When you’re at home, you know all the tricks to save money. You buy your dog food in bags the size of cement sacks to land a bulk discount. You pay down your credit card bill to avoid hitting high interest payments. You know when the local restaurant has its all-you-can-eat buffet, and you make sure you get your money’s worth.
But as soon as you hit the road, all of that thrift goes out of the window. From the moment you reach the airport to the minute you leave the hotel, you’re falling for all sorts of money-sucking tricks. Here are five you can easily avoid and keep more cash in your pocket.
- Comparison Shop Before You Hit The Duty-Free Stores, Then Claim Back The Tax
Duty-free stores look like the last chance to grab a bargain before you head back home. Visit London, for example, and any gifts you buy in the city will be subject to a 20 percent sales tax. In theory, if you can pick up the same item in the airport, you’ll cut 20 percent off the price.
In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. When the duty-free store asks for your boarding card, it’s so that they can claim back the tax. But they don’t always remove the tax from the sticker. Comparisons of airport and city stores have found little difference in pricing for many items. And even when airport stores do remove the sales tax, some use their monopoly to hike the base price so high it would still have been cheaper to shop in town. A survey by travel site Skyscanner found that the price of a bottle Martini Bianco can range from 7.70 Euros in Berlin to as much as 15.95 in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.
Instead of waiting for the last minute and assuming you’ll do better in the airport, check prices online before you fly. If it’s cheaper to buy in town, pay the tax… then claim it back at the airport tax counter.
- Pack Smart And Skip The Baggage Fees
Check your bag on a flight and you won’t just have to wait for it to come out the other side, you’ll also have to cough up a fee, usually around $25. Since 2007, airlines have collected more than $26 billion in baggage fees. That’s almost enough to buy Delta Airlines.
Unless you really have to travel heavy, avoid those fees by packing smart and sticking with one bag. You’re unlikely to need that extra stuff.
That’s easy enough to do on the way out but on the way back, your full suitcase might also have to pack in some gifts. So here’s a thought: that rule about only taking one bag on the plane has a loophole. You can also take your duty-free bag on the plane with you. If you are going to be shopping at the airport, get your money’s worth by asking for the biggest bag they have. If your bag has swollen so much it won’t fit in the overhead compartments instead of checking the bag, use the duty-free bag for your overflow.
- Don’t Pay For Airline Internet
The spread of the Internet onto planes has finally brought something that we now find essential all the way up to 30,000 feet. And it’s brought a giant bill with it. When Ben Schlappig flew business class on Air Iberia from New York to Madrid earlier this year, he was grateful to be given 4 free megabytes. That allowed him to check his email. Once. To do it again would have cost him $4.95, and to use 22 megabytes would have been $19.95 with an additional $0.17 for each extra kilobyte.
A better solution? Check your email and make your downloads before you get on the flight. You can last a few hours without the Web.
- Beat Phone Charges With A Local Sim
When you travel abroad, your mobile phone provider will want you to pay for an international plan… on top of the plan you have anyway. So that’s one plan you’ll be paying for and not using. The price varies but can be as much as $40 per device for just 100 minutes and 100 megabytes.
A better solution is to pack an old phone and buy a local sim. Before you fly, check out the neighborhood around your hotel on Google Street View, and find a nearby store that sells sim cards. You’ll be able to head straight down there as soon as you arrive. The store owner will help you set it up and you can often get away with paying little more than five bucks for enough bandwidth and calls to last you your entire stay. You won’t be charged the earth for making local calls and once you email the number back home, you can still be in touch with your family.
- Use AirBnB To Cut Your Food Bill
There are plenty of advantages to skipping the chain hotel and staying in a good AirBnB. For the same price as a standard room, you’ll get a place the size of a suite. But there’s another advantage: you won’t have to eat every meal in a restaurant. That’s a benefit that’s often overlooked. Sure, eating the local food is one of the best bits of travel but staying in a place with a kitchen will give you a better taste of local life by sending you to the supermarket. You’ll save money on some of your meals and you’ll even have a reason to take a doggy-bag when you do eat out.
It’s not a saving that AirBnB advertises but the kitchen might well be your biggest moneysaver of all.