Travel offers opportunities to relax, explore, or generally just get away from work and spend time with your friends, family, or even on your own – it offers many things to many people, but it can be expensive. Here’s a few tips of how to save money when booking your holidays.
Search aggregators
It was only a few years ago that the only way to book flights was to visit your local travel agent, and that would mean expensive fees and being upsold flights and services from airlines that gave the agents the best referral fees. Luckily, now we have flight aggregators that mean we have the freedom to look at all the flights available on the routes we want.
Everyone has their favourite flight aggregator, but you can’t go wrong with a mixture of SkyScanner, Hipmunk, and Google Flights. Skyscanner has the benefit of searching not only airlines directly, but also a variety of resellers and travel agents, which sometimes have special discounts. Meanwhile, Google’s 2010 acquisition of ITA means they have the most complete access to flight information, and Hipmunk have detailed price histories, so a combination of all three make for a pretty powerful flight-buying suite of tools.
Multiple singles vs return tickets
Many airlines will offer discounts for buying return tickets with them rather than two single, but that is not always the case and if you are a little flexible on time then you can find some huge discounts on flights by stringing together a series of singles form multiple airlines. It used to be hugely labour-intensive to find these discounts, but Kiwi is your friend here.
Think beyond hotels
It may be easiest to just book the local 4-5 star hotel chain when you travel to a new destination, but choosing this option will mean you could be missing out on a fantastic and unique stay in an a bed and breakfast or small local hotel. AirBNB has revolutionised such travel, but even if you want the luxury of a hotel, then it is a great idea to check aggregators and travel review sites like TripAdvisor to find somewhere locally-owned for a real experience.
Do your own research
Whilst TripAdvisor and other review sites can be useful in finding information about possible locations, they have also been found to be rather easily gamed, with places that do not even exist sometimes appearing at the top of their lists. Fake reviews, both positive and negative are a major problem for such sites and so it is hugely important that you should use multiple sources for your research online, and talk directly to those with personal experiences if you can. For example, it is easy to find discussions about kalu yala online, but you will only find out the truth about kalu yala and people’s experiences there by digging deeper and reading a wealth of different opinions.
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