Rule 3. Use debit cards with points or cashback when paying.
Continuation. Beginning in the previous article. We continue to publish the Golden Rules for Travel Savings. This is a squeeze of those tools that help our team save and make big bucks on our travels.
Well, this rule has already become a classic. Buying a tour or airline tickets is usually one of the biggest on a budget and trying to pay for it in cash or with a debit card without points means missing out on the opportunity to get some of the money back from your flight, hotel or tour. Now in many resort places cards are accepted, and all purchases are also better done with them. If we talk about currency, then many banks have offers for multicurrency cards. You buy or put currency into an account, and then attach the currency account to the card as the main one.
There is one more important point. All card purchases are debited on a day-to-day basis. This is how payment systems work: Visa, Mastercard, Mir and the like. Since after you have completed the authorization, the merchant needs time to confirm the write-off to the payment system, and the payment system needs time to transmit the confirmation information to your bank. During this time, the exchange rate may change. There is a way out: use a card with a foreign currency account.
It turns out that you save twice: when you take a card with cashback or points, and when you pay abroad, you get both points and conversion benefits.
Rule 4. Exchange currency gradually, averaging the rate.
If you are an experienced financier and investor, you buy currency at the exchange rate through a brokerage account. Or simply use the service of tracking the course you need in your personal account at the bank.
And if you do not have a brokerage account, you do not have a currency tracking service connected and you are going abroad on vacation, you should average the rate of the currency that you buy for the trip. In a few months, exchange the amount in parts and get a more stable rate than if you had to do it just before the vacation.
Immediately before the vacation, you can also get a promotion, there are several reasons for this – from mass purchases by tourists to multinational companies that earn in foreign currency and pay taxes in rubles.
The point is that you can never guess the course if you are not a professional trader (but even then it will be difficult for you to guess the course you want). Buying in installments before the vacation is the best way.
Rule 5. Choose the season correctly.
Everything is clear with the holiday season for those who have schoolchildren. They are tied to summer and other vacations, as well as holidays. And those who are not tied to vacations can quite choose for themselves. Tell me, summer is the best time to spend it at home in your region. I know few places where it is cold in summer in Russia. A typical summer in Russia is trips to the lake, picnics and just walks in sunny squares and parks.
Why spend the summer on a trip to hot countries, especially those where prices fall in September, and the weather remains the same beautiful, only there is no such intense heat.
One has only to shift the vacation to September or even October, when the season in most of the common resorts is not over yet, prices will also creep down. Moreover, now, at the end of May, there are three more months until September and four until October – you will have enough time for excellent prices.
By the way, regarding seasonality in travel, we have other articles on this topic:
How to plan trips profitably
and
4 ways to save money on vacation
These were our 5 golden rules for vacation planning. If you use all of them, you will save a lot of money that you can invest, put aside in your airbag (more on this in our courses) or spend on a new trip. Write to us on Instagram, Vkontakte or other social networks how you managed to save on travel thanks to these tips, we will be very pleased!