Travel Hack – Doing More With Less

The concept of doing more with less can be stressful, especially in business where this is a constant reality. 

However, when it comes to travel, doing more with less is actually a good thing. For me, doing more with less has become my second strongest travel super power – second only to being prepared.

So what does doing more with less really mean in when it comes to travel? For me, it means making your travel budget go even farther, giving you an opportunity to do more, stay longer, or experience higher quality travel on the same or an even smaller budget.  

There are many ways to make a travel budget work a little harder, such as booking trips using credit card or airline points, or signing up for travel deals. But one of the easiest ways you can upgrade your travel and stretch your travel dollars is to rebook pre-made reservations for your hotel and rental car. 

While I often book my family’s hotel or resort stay and rental car well in advance of our travel dates, I’m constantly going back to the hotel/resort or car rental websites to look for newly posted deals. Hotels will often wait until a few weeks out from your check-in date before they start dropping prices or offering new deals with better rates or room categories. 

To give you an example, for my recent trip to Hilton Head, I originally booked our resort stay in mid-April for our trip in late July. This might have been a little too early but I was nervous that we would have limited room selections if I waited.  We ended up booking a king room for my husband and I and a two-queen room for our teenagers. Both rooms were already moderately priced. Given it was peak season, I thought I had scored a pretty good deal. 

Two weeks prior to our trip, I checked the resort website to find they had released a new summer deal, making our original rooms another 30% off.

I immediately checked the same room categories for our two rooms for our exact travel dates and decided to book the same rooms under the new summer deal and cancelled our original reservations. We ended up saving about $900 between the two rooms and another $100 upon rebooking the rental car – for a total of nearly $1,000 saved! And all of this took less than 15 minutes to complete – all through the website. 

This savings more than paid for an additional vacation splurge – a 2-hour private sailing tour, with enough left to pay for a few meals throughout the week. 

So as you can see, no matter what level of travel budget you start with, paying close attention to fluctuating prices can pay off big time. In some cases, what you save can be used to upgrade your current vacation experience or applied toward your next vacation. In other words, when it comes to travel – doing more with less = #travelgoals 

Ciao and happy travels my friends!

Jennifer