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Often, we get asked how we can afford to travel so much or how it is possible that we are travelling constantly while we work full-time. In today’s post, I want to take you through how we manage this and give you some tips so you too can travel the world in a more regular basis.
We want to look back at all the trips we’ve done in 2018 and give you a little sneak peak of what we have planned for the coming year. This is without counting the trips that we do separately for business or with our families.
Now that you’ve seen this, don’t be deceived: We are not rich nor have all the time in the world to travel whenever we want. We both work full time and get the average number of holidays in the UK – About 25 days a year. But we are REALLY strategic with these so we can maximise our trips throughout the year. We simply are young professionals who save most of their holidays and a good part of their salaries to see the world.
Here’s how we do it:
1. Plan in advance
Planning in advance enables us to maximise our holidays and create a satisfying calendar for the year that fulfills our traveling needs. As you can see from the examples above, we tend to travel to 5 or 6 different destinations every year, including a long trip (2 weeks) to a further away destination that we wouldn’t be able to travel to with less time.
When doing this, we include weekend get-aways and we try to fit in weekends or bank holidays so we can maximise our stays. However, we also make sure to stay the right amount of time in a place so we are not paying accommodation unnecessarily. Hence why research and advance-planning is so important.
In addition, you should know that the earlier you book the better prices you will get. We like to book our long flights about 6 months in advance as prices are much lower then. For example, we flew to Thailand for about £350 return and to Chile for £450 return.
2. Don’t be picky choosing your next destination
Something really important to maintain this type of lifestyle is to not be picky about your travel destinations. Yes, we will always have preferences and lists of places we want to see more; but the truth is, the entire world is beautiful and you should have an open mind when researching your next trip.
We usually are not only flexible with our travel dates but also with where we are going. We use skyscanner to check the cheapest destinations on the month or dates we want to travel. You can do this by typing ‘Everywhere’ as a destination on their search engine – You will be surprised with how cheap you can travel to some places!
Sometimes, we also quickly check prices of hotels in the different destinations to identify, with the flight ticket prices, what would be the cheapest trips.
Once you have this information, it is up to you to analyse the pros and cons and book your trip. But as I said, be open minded! This will not only save you money and enable you to travel more often, but also you will be surprised by some places that you never thought could be so amazing… until you visit.
In addition, be open to travel to certain places when they are not high season or the weather is not ideal. This will also save you a lot of money! And if you don’t like crowds this is the way to go. For example, we visited Oslo in the month of February and our flight only costed £35 return from London with the hotel also being half price… All because it’s cold in the city and tourists don’t visit as much in this season. But we enjoyed our visit just as much anyway!
3. Be ready to travel long hours and wake up early
Something we learned in our trip to Chile last year is that the most beautiful places on earth are far away and of difficult access to the human – But that is what makes them so unique and beautiful. If you want to get to know these, be ready to do long bus hours, flights, train journeys and so on. To get to these places, you will also have to be ready to wake up very early!
What we also do to save money and optimise our travelling time, is we wake up very early to catch the selected transportation. We have taken multiple 6AM flights for its cheap price and have spent a full day travelling to cross the country of Chile to reach Patagonia, for example.
But we wouldn’t change that for anything in this world. It is those little sacrifices, like sleeping less hours or doing a 4-hour flight stop, that enabled us to explore the most amazing places we’ve ever seen.
4. Save up and don’t live above your possibilities
Last but not least, what truly enables us to pay for all of these trips is that we don’t live above our possibilities. In fact, we live much below them so we can save a good part of our salaries to travel as often as we like. This includes living in a flat less nice than you could, not eating out very often, not spending money on alcohol (it’s super expensive in London!), etc… I’ve met people who buy lunch out every day during the working week. In London, that is about £6 a day, which in a month equals a total of £120. With this money, you could buy return flights to many places in Europe!
At the end of the day, it’s your choice – We prefer to spend our money traveling.
So, what will you sacrifice this year to see a little more of this world?
Thanks for reading! We hope this post helped you understand how you can maintain a travel-work lifestyle. If we can do it, you can too!
Let us know in the comments if there is anything else you would like to know or what is it that you do to travel as much as you can?
Don’t forget to check out our social media to keep up with our trips. You can find our pictures on Instagram and our travel videos on YouTube.
