps (just in case or if you are planning hiking routes in the mountains);
- Notifying your bank about transactions in another country (so that they do not block you);
- Booking a visit to locations. For example, if you are planning to climb a volcano on Jeju Island (Korea), you need to book a visit in advance because the number of visitors per day is limited. If you want to visit Universal Studios in Osaka, rest assured that on the day of your visit, there will be almost no tickets left.
- Cash exchange points and their working hours (so that it does not turn out that you arrive on Sunday evening, and you cannot even pay for dinner without local currency);
- Marks in google.maps of all the points that you are going to see;
I have a mind map that I open every time I’m going on a trip, and I plan everything and collect everything according to this document. I recommend you do the same. Example:
Saving everything
Even if you fly on vacation once a year, I still recommend doing this. Write down all aspects of your trip (flights, luggage size, layover duration, all hotels with dates and locations, reservations) in one document that you will have at hand (and accessible offline). Believe me, after six months of waiting for the trip, you will forget which car rental company you rented a car from, whether a specific hotel is paid for, or whether you have to pay at the reception (and in local currency). When traveling, you don’t want to waste time searching for all the letters in your mailbox.
That’s it! Plan what you’ll visit and pack your bags.
I’m planning to write a separate article about how to optimally plan a route and calculate the number of days on a trip before the trip, which will be a great addition to this article.
