Posts Tagged ‘budget travel’

Making Your RTW Budget Last

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

As anyone who’s planning an around the world trip knows, one of the most common questions that needs to be addressed during the planning stages has to do with your RTW trip’s budget. It’s easy for people who are unfamiliar with long-term travel to assume that such trips require enormous trust funds or winning lotto tickets, but a little bit of simple research confirms that traveling in certain countries will actually be cheaper than living at home.

Sure, you can spend a fortune on a RTW trip – and you can also travel around the world on $40 a day (or sometimes less).

RTW travel on a serious budget involves more than finding cheap tickets to India and just hoping for the best once you get started. Being budget-conscious means you’ve got to dust off the calculator (or, let’s face it, use the one on your phone) to work out some figures. How long do you plan to travel? What places do you want to visit? How much will you need on average in each of the countries you spend time in? You may not like the figures you find, but you’ll need to be realistic about them – and then start determining how long it will take you to save up enough money to get going.

Making the most of your travel budget is something you can plan for a little bit before you leave home, but it’s also a task that continues when you’re on the road. Every day you’ll be presented with choices, and your decisions could impact your trip. It could be something as simple as taking a more deluxe hiking tour in Peru rather than taking the more rustic tour, or it could be something more dire – like getting injured on said hiking tour and needing medical attention that ends up being expensive because you didn’t think you’d need backpacker insurance.

With a bit of careful money management and some good guidance, you can make your travel budget stretch much further than you probably could with the same amount of money at home.

What are your favorite budget-stretching tips?

Tags: Budget, budget travel
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Budget travel strategies to consider for 2009

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

If you have money saved up, and are on a RTW trip or are about to set out fairly soon, then you are luckier than you might imagine. We’ve all seen headlines for the past couple months about this problem or that problem, and the travel industry itself is one of the hardest hit of all. It is likely that some airlines will be going under at some point, and that won’t help any of us, but the bargains now on offer can really make for some outstanding deals.

Strategies to consider for 2009

Hostels

Hostels are reporting to be busier than ever, so the competition for these cheap beds is probably going to continue to increase, especially in expensive European, Australian, and North American cities. If you are on the tightest of budgets, these will probably still be your best bet for cheap sleeps, but you might actually have to reserve even farther in advance for the cheap beds at the hostels with the best locations. If you are fairly sure you know where you want to stay, then book your first night as early as you can.
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Tags: budget travel, rtw
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