To Travel Cheap, Follow the Exchange Rates
“Saving travel is about flexibility,” says Andrew Harper, an anonymous editor-in-chief for the luxury travel site. He told Lifehacker about several surefire ways to keep an eye on luxury travel discounts, one of which will make you feel like a complete master of the universe, which you already know because we messed it up in the headline.
The editor supports the usual tactic: get a Chase Sapphire Preferred card to earn points. Travel “off-season” on either side of the peak season (he says prices in the Caribbean are dropping by more than half from peak to shoulder). Choose your dates flexibly and look for flights in the middle of the week. He likes the trend of using premium economy seats on international flights .
If you have flexible dates, you can save a lot of money by setting lots of infrequent discount alerts. Even the most luxurious hotels sometimes offer a free third or fourth night, he said.
But our favorite trick is to calculate the vacation time at the rate of the country. If you have long-term goals to visit certain expensive countries, keep an eye on the exchange rate and try to buy tickets during a recession, or even time your entire trip for an auspicious year. Japan, Britain and Argentina became cheaper for American travelers as their currencies fell against the dollar. Canada is always smart for Americans; The editor notes that the same Rocky Mountain vacation is cheaper in Canada than in the US. And the South African rand is still making a comeback after a severe downturn in December.
Calculate your travel times correctly and you will receive a 10% discount or more on the exchange rate alone. Combine this with the strategies above and you can significantly lower your travel prices without changing your actual experience.
It’s not about going somewhere with a constantly lower cost of living or with a growing economy, but about going somewhere when the life of the locals is almost the same, but temporarily weakened compared to the economy of your own country. Those of us who grew up near a landmark such as Niagara Falls may be familiar with this tactic. (Of course, it helped that the Canadian side of town has all the cool sights.) But try to lock in your prices before they drop again, and you suddenly find yourself just a poor American stuck in an expensive country.