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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It’s coming! Another 2 months and I’ll be in London! A big round of applause to our budget airline AirAsia, which had encouraged me to travel to Europe again after 12 years. I’ve booked my air tickets 3 months ago and I finally have my first Western Europe tour itinerary drafted recently. The whole idea of the trip is to visit some of the top cities in Western Europe in a short period of only 14 days. Reasons why being such a short period off course includes budget, my work and also my children. So 14 days is all we (initially I’m going with my wife only but eventually we are going in a group of 5 including Jean, her siste, my brother in law and a friend of mine) have in Europe. And my role has also changed from a husband and lover to a tour leader and organiser of this small tour group! Ha ha!
If you know where I’m coming from, I’m the advocate for budget travel. It would be my biggest pleasure to have saved more in my travel! Since budget is our next biggest constraint other than time, how and which cities to cover in Europe is a challenge to me. Since none of them have been to Europe before, I thought we better concentrate on those my Top 5 Cities in Europe. To be less ambitious, I’ve opted out Prague. Since we have only 14 days, I decided we travel only the Western European coutries, start from and end in London (the only European destination Air Asia X covers).
In order to plan out our preliminary itinerary of the Western Europe trip, I needed to consider these following factors in advance:
- Transportation cost. I would say transportation cost is the biggest expense of our trip, contribute no less than 50% of the total cost. Though we have bought low fare air tickets to London, we still need to move domestically from London to other cities and countries. We have 2 options here: by plane of train. Different route has different pricing at different timing. In other words, it affects my itinerary planning with tight budget!
- Number of places of interest. Firstly, transportation cost would increase if we travel more. Secondly, less time we are going to have at each destination if we travel more. Thirdly, which travel destinations we would die for visiting it once? These are the factors to consider.
- Season or Festival? Since we have confirmed our return flight tickets, we couldn’t change the season when we will be there. I prefer travelling Europe in May because it’s end of Spring. I love vibrancy of Spring and Jean scared of coldness, that’s it. It’s already my perfect traveling period to Europe. Festival? Ok, I’m searching for the period of any festival going on there during May, so we could pop by if possible (or we could avoid for extremely high crowd). Also the day of weekly open flea market might be our consideration as well;
- Accommodation cost. Budget hotel in Paris would not cost the same with either Venice or London. So planning our itinerary would also depends on the cost of living and number of days to stay there. For me, any place or city in Europe has its own attractions that worth hundreds Euro to stay and needs months to explore. So, which travel destination to stay longer would only depends on the accommodation cost of that place. that’s the only factor, and
- Strictly for ladies. They haven’t got enough money to try the German knuckles or beer but they always have plenty to spend on fashion! Insertion of certain shopping paradise into our itinerary would please our ladies in group. Planning to spend a day in London shopping at the final days would be a good idea.
In view of the above factors, I have drafted a preliminary Western Europe tour itinerary for 14 days. Check this out:
- 1st day – From KL to London. Stay in central London;
- 2nd day – From London to Paris via EuroStar. Stay 2 nights;
- 4th day – from Paris to Munich via rail. Stay 1 night;
- 5th day – From Munich to Venice. Stay 2 nights;
- 7th day – From Venice to Florence. Stay 2 night;
- 9th day – From Florence to Rome. Stay 2 nights;
- 11th day – From Rome back to London. Stay 2 nights, and
- 13th day (midnight) – From London back to KL on the 14th day.
This is just my preliminary planning. I need your feedback to tell me whether I’m too ambitious or we should stay more days in either city. What do you think about this itinerary for short trip to Western Europe? – Travel Feeder, the ultimate travel photo 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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