Tips & Hacks to Save Money While Traveling

Traveling around the globe can look and sound great – you fly across the world and visit cities like Berlin, London, or Tokyo. It’s a glamorous and fancy activity, but if you didn’t organize yourself wisely enough, you would quickly learn how taxing it can be on your pocket. Appropriate planning of the traveling experience is critical to making the best out it. The last thing we want is to find ourselves penniless in a foreign country.

Finding yourself without money when you are 200,000 miles far from home is, in fact, all but fun. Whether your voyage ends up being a positive or negative experience depends mostly on you, and how well you planned it. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for planning a well-organized trip that won’t drain your finances.

Plan your routes beforehand

Often tourists get special discounts in the form of cards to visit monuments and other local attractions. Planning your city route in advance means that you know which locations you’re going to visit beforehand, and organize yourself accordingly.

What transportation do you need? Knowing which tickets you’re going to buy allows you to look out for better fees or, at least, to skip unnecessary diversions through a highly-trafficked city. Many travel apps allow you to plan your trip while you’re still at home, and then navigate offline so you can save precious money to pay wireless data charges.

Make appropriate financial preparations

Money buys things, pays for services, food, rent and everything you need while you’re abroad. Without money you don’t go anywhere, and a credit card is always handy when your cash is over. So, first thing first, pay all your upcoming bills. You don’t want to find yourself without money when you’re overseas because a bill just drained your account or credit card.

Check if your credit card works in the country you’re in. Most European banks, for example, do not accept magnetic-strip cards anymore because they only trust those with chip-and-PIN technology. Call your bank before traveling also. Some institutes might think that a fraud is occurring when a transaction suddenly appears in Hong Kong when you’re from New York and may block your credit card as a security measure.

Check the monetary conversions

Then, give a look at the monetary conversion in the country you’re traveling to. Making sense of the conversion rate is important to understand whether that the hotel room you’re booking for the night is absurdly expensive or rightfully cheap. Also, keep in mind that if you want some local money available, conversion centers at airports are huge rip-offs. Just use a traditional ATM or bank to change your dollars into local credit.

Lastly, don’t forget to check that country entrance and exit fees. They’re not included in the price of your flight ticket, and can sometimes reach up to $200.

Make medical preparations before your trip

Different countries might have different health care systems, meaning that not every drug or medication could be available. If you suffer from any condition, be sure to have enough medications to last throughout your vacation, and make a list of the least expensive drugs that you may need if something unexpected occurs (such as NSAIDs or motion sickness drugs). Having to buy a drug in a different country may be extremely expensive, especially if you don’t have insurance that will cover you.

Conclusion

Traveling could be an exciting and amazing experience. Living every aspect of this activity to the fullest is important as much as planning it in a way that it doesn’t drain all your finances. Don’t let the hurry of visiting a foreign place distract you from organizing your trip carefully and from taking all the right precautions.