How to book a cheap city trip

Traveling is something everyone does and wants to do. Whether it’s a one-year-long travel around or the world or a city trip to Madrid, traveling makes us forget the daily struggle and gives us a certain peace of mind. But that peace of mind doesn’t come freely. If you’re worrying about money the whole time you won’t be relaxed. You’ll even get stressed. That’s why we’ve made a guide on how you can book a cheap vacation (mainly in Europe).

Decision to be made for your city trip

First things first. We need to know what you want to do. Do you just want to lay on the beach, hike through the mountains or explore a city?

For us, personally, it’s the latter. We just love exploring new cities, countries and cultures. By the way, you can check the list of cities and countries we’ve visited on our about page. But how do we make those trips as cheap as possible?

In general there are 2 ways of booking a trip. You can either buy a travel package or you can book the flight, transfer and hotel/hostel/house yourself. Most often the second option will be the cheapest, but you can always check your local travel sites for amazing deals.

We only once booked a travel package. An all-in vacation in Egypt for €350 for 12 days, everything included.

In this blogpost we’ll be focusing on the way how we mainly book our travels. You can summarise this in 3 easy steps.

  1. Pick a destination & book a flight.
  2. Search for a place to stay.
  3. Find out how to get there from the airport.

Pick a destination & book a flight

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We mostly pick our destination based on the price of the flights. We go to Ryanair.com and just try a few random destinations.

In our case: we type in Brussels as departure airport (40km from our home) and try all of the arrival airports that are possible and that we haven’t visited yet. If nothing comes up we try the same with Eindhoven airport (93 km) as departure airport. If that also doesn’t work out we try Charleroi airport (101 km).

Up until now this has always worked out for us. The only requirement is that you have to be a bit flexible with your departure and arrival days and hours as low budget planes don’t fly out to the same destination every single day.

Other European airlines you can check: EasyjetNorwegianVueling (Spain), Monarch (UK) and of course the smaller local airports.

Extra tip: some airlines offer youth discounts!

If you know where you want to go to you can use sites like skyscanner, cheaptickets or expedia. They compare different companies to each other and show you which one will be the cheapest option. You can filter based on dates or other preferences like amount of stops or flight duration.

Search a place to stay

Our first choice in Europe is always AirBnB. Always. We love how you get to stay in someone’s own house. If you want privacy you can search for people renting their whole house (more expensive!),but if you love meeting locals you can search for ‘a room only‘. Depending on the accommodation you’ll share a living room, bathroom or kitchen with the owners. Over the last few years we stayed in quite a few awesome places and met some wonderful owners, all thanks to AirBnB!

Another great thing about AirBnB is their referral program. If you make someone stay in an AirBnB for the first time you get reduction on your own next trip (€10-25), as wel as the person you convinced (€35).

If you ever want to use AirBnb, it would be great if you would use our referral link:
bettertraveltogether.com/airbnb
You’ll get €35! 😉

In most cities AirBnB is as cheap as a hostel, but if you’re more of a hostel person that’s a cheap choice too. A good place to start your hostel search is at Hostels.com.

Find out how to get there from the airport.

There is nothing as stupid as paying €20 for a flight and then paying €50 for the taxi to your place. Be sure to Google how to get to your hotel/hostel/house from the airport before you arrive and print it! Sometimes there won’t be any possibilities besides a taxi (like we had in Plovdiv last week!), but most often there’ll be a bus, tram or train. Having a printed paper will help you cross the language barrier more easily.

Another transfer to take into consideration is the transfer from your own house to your domestic airport. For us Brussels is only €10 per person by train, while Charleroi is well over €20 pp. If you travel with 3 or more then consider using your car to get to the airport in combination with a cheap (but safe) parking.

Where will you be heading this year?
Let us know in the comments!

How to book a cheap city trip
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