What travel hacks could save you a lot of money?

在国外旅游的一些Hacks

• Use many VPNs to get cheaper flight tickets.

  Surprisingly or not, airlines adjust their prices based on your location. Install a free VPN and try different locations. If atleast one got cheaper, there is a sweet - spot somewhere: buy a VPN with over 100locations and test all of them.

• Free upgrades at hotels.

  Write very specific instructions in the"Notes" section.  Check in and check whether your requirements have been met or not. If they haven't, go to the front desk late in the evening(when the hotel runs with 20-30% of the staff) and complain, suggesting theycould move you to a suite to compensate. Most will do (not much cost for themactually).

  
  

• Download some apps to detect free internet connections.

  Or send random share invitations,which the owner of the connection has to accept for me to have internetconnection. Surprisingly, I never lacked internet for more than 30 minutes.

• Flights or train tickets.

  I recently discovered Hopper,it's an app that informs you when the prices drops on your smart phone and it works good for me. I also use Google flights tohave an idea and compare prices.Use Google Flights to find the leastexpensive flight. You can even compare with other dates. Usually, flights onwednesdays are cheaper than flights on fridays or saturdays. If you pick aflight with stops, make sure they last at least 2 hours.

• Take night trains in Europe.

  To save overnight stay costs. For instance, In Portugal and Italy (and maybesome more countries which I don't know of), trains provide free bottled waterfor long distance legs, but *only if you ask for it*.

  
  

• Use carsharing and freeride platforms.

  Have free vouchers in the area and exchange them with locals if you don't want to redeem them (For example,I got a 20% off voucher for a female clothing storeone - got there, and exchanged it with a costumer for a meal at a nicerestaurant [she gave me 10 bucks for it]. You've gotta be the positive of supershy to do this tho). Have apps installed on your mobile for all of this.

  
  

• Book everything early.

  Make sure you book everything early AND free ofcancellation costs. I usually book 3 or 4 hotels with free cancellation costs,and choose which one I go to on the stop (I typically choose the one whosetravel to is the cheapest). Most times, you can't predict this upfront.

• Carry a credit card with free travel insurance.

  This is probably one of the best services you canget for free, in the entire world. I typically use two different credit cards(and activate their insurances) when traveling outside of Europe.

  
  

• Do Everything on your own.

  I even applied for our own Visa without a travel agent and that saved a lot ofmoney,but just don't risk your travel plan for the sake of being individualplanner, if you are not confident and don't have much experience you shouldtake visa services from an agent.

  
  

• Book Hop-On-Hop-Off for every city you visit.

  This actually enables you to do a city tour of any city in just one day and you getto know all the important places of the city which you can travel on otherdays.You can Hop off from any bus on any of the stops that it’s route contain and can Hop on to another bus from any of its stops, they typically have a frequency of 15–20 mins for each bus to come at any stop. Tickets come at 24 or 48 hour, we bought the 24 hour tickets from isango.com . Isango offers 10% discount onadditional tickets purchased from them, so I guess this was the biggest steal.

• Download Google Offline areas for every City youvisit.

  This eventually gives you a sense of confidence that you won’t ever get lost andwill know your directions to hotel in the case of crisis.Only Directions and GPS would work offline and not the Public Transport Directions.

• Recommendations.

  Local's recommendations are everything. Each time I stayed on a home of a MyTwinPlace host, they gave me such great advice on where to have dinner or lunch, where to go and what to visit to have a real local experience while saving money.