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Get Out Of Dodge For Cheap This Holiday Season

After the holidays are over and we roll into February, most of us dream of a way to escape the cold and find a palm tree to sit under.

But with the cost of everything unbearably high, getting away isn’t always feasible. It helps to have some tricks of the trade to make travel cheaper, although outsmarting the airlines and the travel industry isn’t an option. Trust me, they’ve thought of everything and you’re not getting a deal unless they feel like giving you one. And in order to do that, you have to know where to look and what to look for.

In my own travels, I don’t come across many people salivating over the deal they just got from an airline or hotel, but people are still out there traveling. And most everyone you talk to has done their homework. If you don’t mind spending a few hours researching flights and looking for deals, it will definitely pay off if you put the time in. As for me, I get tired of the game: flights that go up while you’re booking, waiting for hotel prices to go down before booking. I’m not a fan of the game, but we’re at their mercy.

Here are some pretty solid travel tips for those of you who would like to get the heck out of Dodge this winter, or those who have been dreaming of Paris or Rome in the spring.

Package Deals

This is my first tip to anyone who asks how to travel well but cheaply. Package deals or bundled vacations combine air and hotel into one price and it’s pretty amazing how much you can save. Let’s look at an example: There’s a deal on Travel Zoo right now that will fly you to Paris and put you up in a 4-star hotel for four nights for $499. You can extend your stay, too, for a bargain. Normally, the flight itself costs more than $500- which is proof that these travel packages are really quite a deal. Or there’s an amazing eight day tour to faraway and beautiful Norway for $1,299 including airfare. The tour includes a one-day cruise along a fjord, visiting several Norwegian cities including gorgeous Oslo, all breakfasts and two dinners. That is an amazing value and you’ll find there’s hundreds of similar packages to just about anywhere in the world people travel.

Travel Zoo is the king of travel packages, but other sites like Travelocity or Expedia list them as well. How about a whole week in Fort Lauderdale for $800 including air and hotel in February? I found that bundled deal on Expedia.

Use Technology

Never pay those expensive fees for parking at a hotel. Use Parking Panda online to negotiate a better deal for you at a nearby parking garage. Pay $15 a night for parking instead of $40. And whatever you do, don’t park at the airport. There’s a company online that negotiates deals with hotels for travelers to park their cars there. For example, you can park at the Crowne Plaza Hotel when you’re flying out of Cleveland for $6.99 a day.

That’s at least a $4 per day savings and it’s just two miles away from the airport. The hotel has a shuttle to transport you to your terminal.

Speaking of Cleveland, it really isn’t that much farther than Buffalo and you can save a ton by booking flights from their airport. Plus, they have way more direct flights than Buffalo because it’s a bigger airport. They also have more flights to more places and more airlines. This keeps the prices lower. I remember catching a flight to Houston two years ago from Cleveland for $59.

Believe it or not, there are some places in the world where prices haven’t quadrupled and travel to these places is a real bargain. We’re talking gourmet meals for less than $10 a person at a nice restaurant and good hotels for around $25 a night. The country of Georgia and its capital city Tbilisi is a fantastic trip and inexpensive. And most people don’t think of Poland when they think of Europe, but cities like Krakow have that old European flare and are incredibly cheap to visit by American standards.

New booking sites like Kiwi and Google Flights allow you to analyze your flight from different perspectives. How much is the flight in different seasons? Is the flight likely to go up or should I buy now? And always book 4-6 weeks in advance, if possible.

And there’s nothing like frequent flier miles to help with a leg or the entire flight. Having an airline credit card helps build miles with everyday purchases.

So, go explore the world we live in. See a Mayan ruin. Stand in front of a South American waterfall. Go snorkel in a blue lagoon somewhere far away.

Travel can be a lot more wallet-friendly than we think.

And there’s no price tag attached to what it does for the soul.

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