It’s been a while since I last wrote about Top 5 tips for travel. This is something popped up in my mind and experienced when I tried to book for our accommodation on our Europe tour next next month in May. Let’s put aside other accommodation option like home exchange, residential room to let, or sleep on train. When you need a proper accommodation to stay on your travel, there are still some tips for you to book them cheaper. If money is not your concern when booking hotels, don’t waste your time here. You can’t get what you want and you can leave this blog NOW and search for hotel websites instead. I’m the advocate of budget travel and what I’m writing here is all about saving money on your travel, not spending! How to save money on travel? Ok, you may read on… 
How to get cheap accommodation on your travel? There are many ways and what I list out here are the Top 5 tips to get them cheap (I’m not giving away discount coupon please), not free. If you want free accommodation, consider to join home exchange network, or, start praying…
Here are the top 5:
- Location from travel destination. General rules of thumb off course is the further away from town, the cheaper the accommodation cost. However, accommodation in some cities like those London hotels are much cheaper away from city center but much nearer to train station. If you plan to go to and from there by train, and those travel sites you planned to visit are quite scattered, you may be wiser to book further away since cheaper and grab a daily ticket to travel around travel sites by tram, underground as well as buses. This way your overall cost would still be cheaper since you still need to take an underground to wander around even though staying in city center. So, check your places to go before you book a hotel!
- Facilities of accommodation. Well, logic tells us that the more facilities you need, the more you need to pay. This relates back to the type of accommodation you are after. They are few type of accommodation in general, from campsite, Bed and Breakfast, hostel, boutique to star rated hotel. In terms of facilities, campsites have the least facilities while 5-star-hotels have the most. From sharing bathroom for campsite and B&B to attached bathroom for hostel and hotel. Also to consider is the number of people in a room. Whether it is a 10-people-dorm or a double bed ensuite. Another factor to consider is which city you are booking for? You could expect bar facilities from Barcelona hotels while foot reflexology service from Phuket hotels. What’s the tips? Ask yourself these questions: “Can you sleep with strangers?” “Can you share bathroom with others?” “Can you sleep if someone snore?” “Can you sleep without lights?” “Do you like chatting with other travellers?” “Do you surf net on travel?” “How much time you’re going to spend in your hotel?” “How about your partner if you are travelling with companion?” Then next step is to pick the least facilitated accommodation you can accept to book it cheaper or nearer to town center.
- Which Day / Season to stay. Which day of week to stay in that accommodation would cost differently. Don’t mention about which season of year. Accommodation cost would be doubled during weekend and halved during weekday. New York hotels would cost more in July due to its Independence Day and summer while you could expect much cheaper during Winter. Check if there is any special day in that city on which particular day and plan you itinerary or travel to avoid that festive seasons, unless visiting the OctoberFest of Munich is your purpose then booking more expensive accommodation would be unavoidable. The only option left is to book it online as early as you can! The tips is to stay in expensive Paris hotels during weekday and move to Amsterdam hotels during weekend.
- Book online in advance. Nowadays, most travelers are booking accommodation in advance. These can be done online. Even B&B could be booked online. Why? You can get online rate which is much cheaper than walk-in rate normally. Unless you are backpacking where no definite time or date to stay in one place, travelers should book your hotels in advance to have it cheaper than published rate. Especially booking accommodation in Europe online where you need to pay only 10% deposit normally, you won’t lose much on paying money in advance!
- Number of days to stay. If you are planning to stay in a city for few days, check the rate for multiple day stay of your hotel. Be slightly flexible to your itinerary and you might be able to stay one more night for FREE! Another instances to consider would be staying one more night in Florence hotels and travel to Pisa for a day trip is much cheaper than traveling and staying in Pisa! Tips? Do the simple math to calculate which city or hotel is cheaper to stay more days instead of spending unnecessary money by checking in and out different hotels!
By using these guidelines, I’m now assessing accommodation cost in London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome before confirming my online booking as well as my Europe tour itinerary. No time to do all these homework? My last tips for those who have limited lead time to plan is to wait until last minute to get some last minute offers from certain online agents who offer last minute best rate within 30 days from your check-in date! – Travel Feeder, the ultimate travel blog
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Unless we are professional travel photographer, what we normal shoot and how we capture a scene normally is, we take photos of those scenes of our travel destinations whenever we find it attractive or important to capture (as a travel blogger) by the time when we are there in whatever season and under whatever ambient lighting. We don’t care much on the perfect lighting and timing it should be. This is called casual travel photographer.
We travel and we shoot photos. To which we put more priority depends on every individual traveler. Some might travel more places and shooting less for each place, or, some might travel less places but shooting lots of photos from there at different day, time, angle and under different lighting. But we still travel to different places and shoot. We don’t travel to one place again and again just because we haven’t captured the most beautiful moment of the scene. Because we are not professional travel photographer. We don’t take photo for our living and we don’t travel to get paid either.
So, don’t upset if you can’t capture the best moment of that tourist spot. Don’t worry if the weather was overcast when you were only allowed 1 hour to shoot photos of Eiffel Tower. We travel and photograph as our hobby and passion to do so (also hobby to blog about travel ). We have budget for our hobby, don’t we?
What we should do to produce ourselves some nice photos of places we’ve been to (not bought from pro travel photographer) is more important. If a casual travel photographer could take fantastic photos, it would be great pleasure. If a casual travel photographer could capture what only a pro can, it would be more satisfactorily. Here are the top 5 things a casual travel photographer should do:
- Set your travel plan along side your photo plan. We know the best photos come from the best surrounding lighting to the scene. So fix your travel period to that country or city to suit the weather we want for our ambient lighting. If you plan to photo snow scene, go now!
- Take as many photos as you can. Shoot the same scene with different composition of light, different exposure compensation EV value, high or low key setting (I’ll come to this other time), different shutter speed and aperture or even with and without flash.
- Bring along your camera accessories like ND filters, polarizer, tele-convertor, tripod, flashes and so on. You could then explore different ways of capturing the same scene. If you don’t have any of these, buy them now!
- If we still couldn’t get what we wanted or no where near it, plan your travel to be less ambitious. Travel lesser and spend more time or days on each place;
- Thank god. If nothing from the above has been achieved, we still have our final tool. In this digital era, we have photo editing tool like Photoshop CS4, lightroom or Elements! They can savage poor lighting, poor colour or even poor composition!
Finally, we should be more happy to be a casual travel photographer. We can shoot whatever we like. We don’t have to worry about copyright infringements, contract requirement or so on. Happy shooting and traveling! – Travel Feeder.
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I’ve been following Malaysian satellite Astro TV travel game show ”Ready To Fly?” lately, and am sitting here at home asking myself the same question: “Am I ready to fly?” The countdown of my Phuket vacation travel is just around the corner. If I’m not wrong (can the flight ticket wrongly printed? ), I’m going to depart to Phuket Island, Thailand, tomorrow!
I’ve been busy preparing and packing for my latest self-travel to an island that I haven’t been to before and the decision to fly was only made a couple of weeks ago. What have I done and what else should I do before checking in? Here are somethings that I’ve done:
- Off couse, I have booked a hotel online. I need to book it upfront as my in-law mother and sister are travelling with us and I don’t expect them to follow me searching and asking around for accomodation only when we reach Phuket.
I was looking for discounted hotels in Patong Beach area (I heard it is the hottest spot in Phuket Island). Though I would prefer to book it through my affiliate partnership with HotelsCombined but unfortunately the hotel that we chose is sold out. So I tried LateStay and got it with a last minute bargain! Though I’m not the affiliate marketer of Latestay, I still find them a goood option and competitive if you are looking for great discounted rate with plenty of hotel choices! Reservation was done smoothly. Final comment? Until I got back from Phuket… - Next would be the confirmation of our air tickets. Off course we have booked and confirmed tickets from AirAsia. But who knows? They are “famous” with postponed flights if less people turned out or over sold their tickets! I’ve got enough experience with them in my Bali trip and I want to make sure at least we have seats in our original flight this round. So I’ve done the web check in yesterday (within 48 hours from your flight time) and purchase checked baggage and reselect seats. Final comment? Until I got back from Phuket…
- Another important aspect of this travel is no doubt taking many many photos that I can afford. In order to avoid dissapointment, I have to get ready my photography equipments! While still deciding whether to bring along both my D60 and Lumix FZ28 or only D60, I bought an extra 4GB SDHC card and an additional backup battery for my D60. Now I have 4 cards and 2 batteries with my D60, just in case I need them. I’m going to pack the battery charger off course and also our power socket adapter from China. So, I think it should be enough…
- The only headache for me now is which and how many lenses should I bring along. I’m an eventualist of light traveler. I don’t like to pack any extra stuff in my luggage (SD cards are exempted since they are too light to include in ). I have 3 lenses: 18-55mm zoom, 55-200mm zoom and 35mm prime. And I’m thinking to fill my camera in my Lowepro Cirrus waist bag only. So how? I don’t know. It would my final decision to make before check in!
- The last thing is defintely money! How much Baht should I change for the trip? 100 baht is to RM10.60 currently. Should I change less and rely much on my credit cards? Entrance fees for Fantasea show is about 1500Baht and Phi Phi Island day trip is around 1800Baht per pax. So I think at least 15,000 Baht is needed for Jean and I for 5 days there, as part of our budget travel. Beyond that only we swipe our cards. Enough? I don’t know. Will only know once we got back from Phuket…
These are the 5 most essential preparation I’ve done for our ‘budget’ travel to Phuket Island. I hope we will have a great vacation there. We shall depart tomorrow and will post again next week. See you then. Am I ready to fly? Subscribe to my RSS feeds for free updates of my stories – Travel Feeder.
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I heard recently one of my fellow photo traveler, Mei Teng saying that she is travelling to Australia this week and asked about what she should do there. I suddenly felt so excited. Not because I’m going there as well. It’s because it reminds me of my previous travel to Gold Coast Australia. That trip [...]
This is the follow up post of my previous popular article: Top 5 Things To Do Before Your Vacation Travel. Although many travelers would have ideas of what they are going to do on their vacation travel, some may have too much idea in their mind but too little time during that short period of vacation tour. [...]
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