How to be a frugal traveler

I feel like I've got some experience in this now that Kate and I have planned a May vacation/escape thingy that entails us going to Minneapolis, Fargo, San Francisco, and Boston over the course of a week. Here's my top 5 methods for doing it on the cheap.

1. Stay with family, hotels are expensive. Yeah, it's kind of obvious. And it limits your travel options. But if you are lucky like us, you have family all over the place. As of this summer we will have family in Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. That's four of the coolest cities in the US. Add in my friends in NYC, and you've got your bases covered. This also saves money on food, because you don't have to go out for every meal, and you can even cook up a good meal to make up for the fact that you are messing with your hosts' schedules.


2. Use kayak.com, but don't use it. Kayak the best travel website I've ever used. It is the dogpile of travel websites. It searches all the other travel websites (expedia, orbitz, travelocity, all the airlines websites, etc.) and gives you the best prices. Then, when you find the cheapest flight, go to the airline to buy that exact same flight. This keeps you from paying the service fee of travelocity/orbitz/etc. It's not a lot you save by going directly to the flight, but it's something. We saved around $100 on this go-round by doing that.


3. If it's multi-destination, fly on multiple carriers. This is because all airlines work the same way: unless you get a rare direct flight, they fly you to a hub airport, and then out of the hub to your destination. Which is all well and good, unless you are traveling to multiple cities. For instance, our first flight to Minneapolis is easy to get a flight on Frontier, because it is a hub for Frontier's hub is in Minneapolis. Our second flight goes to SF, and that is a hub for another airline. Our third goes to Boston, and that is a hub for another. Flying on one airline for all three flights would be much more expensive than if we switched. We didn't know this always. We can't help but regret our method for flying to Minneapolis, and then from Fargo to Hartford this winter. Since only two airlines fly out of Fargo, our flights to Minneapolis were far more limited that they would have been had we flown on another carrier. And far more expensive. Never again!


4. Start at the biggest airport you can get to. For this trip, we are flying our of Boston. Our nearest airport, Bradley, is only 45 minutes away, but we are flying out of Boston because the flights are about $100 cheaper, each way. That's more than enough to cover the cost of gas and parking, so we are going to Boston. You have to work out your own cost/benefit analysis, but for us it really works out.

So there you go. Aaron's four tips for keeping in the black during travel. Wooo!