If you are waiting for the pandemic to ease and everything to open up again so you can go travelling, you are not alone. It certainly looks as though travel of some kind will be possible in the coming year, so that is something to look forward to.
But many of the aspects of planning such a trip are still going to be relevant and it’s important to be aware of what those are. One of the main things you will always want to do is to try to make travel as cheap as possible, so here are some of the ways you can hope to do just that in 2021.
Understand the best time to travel
A lot of the process of making travel cheaper comes down to understanding when is a good time to travel. By simply being a little bit clever about your timing, you can ensure that you are going to save a lot of money, so this is definitely something you will want to be aware of.
Travelling off-season can be up to four times cheaper than travelling in season, so its worth paying attention to these things.
When you are looking at timings, be sure to consider both your home country and the country you are hoping to travel to, as they might have peak times which vary slightly from your home country. Avoiding school holidays, if you can, can be the key to much cheaper holidays, too.
Remain flexible
A general way to make travelling easier is to try to remain flexible about the nature and details of the trip. Generally, the more flexible you are willing to be, the more likely it is that you can travel more cheaply.
If you are happy to just get away somewhere (and you might be after this pandemic) then you can keep your options open and simply allow your search to be dictated by what is the most affordable destination at any given time.
This can be a really useful way of saving a lot of money, but of course it doesn’t work if you have a very clear idea of what your trip should be like and where you want to go.
Book in advance or go last minute
When it comes to choosing when to book your holiday, there are two options that are generally a lot cheaper than anything else: Booking far in advance and booking at the very last minute. It is easy to appreciate why booking very early can be such a good idea, as you are bound to find the best prices, but you might wonder how a last-minute booking can work in quite the same way.
However, the answer is simple: There are travel websites dedicated to providing last-minute holiday deals that are generally a lot more affordable than regular prices.
This works because those sites are aiming to fill up the last hotel and flight combinations in order to save the airlines and accommodation companies money, so they are happy to offer it for a very low price. The trick to making this work is, as we saw above, to remain flexible, so if you are happy to just go away anywhere, you can usually make a good saving by using these kinds of sites.
Use vouchers
Travel being such a huge industry, it’s no great surprise that you can find a lot of vouchers for travelling. This is very much a powerful way to save a lot of money on your travels, and it’s something that you should make a point of looking into before you pay for your travel.
If you look at a site like NetVoucherCodes.co.uk, it can often be surprising how good the deals are, and you should be able to save quite a lot of money this way.
What’s particularly exciting about this method is that you can usually find vouchers and coupon codes for pretty much any trip and destination you are hoping to take, so you won’t have to worry about making your plans fit in with any particular itinerary. That sets this apart from those methods that rely on you being flexible as to destination and so on.
It’s well worth taking a look for any vouchers or coupons that might help you out in trying to make your holidays a lot cheaper. It can make a lot of difference to the total price.
Automate the search
There is plenty of the searching process for cheap flights, hotels and so on that you can automate these days, thus saving you a lot of time and making the whole process so much easier for you.
One of the simplest and yet most effective ways of automating the search for cheaper travel is to subscribe to email alerts from many of the best comparison websites. If you have a regular email alert coming in from Skyscanner, for instance, you can be notified of when a particular flight and hotel search becomes cheaper, and then book it in before the prices rise again.
If you like, you can also set up Google alerts for a particular phrase – such as “holidays in Maldives” – and you will receive an email when that crops up on a new page, meaning that you will be one of the first to see the best prices for a new holiday package deal. That can really make things a lot easier, and it helps you to save money without you having to sit there thoroughly scouring the internet for deals.
Search incognito
When you search for anything online, cookies are installed onto your computer which then allow you to be tracked around the web. Many holiday booking companies make use of cookies to raise the prices, as they know that you are interested in particular search phrases and so on.
To get around this, be sure to try searching in Incognito mode (Chrome) or Private Browsing (Firefox). That way, you will see the fares without any cookies artificially lifting the prices for you. It’s a simple tip, but it could help you in saving a surprising amount of money on your next holiday.
Ignore the myths
As well as all of that, there are a lot of myths floating around about buying plane tickets in particular, and it is worth being aware of which of those are not true and should therefore be avoided.
For instance, you might often hear that it is always cheaper to buy plane tickets on a Tuesday, or some other randomly chosen day of the week. But this is simply not true. There really is no telling which day of the week is going to bring you cheaper deals, if any will. So be sure not to be swayed by those ideas – you are likely only to end up wasting your time.
As you can see, there are a lot of things that you can bear in mind if you want to make travel cheaper in 2021. Give these tips a go and see if it makes a difference for you. You might be able to save a lot of money this year.
