We try to use airline miles for our flights as often as we can. If we use money to pay for flights it's almost always because we have a particular date requirement that we need to satisfy or we are traveling during a peak period and there are no discount mileage fares available. This article will talk about the basics of using airline miles frugally to give you the most benefit … [Read more...]
Travel Insurance: Don’t Leave Home Without It
Travel insurance is something that many travelers, especially younger travelers, ignore. In this post I'll discuss our experiences in searching for and purchasing travel insurance that cost little enough that there is no reason to forego having the additional protection. When I took my first international trip abroad as a young man I had quit my job and had no health … [Read more...]
Our Packing Lists
These are example packing lists of items we are taking on foreign trips. You can add or delete items depending on the amount of weight you are willing to carry. Clothes 1: Tropical\Hot Climates 2-3 T-shirts – nylon\polyester (not cotton) quick drying 2-3 Button shirts (at least one long sleeve) – nylon\polyester, quick drying. At … [Read more...]
AirBnB Pros and Cons
AirBnB and other online vacation rental booking agencies provide a valuable service. They allow you to book longer term accommodations, usually at a lower price than local hotels, with the security that the place you booked actually exists. The alternative to a service like this would be booking through an online ad service like craigslist.org and sending money to the … [Read more...]
Finding Cheap Travel Destinations
There are a lot of online resources for finding cheap travel destinations. Two cost-of-living comparison websites I use frequently are expatistan.com and numbeo.com. You may not find the exact city you are looking for in their databases, but you can get a decent idea of the overall COL for various countries just by taking the ranges of COL indices for each country and … [Read more...]