I am a travel budget planner by nature.

I can’t stay in the same place for an entire month, but I don’t want to recklessly spend money satisfying my endless urge to stay on the move. The discussion of travel and budget is something that Drew and I discuss frequently. This is pretty typical conversation that I have with him, roughly, three times per week:

Drew: I know we thought about going somewhere for a weekend this month, but plane tickets are getting pricey and we don’t have an obvious place to go so maybe we should just stay home.

Julie: What? What am I going to do being in the same place for four whole weeks without going somewhere at least once?

Drew: Can you hear yourself talk? You sound ridiculous.

Julie: I know, but can we at least book a night in Hong Kong for a change of scenery?

Drew: Sure, here are my 17 spreadsheets on the subject.

We are passionate travelers, or maybe we’re just restless, or maybe a combination of both. It is what we talk about and think about. We even plan trips for friends and family members because it’s such a passion of ours. When we think about the future, where we might live next or where we want to retire, proximity to good value travel destinations is consideration number one.

Sorry Mom and Dad, for picking our home based on good quality airports and not, well, you.

You can imagine that we have a lot of opinions on how to find amazing travel deals. We know that everyone has their own time, budget and energy constraints, and our preferences may not match yours, but here are our best, best, best tips and how I became a master travel planner.

1. Get the Right Travel Budget Planner

Ugh, budgets are so boring. We get it. But we got into the habit of tracking our spending about five years ago, utilizing the app from Toshl Finance ($2.99/month), and it’s done wonders for our travel life. Here’s why.

First, we set aside money every single month for travel. We have a little sit-down discussion at the start of the month about what travel expenses we’re expecting, and we estimate costs (with a simple Google search). This month, for example, we planned to purchase plane tickets for an autumn vacation in Europe. We also wanted to spend one night at a hotel in Hong Kong (or, maybe that was just me getting itchy facing down a month with no adventure).

Unlike many budget categories, travel is entirely discretionary, so we can allocate for it in months where other things aren’t likely to arise. We never have to unexpectedly buy a plane ticket to Europe, you know? And for those few travel items that WOULD be unexpected (namely, an emergency trip home), we have a stash of credit card points waiting to be used when and if that happens.

Then, we work backwards, managing the rest of our budget categories based off of our expected travel expenses. Plane tickets to Europe are expensive, so I happily buy new clothes only a couple times a year in order to contribute more to our travel bucket. I will plan those splurges for a month with no expected large travel expense. For instance, in August I will put in a few online orders for clothes, and we won’t book expensive tickets then.

Our travel budget planner allows us to enter a new budget each month, and with a few taps on my phone, I can see exactly where we stand with each category and how much we have left for the month (or how much we have overspent…which aggravates me every time).

If one of our travel expenses ends up more than our estimates (ahem, like those Europe tickets that were over budget by about $150 each), we either cut back in another area in our travel budget planner app. In this case, we had budgeted for a really nice Hong Kong hotel, so we scaled that expense back by about $125 by booking a cheaper hotel and we will make up the remaining overage by cutting out some other expenditures here and there.

2. Speaking of Hotels….

We almost never use them anymore.

Over many years comparing the costs and benefits of hotels to rental properties, rentals win out about 95% of the time. I just looked in our Airbnb account and we’ve stayed in 33 Airbnb rentals, and that doesn’t count the other private rental properties we’ve found on other sites.

Using a rental service like Airbnb is such a no-brainer. On a per-night basis, we regularly save 50% versus a comparable hotel. Plus, we always book places with kitchens, so we buy groceries and at least have breakfast at home. Lest you think that we’re exploring a new city and slaving away cooking three meals a day, fear not. We’ve found that even just having breakfast in saves a least $20 per day, plus we can bring leftovers home from restaurants, cook if we feel like it, etc.

I honestly can’t imagine traveling anymore without Airbnb, and I wonder why the whole world hasn’t converted over to this style of travel. It is a complete no-brainer. If you haven’t ever booked an Airbnb and want a guide about avoiding potential pitfalls, here’s our primer on Airbnb tips for first timers.

Want to get $26 towards your first Airbnb rental? Follow this link to save!

In the 5% of cases where a hotel is necessary (usually, when we’re somewhere for an overnight visit, or we want to be pampered at a luxury resort like we did recently at the Alila Yangshuo), we almost always use Booking.com to book. No particular reason here, but we like the interface, the thorough reviews, and all the different filters to help narrow down our options. We’ve booked over 50 hotels using this site, so it’s our happy place.

3. Getting There in One Piece

This is not a new revelation, but our best hack to finding a good deal on flights, trains or car rentals is to have flexibility in our schedule. We’re not exactly flexible people, let’s be honest, but even a tiny shift (moving our travel by one day in either direction, being open to nearby airports) can make a huge difference.

In conjunction with flexibility, the next biggest hack you need is straight up patience. In order for us to book consistently good value flights, we usually look at 10+ itineraries. We like Google Flights for this, because you can efficiently change dates with one click, which saves us from physically typing in the different options and starting a new search each time. Booking those Europe flights that I keep yammering on about took probably three hours of combined research, over four or five sessions. Drew and I thought of a tentative itinerary, looked into all the prices of that one, then slightly adjusted the itinerary, looked into those combinations, etc.

We will often book flights on separate tickets to get good deals (instead of booking City A – City B – City C – City A all at once, we will book City A – City C – City A as one ticket and then City A – City B – City A as another ticket, if we get a better overall value). We also always look into options to redeem various air miles that we’ve accumulated, but we only cash in miles about a third of the time.

I will say that we’ve reached a stage in life where we are willing to pay a little extra for more comfort. In the Europe itinerary, we paid extra to have nonstop flights. We will also sometimes pay more to fly an airline we really like, especially for flights of 12+ hours. The cheapest itinerary we looked at for Europe was on an airline that we’ve never used that has a stopover in Mumbai, India. A little Google search uncovered that the flight transfer in Mumbai can be a bit hit-or-miss, and our 2-hour layover time might not be enough. So we ultimately decided not to book that good value option.

In that itinerary, we also incorrectly assumed that it would be cheapest to book multiple ticket and take advantage of the cheapo European budget airlines for inter-Europe flights. Turns out, once you add on the cost of going to and from the airport in London, plus the baggage fees that we will have, it wasn’t cheaper at all. There isn’t anything special about the tools we use for this research but it is a lot of number crunching.

Where you are willing to scrimp and splurge is entirely personal, but straight up old-fashioned research will take you far.

If you live in Europe and are specifically interested in budgeting for weekend trips that won’t break the bank, check out this in-depth guide. Boy, those low cost airlines in Europe make frequent travel so easy and affordable!

4. Eating Our Feelings, and Budget

Our Achilles’ heel if there ever was one, is our love for amazing restaurants. On our honeymoon when we were 26 years old, we literally booked our trip to Barcelona specifically around when we could get reservations at one of the world’s best restaurants. Now that, my friends, is dedication.

Ok, so now that you know where food falls on our priority list, you’ll understand that it can also be where all of our good budgetary intentions go to die. Over the years, we’ve turned down several 3-star Michelin experiences because justifying $1,000 for a meal is very difficult for our frugal minds. That being said, even when we are trying to be budget-friendly, we get lured in quite easily by tempting restaurants, until our credit card bill comes and we’re kicking ourselves for not substituting in street food for some of those pricey appetizers.

In addition to the trick of eating breakfast in our rental, we like to book high-end restaurants for lunch. At lunch, a restaurant might offer more a la carte options, or have smaller set menu combinations, which we like. We are also less tempted to drink heavily, and eating a big meal in the afternoon gives us plenty of time to digest, as opposed to waddling out of a 10-course tasting menu at 10pm feeling like we need to be rolled home. That feeling is the worst.

Side note: The worst fancy meal of my life was a massively long tasting menu which lasted over 5 hours, and the amount of food was so extraordinary that I threw up in their bathroom, before dessert. After that little incident, I couldn’t really get on board with even more food, so we gave our friends our credit card to pay our portion and went home. That restaurant currently has 2 Michelin stars, and gets consistently rave reviews, and I haven’t subjected myself to that kind of meal since.

We also like to visit ritzy hotel bars and restaurants for a drink and an appetizer. We usually can get in without reservations if we sit at the bar, we get a good look at the space and kitchen, we sample a little of this and that, and we rarely feel like ‘it wasn’t worth it.’ Feeling like an expensive meal wasn’t worth it is one of my biggest pet peeves.

My last food tip is that we also like to snoop around online before visiting a new destination for restaurant review blogs by locals who can really point us in the direction of lesser known gems. We once spent a whole trip to Montreal on just the recommendations of one website we found and we remember those eats fondly, over 10 years later. To find such websites I Google ‘city + restaurant reviews + blog’ and that helps cut out the giant travel sites like TripAdvisor from taking up the whole first page.

5. Entertainment (preferably free)

The fun front is where we prefer to save our money. In a new place, we will often look up free things going on in town via a quick Google search. When we went to Hong Kong last weekend for a night, I looked up free things going on in Hong Kong. The first item I found was a free street festival happening over the weekend featuring ‘beers and bitters from around the world.’ Sold.

Every so often there will be a special experience that we want to have in a city, like watching a Broadway show in New York City or going on a Li River cruise in Yangshuo, China. When we are expecting a bigger ticket entertainment item, we usually modify our food budget to compensate. Let’s NOT do the lunch at the Michelin-starred restaurant, and instead, use that money to book tickets to a festival instead.

Also, I can’t say enough about just wandering around a place. People watching and park hopping are free and fabulous.

When we took our epic Balkan road trip in late 2016, we kept a meticulous budget and ‘Entertainment’ expenses were consistently tiny. Same for our US Southern road trip, also in 2016. It’s not like we didn’t have a blast all over the Balkans either. There are just so many cheap ways to have fun, and we often prefer the freebies.

How to Be the Best Travel Budget Planner

By following our tips, you can travel AND save money. The beauty is that one feeds into the other: the more money you save, the more you can travel. It’s a wonderful thing.

If your goal is to travel more and really make it a priority, you would be amazed how you find ways to make room in your budget. Cutting out on that daily coffee habit or skipping those mid-week cocktails with friends can make a massive difference in your budget. By tracking those expenses, you can really see how much you are spending and what spending habits truly make you happy, and which ones you can cut out.

Obviously, we are all about travel. By finding the right travel budget planner app, keeping an accurate log, doing a proper flight deal search, and perhaps staying in an Airbnb instead of that fancier hotel, we save money, but never sacrifice on fun or exploration.

More travel for the win!