Last-Minute Travel Methods for a Hyper-Cheap Holiday
When I published my best-selling book Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide, I compiled 51 hacks and tips to help you travel on a minimal budget. Stuff that I learned during my travels across all continents.
Of those 51 hacks, this is by far my favorite.
This single piece of advice saved me money while guaranteeing that I visited some incredible places for prices fitting perfectly an economical budget. Here it goes:
Do Last-Minute traveling.
You may think I mean those impulsive trips made by young backpackers, which are decided two days (or less) before boarding. It is not exactly that, although with the same surprise factor.
There is a quickly growing number of websites selling last-minute travel packages. Some of them belong to airlines, some to travel agencies.
Examples are the German tourism behemoths TUI and Lufthansa with their own last-minute websites[1][2]. There are also plenty of independent sites, specialized in packages like Holiday Guru, which is available in European countries like Spain, Austria, Switzerland, etc.
Where I live I use Wakacje[3], a Polish website offering complete packages with flight included or just accommodation. I used them a few times already.
Especially in the final part of the warm season (September and October), the number of offers is so big on those websites that you will always find a good opportunity.
Packages of hotels ranging from economic to full-service five stars. You can easily expect discounts from 40% to 80%. A week in a four-star hotel on a Greek beach with flight included can cost less than the flight itself in a normal situation.
But what to do when the last-minute package is Hotel only and I cannot find a cheap flight ticket available?
In some previous articles, I explained how a VPN and the Incognito Mode of your browser can help you to travel cheaper. I also wrote about the days of the week when airlines will offer you the best prices.
Together with those, the hint below is especially suitable to help your last-minute travel have record-low prices.
Research prices of low-costs airlines separate.
There is one common thing for any traveler: Google Flights and aggregators like Skyscanner and Kayak saves us time. Those websites compare the prices of dozens, sometimes hundreds of airlines in a matter of seconds.
However, people would be surprised by what they don’t do (or at least not efficiently) and the opportunities they waste. Especially when flying with low-cost airlines.
A good part of the low-cost carriers, like Ryanair, Wizzair or EasyJet, operates in a system called Point-to-point network. Legacy carriers (those that are not low cost) like Lufthansa, Emirates, British Airways, and others operate in a Hub and spoke network. This means low-cost companies in general sell tickets to fly from a city to another without any stop in between, while legacy carriers have stops called hubs (like Lufthansa have in Frankfurt or Emirates in Dubai).
How that can save you money and why is this related to Google Flights and other aggregators?
The explanation lies in how you search for a ticket on the internet. Most people will simply search for the price from the place where they are departing to where they want to arrive.
Therefore, if you are planning to travel from Warsaw to New York, you can enter in Kayak or Google Flights and look for flights departing from WAW airport to JFK (for example). It will show to you plenty of options, and currently, a round trip between those two cities costs around 430 euros in the cheapest option, with one or two stops in the way.
However, right now, there is a way to go from Warsaw to JFK for 285 euros.
But Google Flights and most aggregators will not show you that.
Why?
The answer is simple: Those websites don’t work well with low-cost airlines.
In the case mentioned above, the cheapest way would be to go to Norway with one of the two low-cost carriers flying from Warsaw to Oslo. From there take another low-cost flight to New York.
Google will not show you that because low-cost airlines work in a point-to-point system, as I mentioned above, remember? They are not optimized to sell flights with a stop in the way. But if you create this stop by purchasing two separate tickets, you can find much better prices.
The best way to find those low-cost opportunities is to look for flights separately. When I want to travel from Poland to Brazil, I don’t look for flights departing only from Warsaw, but also from Barcelona, Milan, London, Frankfurt, etc. If there are cheaper flights from Milan or Frankfurt to Brazil, then I just find a low-cost airline to go from Warsaw to there and from there to Brazil. In this way, you will perform a low-cost hack that even Google couldn’t find!
Just be aware that flying with low-cost carriers brings its challenges, like the need to pay even for a cup of tea or coffee. But for the cost-savvy, it is a treasure.
The Planning Question
This apparently inconceivable opportunity of Last-Minute Traveling comes with a single condition: You must depart in the next days after buying it. Sometimes, literally the next day!
That condition may look like a big NO. After all, how is it possible that people with a job and responsibilities will schedule a holiday for Tomorrow?
The truth is that you don’t need to do it only a few days before flying! My wife and I have the following approach: She schedules her days off, while I inform my substitute in my business that I will be out in the next month, let’s say, from the second to the third week.
Doing this, We already have our holidays scheduled. We just don’t know yet to where.
Therefore, when the dates scheduled for our holidays approach, we start to navigate those last-minute websites looking for offers to travel in the chosen days (usually in the next 48 to 96 hours).
This method put me in a pleasant dilemma. Usually, I need to decide between options like a villa in Morocco, a resort in the Black Sea, an urban hotel in Italy, or a boutique B&B in Malta. All for fantastic prices.
We always found something for incredible prices, in a good destination and, the best part:
With a stimulating ingredient of surprise!
Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, writer of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. You can check some of his articles here.
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