People are nomads. Even if we don’t admit it, we all want to travel, visit places we have never been and connect with cultures we have only seen on the TV.
What is a budget?
To me, “budget” is just a word. It means nothing, unless you believe in it. I don’t believe in travel budgets. Yes, maybe what we do is a type of budgeting, but definitely not in the sense which most people understand it where you are led by a budget.
People see budgets as borders. Frames they need to fit in. I don’t! I despite budgets and I try to avoid them.
What we do instead? Research.
Every time we want to go somewhere, we decide in advance. As much advance as possible. Sometimes months, sometimes just a few weeks. It depends on the destination.
1. Read blogs and watch YouTube vloggers
We start by reading what other bloggers and vloggers say about the country or place we want to visit. We read where they have been, what they do there. Some of them even share how much they have spent on food and accommodation which is really helpful.
2. Search for paid experiences
Everywhere we go and everywhere you will want to go, there are companies which can take you to a guided tour for a fee. You can get different experiences with such companies like diving in the ocean, rafting in a wild river or even iceberg climbing.
Those companies’ websites are some of the best places where you can find information about different attractions in the place where you are going. They are trying to show you the most interesting part of their country/city/surroundings and sign you up for as many as possible.
After looking at such websites, we decide if we can afford any of the guided tours/experiences they offer. I can’t tell you what we do most of the time as I don’t count, but we like to do things our way, not the guided way.
After this we have a list of attractions we may visit. Even if we don’t visit any of them, it’s a list of choices and it’s good when you can choose.
3. Find accommodation
We are not those people who stay in 5 star hotels no matter what. Most of the time we have been on a journey we don’t even sleep in a hotel. Or if we do, it is rarely even 3 stars hotel. Every now and then we even sleep in the car, like this time when we were camping on the Isle of Wight and our tent was flooded by the heavy rain.
We start by searching for a place to sleep in Airbnb. This is a good place to see the prices offered in the country/city you want to visit.
If we like the price, we book it straight away. If not, we start searching for alternatives. So far google has proven best in this task and we are not focusing on searching on specific websites. Just go to google.com and type “cheap places to stay in <city>”.
After all, search is what google does best and it will search all those other websites for you in one go.
4. Flights
We never buy the first flight ticket we find. We always give ourselves time to research and compare prices between different airlines and different time periods. We are almost never set a specific timeframe to travel and always arrange our non working days after we book a holiday.
Take your time when booking flights. Sometimes it’s worth waiting for finding a better deal.
Can we afford it?
After we do all of the above, we decide if we can afford the journey. And since we don’t have a budget, the question is almost always “Yes, we can”, but sometimes we know it will take time. On some occasions, we keep the destination, but skip some of the places we want to visit or some of the experiences we have in the list (those paid ones from above). This gives us more time to spend elsewhere and lowers the total cost of the holiday and making it possible.
Other times we have to completely change our destination, but we don’t just delete the research done so far, we just keep it safe for the next time we decide we need a getaway of our day-to-day busy life.
This is our way of not being framed by budgets when choosing our next travel destination. We simply don’t have a budget. We have a dream, we know how much it will cost us and we are working hard to get there.
P.S. I will be editing this article to keep it up to date with our methods of traveling without a budget, so keep an eye every now and then.
