Top 5 Tips To Plan For Budget Travel

‘Budget travel? Do I need that?’ Perhaps it’s just for me who has limited budget and time but been dreaming for travelling more. ‘What is budget travel?’ It’s as simple as a Travel with budget constraint as opposed to luxury travel. There are always 2 option of travel, either luxury or budget, and both have their pros and cons (not right or wrong). ‘What is the essence of budget travel?’ It’s a bit tricky here. For a good quality budget travel, it is not as simple as save money on your travel. The true essence of budget travel is to limit your budget on extravagance and spend sparingly but sufficiently on exploration of the local living and culture.

Clear? Let’s start our top 5 steps to plan for your budget travel as follows:

1. Travel Destination - Firstly, you have to decide where you wish to travel most at this moment, somewhere you have been dreaming about all this while. At this stage, a rough budget is extimated. Surely said that you can’t choose a country or destination where you can’t even afford the air ticket or transportation cost! Thanks to the upcoming and popular budget airlines nowadays that travelling to lots of places in the world are no longer a dream only!;
2. Set Your Budget - Set your exact affordble budget. Don’t stretch your credit card limit until couln’t pay back! Set budget for transport, travel expenses and some extra for your beer or coffee! Then you have to choose your option of travel: Luxury or Budget. If you decided on luxury travel, then add Travel Feeder to your RSS Feed reader for coming updated tips on luxury travel!
3. Go online! - Book your air tickets online! The benefits are certainly the cost. Online booking is usually cheaper than drop-in as you are paying them in advance and which is normally NOT refundable! Visit one of your local budget airline websites to look for cheapest flights and time available. Malysian Air Asia for instance, air ticket price depends on the date and time of flights. The more advance you book, the more saving you could get! Some of the famous low cost Airlines are JetStar Australia, Tiger Airway Singapore, EasyJet England, Virgin America, Spanair Spain (Oops!) and Nok Air Bangkok (Oops Oops!!);
4. Go online Too! - Book also your budget hostel online too, if possible. It will easily cut off half of your accomodation cost if you search around for the best deal and book in advance (off course after your flight booking confirmation). Hostel World is one good example of online hostel search engine which searches over 17,000 hostels in 168 countries! You just key in your destination and date in the form on top of sidebar and they will search for you NOW! Some might prefer to book the first few nights online and search and book the rest only when they reach there. This is good practice when you are planning to have some feeder trips from your original destination. Then off course, adjust your budget a little bit, and
5. Finally, wait until tha date comes! - If you have time constraints or you are still under employment, apply leave in advance! Then read my previous posts on the Top 5 Things To Do Before Your Travel!

If you have observed it well, budget travel is all about planning your trip well in advance! Travel Tips: Last minute travel is always your last option of vacation travel. If you like this post, you may like to subscribe FREE to Travel Feeder’s RSS Feed. - Travel Feeder.

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I was shocked when listening to radio this morning that an air plane in Madrid crashed and broke up in flames after failing to take off from Madrid airport which killed 153 people and 19 injured. It was Spanair jet plane MD-82 which is the second largest airline and the largest budget airline in Spain.

According to the Spanish Transport Minister Magdalena Alvarez, the flight JK 5022 was to take 162 passengers including two babies and 20 other children from Madrid to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. It was Spain’s worst plane disaster since a Boeing 747 belonging to Colombian airline crashed in Madrid in 1983 killing 180 and the worst in Europe since a Russian Tupolev crashed in Ukraine in 2006 killing 170.

The tragedy has enlightened me on the safety of air travel which was once considered as the safest public transport in this world. Unfortunately, with the ever rising petrol prices and tougher and tougher competitions among airline, budget airline companies have been striving to survive nowadays. Because of that, I’m just wondering whether they have also compromised the safety standard of their aircrafts and if that is the case, they are jeopardising our lives!

Is it still wise to fly with those budget airlines just for meeting our travel  budget? Or should we re-proportionate our travel budget to accomodate those reputable airlines? Should AirAsia’s slogan “Everyone can fly” be changed to “Anyone wants to fly?” Well, let’s give our silent condolences to all the victims while thinking of the answer…. - Travel Feeder

It is always the vision of Travel Feeder to feed travel tips to travelers around the world so travelers could visit their dream cities with the least budget and highest value, even to the most expensive cities in the world. Only recently, we have our latest target for this year: According to Mercer’s 2008 Cost Of Living Survey highlight released recently, Moscow, for the 3rd consecutive years, has been ranked 1st for the most expensive city in the world year 2008 while Tokyo is the most expensive city in Asia. For those who doesn’t know about Mercer’s Cost Of Living Survey, Mercer’s survey covers 143 cities across six continents and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment. It is the world’s most comprehensive cost of living survey and is used to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees. Here are the Top 5 Most Expensive Cities In The World:- 

1) MOSCOW, RUSSIA

2) TOKYO, JAPAN

3) LONDON, UK.

4) OSLO, NORWAY

5) SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

 How many of these cities that you have conquered with least budget and greatest pleasure? We would be glad to hear your experience by commenting this post. - Travel Feeder. 

For most of the travelers in the world especially Asian travelers, travelling to countries in Europe perhaps is their dreams come true. The reasons are the cost of Europe tour that is very expensive as their Euro currency has emerged as one of the strongest currency in the world currently. On top of that, there are so many exclusive cities in Europe and so many travel sites that travelers will need easily 3 months if they want to capture briefly most of the countries in Europe. So, in order to save some money and time for an Europe tour, it is important to know which countries and travel sites to cover in priority within a limited period of holidays that we normally afford. I was lucky enough to have been to quite a few countries there and from my travel experience to Europe, here are the Top 5 Cities, in my opinon, that you must include in your must-visit list for your Europe Tour planning. Oops, sorry to say that this is only part of my Top 5 cities as there are unlimited facts to write about this most significant city in Europe, and one of the top in the world, London.

1) LONDON

As the capital city of England and United Kingdom, whoever wish to visit England must first visit London. Right from the while you reach the Heathrow International Airport, the established and busy city will stun you effortlessly. Covering 1500km square of the area and over 7 millions of its population, London has plenty of travel sites and attraction to offer to any traveler.

You could experience the world oldest and most extensive London Underground train in central London where there is always a station on the next street in central London. For museum lovers, there are the infamous British museum and Madame Tussauds max museum; For architecture, London bridge is more popular with the song “London Bridge is falling down…. falling down…. falling down…” though it is always confused with the more iconic landmark, Tower Bridge, which is next to it. While the Big Ben and Westminster building with warden marching show are the tourists favorite; For shopping addicts, the 2km long, Europe busiest shopping street, Oxford Street, is a must-go spot. Or you may want to experience the royal privilege of shopping at The Harrods in Knightsbridge; For park lovers, Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square would be your choice. Hyde Park is famous with it open air summer concert festivals during July-August; For food lovers, London is the home for the oldest and original HardRock Cafe while its diverse mixture of population ethnic group has introduced full variaties of foreign food to London; Indian in Brick Lane, Chinese in China Town, Italian in SOHO, Carribean in Notting Hill; For sightseeing, you should ride on the London Eye or cruise along the Thames River. And there are so much more.

All these places are reachable by London’s excellent railway transport, either underground or above ground. The best bet is to buy a daily London pass that allows you to take whatever public transports and visit tourist attractions for a fixed price which could save you bomb. For fast conectivity, London Underground or tube is ideal as most part of Central London is covered by underground network. On the other hand, London exclusive red buses are just perfect for a city sightseeing ride. Driving a car here is not advisable as parking space during normal hours is very limited and expensive. 

Being one of the most expensive city in the world, everything is money in London. However, there are travel tips that you could save lots of money if you are planning for a budget travel to London. For instance, you could:-

• book in advance hostel or Bed and Breakfast (you can try keying in ‘London’ in hostel search panel at my sidebar) which could save you 70% of accomodation;
• Buy London Pass for 6 days for £117 to get maximum saving on entrance fares and public transportation;
• Visit London in July or January for great saving on shopping during their 70% off store wide sales;
• get great late evening offer of 50% on breads in supermarket such as Safeways or Tesco, and
• grab a free newspaper at any railway station to look for any discounted staffs.

Well, there are so much more activities you could do in London, clubbing addicts should hear of Ministry Of Sound, and shall I say more?

Please comment if you feel like comment and subscribe to my feed if you want to know more from Travel Feeder.com.

I always feel good to write about my travel experience. It created a travel log of mine so I could read back to recall after 10 or 20 years later for some sweet memories. This round of my travel log is about my recent travel experience to Bali. Why I chose Bali? Let’s read on my top 5 reasons:-

1. My wife and I have a common interest in this fantastic island of Indonesia where I have not been to. Though my wife been there some 10 years ago but she still loves to revisit;
2. It just fit into our budget right for a mid-year vacation plan as we are planning to travel to Shanghai later this year;
3. For a short term travel of 4-5 days that we areallowed for(try to have a short steam-up after my wife gave birth for our second son), a destination which is nearer to Malaysia would be ideal with less air-travel time wasted so we could have more time at Bali;
4. For self-travelling without engaging into any vacation package or tour guides, in my opinion, Bali is ideal where you could have relatively safe streets to walk around yourself in the night without much worrying in being robbed or what (unfortunately, the bombing incident in year 2002 did scare off quite some tourists), and
5. Choosing Bali is because we would have less communication problem there as Balinese generally understand english or at least speaks Malay both I think we could communicate. 

So, we were off to Bali! On top of the above top 5’s, we decided on Bali also because the weather in Bali during our travel period from 21st to 24th May 2008 is still acceptable with generally clear and breezing environment and this is the tips of the day, ALWAYS CHECK THE WEATHER SEASON OF YOUR TRAVEL DESTINATION BEFORE BOOKING YOUR