Let’s start by saying, this post is the odd-one-out from all of my previous ones! In all my blogs I keep sharing our travel experiences, tips & tricks and information that one needs to know about a place before they travel. But apart from knowing all those details about a destination, a few technical questions still remain unanswered.
- Package tours or Self-booked tours? How to choose?
- How to find economic flight prices online?
- How to book budget friendly hotels?
Well, to brief it up… You asked for this! We have been receiving messages from many of you, about sharing our knowledge and experience about planning and booking a complete tour. And, here you go! In this blog I would share all the secrets of travel bookings that we follow when we plan our trips – of course, the most economic way!
Package-tours or self-booked tours?
We have been asked many times, if we prefer package tours or book our trips on our own? Well, we almost always book our trips online and on our own. Not through travel agents but by comparing prices online. A lot of research work goes in this method. While package tours can save your time as somebody else design your vacation for you, we don’t prefer that. See, we are explorers and we like to follow the old school DIY process to plan our trips. And we don’t regret it. Google is a treasure-house of information and each and every minutes spent on this pre-travel research work help us to get genuine fundamental knowledge about a destination – what to do, where to eat and where to stay?
However, even when we book our own tickets and hotels and design our own travel plans, we take help of a few websites who enable us to pre-book everything from before. They are like package organisers but you get to design it on your own, from the comfort of your home!
#1 Klook
We trust Klook.com greatly for booking certain local activities abroad. Like online skip-the-line entry tickets for visiting local attractions, booking local car transfers, ferry tickets or speed boat transfers and even we booked our local SIM cards for Thailand and Vietnam with great 4G Data package from them! Your every activities planned can be booked from them before and you can just travel entirely anxiety-free! They have amazing discounted offers for a huge number of activities, sightseeing and transfers listed in their site. The best thing about Klook is that, when you book a transfer or activity, you don’t have to be stuck with a guided group-tour and completely design your own activities and visit the places at your own pleasure. You don’t have to stand in the queue of the entrance of an attraction to buy tickets, but pre-book your skip-the-line ticket from before and save a lot of time.
Online flight booking made-easy:
There are zillions of online travel booking sites that lets you book you flights online. However, we always go for the sites that allow to compare prices from different airlines and book a multi destination trip with ease. When visiting a large country or continent (like Europe), we always land in one city and return from another. That way we save time, cost and maximise our coverage. We always look for a booking site that allows to select “multiple destination” as an option.
Our all time favourites are:
#1 Expedia
Expedia is one of oldest and fastest growing online travel booking platform. It offers excellent competitive flight prices globally and also multiple cost efficient discount coupons. Not only that, they also have a huge number of hotel groups listed in their site with discounted rates.
#2 Skyscanner
Skyscanner is our personal favourite! Not only because it allows to compare rates from different airlines but also because it shows all the competitive pricing listed in the internet by a few hundred flight booking sites globally. And thats super helpful! You can compare the same flight price listed in 5 different websites, and book the most cost-effective one with an ease of a click. They have options to compare and book hotels as well hire car rides globally.
#3 Makemytrip
If you live in India, then you have heard about Makemytrip big time! Yeah, Makemytrip is India’s leading travel booking platform that offers easy flight booking and comprehensive choices. Plus, cherry-on-the-top – it comes with hundreds of coupons and offers everyday, and if used strategically and timely, you would be in great profit! We love their offers for flights. They have offers for booking hotels (globally), cars (India only), Indian Railway tickets, as well services like international and domestic package-tours, travel insurance and visa application etc. We don’t go for package tour options, since we like to travel freely. But we regularly book flights from Makemytrip for both of our domestic and international trips.
#4 Cleartrip
Another Indian site with comprehensive ticket rates and tons of lucrative offers is Cleartrip. They too have hotels and train booking options, but we mainly use their flight booking portal. We keep an eye on their deals and fish-out coupon codes every now and then for discounted fares.
Booking a hotel? Solution is here:
The internet these days are full of websites that offers amazing discounted deals, starting from hotels, hostels, apart-hotels, apartments, guest houses, resorts and many more. Price range varies based upon the location and star category but it is important to choose options based on your budget and the location you are visiting.
As for example, when we visit Europe, we do not prefer hotels and always look for a cozy little apartment that comes with a kitchen. But why stay with a kitchen? To cut the fooding cost!! If you can buy your food supply from the local grocery store and at least make and eat your breakfast on your own, you can save upto 30% of your daily budget.
However, when visiting locations in South-East Asia, we prefer hotels that comes with complementary breakfast. In South-East Asia hotel prices are much cheaper than in the West. And we have seen that one free meal (preferably breakfast) a day can reduce the per day cost extensively. So, all these are needed to be researched before you hit the road. Researching about a new location and their cost of living, destinations, attractions are pretty exciting and we love to plan for our trips, same as we love to actually travel.
But how do we book our stays?
#1 Booking.com
We are totally a fan of Booking.com! We have booked majority of our stays from them and they offer thousands of amazing deals world-wide at a price that is so budget-friendly, that you cannot think of visiting another site! Rate comparisons, discounted per night prices are a few important features here, and they allow to check out the hotel locations on the map, and compare other properties nearby very efficiently. They have a huge list of apartments, hostels, budget and star-category hotels, luxury resorts, bed & breakfasts, family-run stays and actually all sorts of properties globally. Their interface is super easy to use and payments are most of the time “pay at the property” which is a great option. Another thing we love about them is that they have tons of properties listed in their site that offer “free Cancellation” policy. This is a great feature for budget travellers, in case their trip plan or travel dates are changed in the last minute. Click on the above Booking.com link to access discounted prices from their site.
#2 Airbnb
We book our home-stays from Airbnb and we love them! Airbnb has a super easy to use interface and an enormous list of hosted private properties, as well resorts and hotels these days. Airbnb lets you book apartments and home-stays globally in affordable prices that enables you to have your own little home away from home. For all the countries where hotel stays are expensive or eating out is a big-budget problem, a home-stay booked from Airbnb lets you use your own private kitchen to cook your own food and save a prime share of your travel funds. Airbnb enables you to chat with the host/property owner directly and they most of the time help with local travel tips too. Before booking, always double check the cancellation and refund policy, for not all properties listed here allows cancellation in full after booking.
Bonus Tip:
Never ever travel abroad without a good travel insurance. In a few countries a travel insurance is mandatory to be submitted along with visa application, but for other countries as well, always pre-book a good travel insurance before leaving the country. We generally cover us for USD 50K to 100K depending on the visiting country. For Europe, US, UK or UAE it is always better to go for at least 100K coverage per head. For Asian countries 50K is ideally good enough. Choose wisely before purchasing. We have booked our travel insurance from various companies like HDFC Ergo or ICICI Lombard, but in recent times we have been booking from Columbus Direct. They have insurance coverage for various categories, lets you select your travelling purposes like, travelling for “leisure” or “business trip” or “adventure sports” etc, and quotes the pricing accordingly.
Columbus Direct International Travel Insurance
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