My friends seem to think I live in a tent and eat ramen all the time to finance my trips abroad. What they fail to understand is that travel is cheaper than the EMI on their brand new car or that a comfortable 2-week vacation in Europe could cost less than a thousand dollars. The problem is knowing how to spend the money so as to maximize the experience while minimizing the cost . For example, it isn’t prudent to save money on food in Italy and neither is spending it on expensive cruises. Personally, I hate spending money on getting from one place to another. Whenever I plan a trip, I spend way too much time optimizing flights and trying to extract the most value out of my reward points. On the other hand, I don’t think twice about eating at fancy restaurants or overindulging in beer. In the remainder of this post, I’ll show you how to spend less money getting to cities so you can spend more of it in getting to know them.
Let’s say you want to see Amsterdam, a charming city with numerous crisscrossing canals and trippy night lights but, you observe that flights to Amsterdam are ridiculously expensive. Conversely, the cheapest flights maybe to Amsterdam yet, you would rather go to Berlin and immerse yourself in world war history. The trick here is to be flexible with planning so that you are able to take the cheapest flight out and then travel onward to your destination. In most instances, this would save you hundreds of dollars.
Google flights, for instance, allows you to search from say, New York City to Europe and skyscanner lets you search from anywhere to everywhere, listing results by country.
So now that you have saved a couple of hundred dollars on the flight ticket, how to get to the destination? You want to be in Berlin but, the cheapest round-trip ticket available leaves you in Amsterdam. The next question, obviously, is how to get from Amsterdam to Berlin. Wait a minute, are you sure you don’t want to spend a couple of days in Amsterdam and see what it has to offer? All right, a hostel bed has been reserved in Amsterdam and the canal tour booked but your destination still is Berlin, Deutschland.
All right. I know of 3 ways to travel frugally within Europe, 4 actually. One of them must surely get you to Berlin at a cost lower than $187 – the extra amount you would have had to pay to get there directly from New York City (refer image above).
RyanAir – With tickets as low as 11 Euros, you simply cannot beat RyanAir’s fares. Of course it goes without saying that you have to book early and travel during the week to snag that great price. Even otherwise, it’s hard to beat RyanAir’s price for long distances within Europe. I have flown from Brussels to Barcelona and back for as little as €34. Do remember to print your boarding passes, otherwise you would have to pay a fee of €15 to get it printed at the airport. RyanAir also doesn’t fly all the routes you would expect. For instance, the Amsterdam-Berlin route you want to take doesn’t exist. RyanAir only has two routes from Amsterdam, one to Malaga, Spain and the other to Dublin, Ireland. In cases where the route you want to take does exist, you need look no further than the airline with the tagline – “Low fares made simple”.
Trains – There are so many things to know and equally many quirks to booking trains in Europe. For instance, you could book the same Amsterdam to Berlin train on bahn.com (German site) or nsinternational.nl (Dutch site) and prices might vary. Then there’s this whole debate about whether to reserve a seat or not. I’ll probably write a separate post on this and mostly from my travel experiences on the DB Bahn it isn’t necessary. There is, nevertheless, a mammoth amount of information on trains already available here https://www.seat61.com/Europe-train-tickets.htm In my opinion, travelling by train is a joy and an end in itself. You get to take in the sights and maybe realize that as in life, the fun is in the journey.
Here’s a handy guide to understanding your ticket if you did end up booking a deutsche train – help.loco2.com/article/329-understanding-your-deutsche-bahn-ticket Plus Db Bahn mobile app is available on Android and iOS. You can use it to display your tickets and keep track of the timetable and platform information for connecting trains.
Flixbus – Behold the best travel deal for Europe: interflix.flixbus.com. Flixbus is a low-cost private bus company that operates routes all over Europe. With interflix they seem to have outdone themselves. For only €99, you can book up to 5 direct routes in a three-month period. Of course, there are a few restrictions, which are to be expected with an impressive deal such as this one. The 5 routes must be direct which means stopovers don’t count i.e. if you go from Prague to Stuttgart with a bus change in Nuremberg it counts as 2 buses and you have to book each leg separately. You also cannot book direct return trips on the same route like Vienna – Bratislava – Budapest – Zagreb – Budapest. Although you are allowed to do a Paris – Brussels – Amsterdam – Cologne – Paris trip. Note that these routes may not actually be served by Flixbus, I was only trying to give examples of what is and isn’t allowed with the interflix program. I firmly believe this is one of the best budget travel deals out there. There are some problems with Flixbus, namely, frequent delays and bus stops being located outside of cities’ main bus terminal. Having said all this Flixbus remains the budget traveller’s best friend. Much like DB Bahn, Flixbus’s mobile app makes it extremely easy for booking tickets and managing your journey across Europe.
BlaBlaCar – I have journeyed by RyanAir, Bahn trains and Flixbus but, I haven’t done blablacar. I learnt about this from my friends in Europe who never stopped singing its praises. So I did what any self-respecting budget traveller would do – research on the internet. I discovered a lot of useful information but, some things are best said by journalists – “Though more expensive than hitchhiking, BlaBlaCar is a commendably community-minded enterprise. Drivers are not allowed to profit from the service, which serves the dual purpose of excluding the greedy and avoiding added insurance costs for commercial vehicles. The website calculates the distance of each journey and offers a fair price for the driver to ask from each passenger, as well as a maximum price above which the driver cannot charge. For London to Paris these prices are set at £22 and £33 respectively; by contrast, a similar trip on iDBUS, the state-owned French coach service, costs £30-40.”
Here’s the link to the full guardian article in case you’re interested – https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/oct/13/car-sharing-blablacar-cheap-travel-green
Not only does blablacar reduce your travel costs, it enriches the travel experience itself. It’s an opportunity to meet people and learn their stories, to share your own and to make a personal connection with someone from a place very different from yours. To me, travel is all about the learning experience. It challenges you to look at life from someone else’s perspective and the more you interact with people from different cultures, the more you start to question your assumptions. Travel changes you and almost always, changes you for the better.
