How to plan (& save money on) your next holiday!

When you’re planning a trip it can be difficult to know where to start, even if you’re only going for a couple of days. With that in mind, I’ve created the guide below which will help you to not only plan your holiday, but also save you money on your flights, hotels and spending money too!

I’ve also created a FREE and easy-to use budgeting spreadsheet (featuring pretty colours!) which will help you track your holiday spending to make sure you don’t go over budget.

I hope this helps you with your next trip! (And just to add – despite me extolling the virtue of some of the services below, I’m not sponsored by any of them!)

Initial thoughts

The basics

To start with it’s good to sketch out the basics and ask yourself some key questions. Which destination do you want to go to? Which key cities or locations do you want to visit, and can you get from one to the other easily?

Time off

Establish how much time you’ll need off work. If you’re going for a longer holiday, it might be worth giving your manager a heads up to both flag your intentions and get an initial ‘all clear’ that you can take that amount of time off (without needing to give specific dates).

Money

Travel can get incredibly expensive, and no matter how great it is, it’s not worth getting yourself in debt over. It’s worth setting up a separate account and putting a portion of your monthly savings aside for your trip if you can – that way you have enough money in your regular savings account in case something crops up, and you have a financial cushion when you come back!

Don’t forget, in addition to flights and hotels you’ll need cash for getting to and from the airport at each end (or airport parking), entrance fees and snacks, alongside proper meals and souvenirs.

Planning well in advance means that you have the budgetary flexibility to snag great deals on flights and hotels when you see them, rather than paying for everything at the last minute.

Do some research!

Once you’ve settled on a destination it’s important to do a bit of research. What’s the weather going to be like when you go? Are there any festivals on that might coincide with your trip? Even if flights might be reasonable, at certain times of the year (e.g. festivals, public holidays) hotels may well have limited availability and be much more expensive due to an increase in domestic tourism, and tourist attractions may have limited numbers of tickets available (or be closed completely).

On Skyscanner you can select which months you’d like to travel to get a rough guide as to how much flights will cost. You can also select the ‘cheapest month’ option which is good if you’re on a strict budget, however it’s worth thinking about why that month is cheaper. It might be that it’s 11 months in the future which is fine – but it might be because it’s monsoon season and it’s going to be pretty wet! Are those prices due to the flight times, the airline, or needing to do an airport transfer – and are they compromises you’re willing to make?

Looking at sites such as Booking.com, Expedia, or even a Google search will be able to give you a rough idea of how much hotels are per night, although prices will fluctuate throughout the year and may well increase the closer you get to your departure dates.

Sign up to flight discount sites

I’ve used Jack’s Flight Club in the past, although there is Scott’s Cheap Flights if you’re based in the US (if you know of any more in your country do let me know and I’m happy to add these to the list!)

For Jack’s Flight Club at least, there’s a free and a paid subscription option. The paid subscription option (approx. £35 a year) does give you access to more discounted flights, but free users are still notified of some pretty great deals. I managed to get a direct flight from London to Osaka and back from Tokyo for £590 – usually that would cost £850+!

There are also a few apps available like Hopper, where you can be a bit more specific about when you want to travel. You can also get alerts when flights hit a certain amount although of course it’s still worth looking into when those flights are, whether you have to transfer and how long they take.

Regardless of where you find your discounted flight, it’s worth checking if there are any restrictions for use (especially important given the ongoing pandemic) and you have to be ready to go for those deals when they come up – they won’t last long!

For me the flight purchase is basically when I say to myself ‘it’s official – I’m going! Ahhhhh it’s happening!!!’

Check every so often for hotel prices

Providing on how long you have left until your departure date, you can then check hotel prices at your leisure and snag any deals that pop up (sites like Booking.com often have discounts on different hotels at different times). Don’t leave it too long though as hotels can get snapped up quickly!

Consider getting a Revolut card

I am ashamed to say that until 2017 I was still taking wads of banknotes with me when I travelled. I didn’t even realise you could use your bank card abroad. (What was I thinking?!) And then I used my bank card overseas and guess what – conversion and withdrawal charges for foreign currency can get expensive.

Nowadays I use Revolut for getting my spending money, as it doesn’t cost anything to exchange money into whatever currency you need (which you can do in advance as well as when you’re abroad), and there’s a pretty liberal limit on how much you can withdraw before you have to pay any admin fees. You can also set alerts so that when your currency hits a certain value you can take advantage of that great exchange rate to get more bang for your buck.

It costs £5 to join Revolut and they send you a card through the post. You then download the App and off you go. Some things to note before getting Revolut are whether they carry the currency you’ll need – for example, when I travelled to Krygystan I wasn’t able to get Som – and check whether Revolut cards will work at ATMs at your destination. You can usually find answers on various discussion forums.

Tracking your spending

For my trip to Japan I used an excel spreadsheet to help keep track of my spending (you can download a copy for FREE here). I created two tables: on the ‘Budget’ tab I listed my draft itinerary, how much I was realistically able to spend on hotels and flights, and then any extra known expenses (pocket WiFi, JR Pass) on the set of columns on the right hand side. I made sure to over-estimate what I thought things were going to cost to make sure I had saved enough (and also to give me the feeling that I’d gotten a bargain). As you can see, a trip to Japan can get very expensive – I was very lucky to get a decent bonus that year which helped to cover some of the cost.

On the ‘Actual’ table, I then replaced my budgeted spend with the actual amount. As you can see, if your total actual spend is under the amount you budgeted, the cell will turn green. If you’ve gone over, the cell will turn red. That way you can easily see whether you’re sticking to your budget or not!

Then, when it comes to going on your trip, it’s all taken care of!

Go!

If you’ve followed the above, there’s not much more to do other than sort out any other bits and bobs you might need such as travel passes or tickets, and then get excited about your trip! Enjoy!