The ultimate budget traveler's cheat sheet

How to plan the perfect trip without breaking the bank: spend less, have more fun, and get the true experience

I admit it. I can get a bit chatty. This Web site (ReidsGuides.com) contains thousands of pages going into detail on the variety of resources for European trip planning. Truth is, I could boil it down to the best tools in each category and it would fit onto a single page.

So, that’s what I did.

Here’s the ultimate cheat sheet for planning this summer’s European Vacation.

The Rules

The two main money-saving tips that apply to every aspect of trip planning are:

Shop around
Be flexible

Here’s why: Last year, in planning a trip to Italy, I used the resources below to find the best airfare for a departure in early June. Then I found a sale at 1800FlyEurope.com that would save me $400 if I left before May 25. That was enough to afford three more days in Italy.

The Resources

Airfares

Don’t bother poking around United.com or even Orbitz.com. Let an aggregator do the legwork of sloughing through major search engines and airline websites for you.

Alternative Tip!
I'm about to fly to Italy (again) for $279 roundtrip (or $574, once you add taxes and fuel surcharge), on a spring 2008 date when most airlines are charging, at best, $1,411. What's more, I'm flying directly from New York into Bolgona then back from Rome—though I could have returned from Naples, Palermo, or Venice, again on a direct flight.

How is this possible? I'm using a fabulous new, low-cost international airline called Eurofly (www.euroflyusa.com)—and, having flown them before, I know I'll get superior coach class service, right down to a vast film library for my seatback screen.

Eurofly just does Italy, but you could also hop Martinair to Amsterdam, Condor to Germany, or Zoom to London. I have a full list of these and other alternative transatlantic carriers in the No-Frills section of www.reidsguides.com.

You just plug in travel dates and destination, they churn through the systems and present all the results in a list which you can organize by price, departure time, or flight duration. You can even tinker with the results—be more or less flexible with departure dates, exclude certain airlines or airports, show only non-stop flights, and so on.

My favorites are Momondo.com, Vayama.com, Kayak.com, CheapTickets.com, DoHop.com, Mobissimo.com, and Fly.com

If you’re extremely flexible, Cheapflights.com lists loads of deals connecting any two cities you give it, but you have to comb through the results yourself, matching their validity dates to the period you want to travel.

Take the best results from these searches and see if airfare consolidator 1800FlyEurope.com can beat them. Consolidators buy discount blocks of tickets from the airlines then resell them to the public, essentially splitting the discount with you. (It’s actually not that simple, but that’s the overall concept, and if in practice it means you’ll often save a couple hundred dollars, who cares how it works?)

Rental cars

Again the aggregators—RentalCars.com, AutoSlash.com, Momondo.com, Vayama.com, DoHop.com , Kayak.com, Mobissimo.com—usually sniff out the best rates from all the major players. But, again, take the results and compare them to the rates offered by car rental consolidator AutoEurope.com. (For what it’s worth, four times out of five I end up renting through Auto Europe for the simple fact that it usually has the best price.)

Train tickets & railpasses

You don’t need to book train tickets before you leave, but it helps to peruse rail schedules while planning your trip. RailEurope.com is easy to use, but the German railways site Bahn.de provides more detail on itineraries all across Europe.

If you'll be covering several countries on your trip—or are interested in mixing and matching a few long train rides to connect major cities with a few rental car days to explore the countryside, a railpass can be your best bet. You are no longer limited to just the granddaddy, 17-country Eurail pass aimed at backpackers. Rail passes now come in a variety of flavors, from regional selectpasses and single-country passes to partner passes for families to rail-and-drive combo tickets than can be particularly good bargains. RailEurope.com can provide all the options, details, and prices.

Especially for longer rides, it’s also good to known the costs of train tickets so you can compare the rail option with no-frills airlines:

No-Frills Airlines

I was recently helping a friend plan a trip to Berlin, Prague, and Budapest. It had been a while since she’d been to Europe, so she naturally imagined she’d be taking the train everywhere.

She had forgotten about the no-frills airline revolution in Europe.

I pointed out should could fly from Berlin to Budapest on easyJet (www.easyjet.com) in just 85 minutes for $80. The train would take 15 hours and cost $153. She can then make her way slowly back to Berlin via Prague by train.

There are around 50 low-cost carriers in Europe these days. You can find out all about them, and find resources for figuring out which ones connect the cities on your itinerary, at NoFrillsAir.com, WeGoLo.com, DoHop.com, SkyScanner.net, and WhichBudget.com.

Lodging

Alternative Tip!
Another great way to save money on lodging is to look beyond hotels at the some two-dozen alternative accommodations in Europe, from campgrounds and castles to cottages and convents.

Since no central clearinghouse of resources for finding these alternatives existed, I made one: BeyondHotels.net (though you can access the same information in the Lodging Options section of ReidsGuides.com).

Most major hotel booking engines suffer from three disturbing trends:

(1) With slight variations, most provide the same list of lodgings for a given destination. (2) They tend to over-represent international chain properties (easier to database, I’m sure, but who goes to Europe to stay at a cookie-cutter Holiday Inn?). (3) The listings are top-heavy, favoring four- and five-star hotels with a few three-stars thrown in the mix.

Two search engines that do things differently are Venere.com and Booking.com, both of which include plenty of independent, family-run two- and three-star hotels, plus B&Bs, apartments, villas, residence hotels, and farm stays. Put it this way: few of the small, friendly, charming mom-and-pop joints I used to list in my guidebooks (and still do on my site) rarely show up on the other booking engines, but they do on Venere.com.