Travel tips during recession???

**strezzed** · 06-20-2009, 09:06 PM

We do a lot of car/motorcycle day trips. We make a whole bunch of sandwiches to take with us. We only eat out once a day (usually a all-day-breakfast place is cheaper for lunch) and it's either breakfast or lunch. We take water with us in refillable containers. Most rest stops/coffee shops will refill your water for free. When staying in a motel, we stay out of big cities or towns because they're cheaper further away from attractions.

**maryannsms** · 07-23-2009, 01:50 AM

When economic times are tough people hold off on spending. This causes many businesses to become stressed. Competition becomes fierce among competing businesses whom often get caught in a price war - whoever offers the lowest price gets the few customers available.

This creates ample opportunities for the traveler to travel cheaper than ever. Airlines drastically lower their prices, hotels continuously promote special deals on room rates, restaurant prices drop, entrance fees to many attractions are reduced and even expensive vacation packages get their prices slashed.

**guest002** · 07-23-2009, 02:01 AM

Unless I missed it I didn't see any mention of Bed and Breakfast? Before we had kiddos we stayed at Bed and Breakfast instead of hotels and in a lot of cases it was cheaper and breakfast was included!

http://www.bedandbreakfast.com/
http://www.bbonline.com/

Of course we don't do that anymore...we RV/Camp.

To go uber cheap, tent camp. Depending on the cost you could rent a trailer or motorhome.

Main thing for us was hotel cost, eating out, and souvieners.

The main thing for us is to get away and decompress...bring your own food and save $$. Before we had a RV to save money and not to have to always search for ice for the cooler we invested in a Thermoelectric cooler:
http://www.coleman.com/coleman/Colem...ategoryID=8570 while traveling in the car. We didn't pay as much as listed on Coleman's web site. We got ours at a Target a few years back. Looks like for now Wal-mart has the cheaper price.

**Greebo** · 07-23-2009, 08:05 AM

Remember Einstein - travel by the Theory of Relativity.

My cousin lives in Maryland, so I'll visit them, and then my brother is in New York, so we can stop there...

**Chipper** · 07-23-2009, 04:45 PM

Many things have already been said. Just got back from a week at the beach. Rented a beach house for $2000 -- with 8 of us (two families plus myself) made it $250/person. Normal price for beach house is $2500 but with the economy, the had dropped the price by 20%.

Ate in except for two dinners and one lunch -- groceries was approx $30-$35.

Some splurges we allowed ourselves:
* Two dinners and one lunch (lunch was Five Guys)
* Miscelleneous spending money at the boardwalk.
* Going to Rita's to get Italian Ice two or three times
* Probably a couple other misc splurges as well, but overall we all did OK.

New discovery!! It seems that everybody buys sun block, doesn't use it all and then leaves it there for the next people. There was a cabinet in one of the bathrooms with about 15 bottles -- various SPF levels. There were also two bottles of hydrogen peroxide -- one expired in 2006 and one in 2007. The outside shower had some soap left over.

**dianeeileen** · 07-26-2009, 07:42 PM

Most of my frugal tips for trips have already been posted but one that we found surprisingly cheap was a cruise we did last August. We made our own plane reservations which were much cheaper than letting the cruise line make it. We took our ship out of NY rather than Florida. RT from Detroit to NY less than 150.00 a person. Cheap Tickets rules. We booked an obstructed view balcony on Carnival (you have to get those over the phone from Carnival they don't list them on the web). which was not very obstructed at all. We had life boats but could see out perfectly over them. Saved us over 300.00 a room. After all the port charges, tax, fuel sur charge etc we paid an average of 1300 a person for the ship. That included all our meals, tons of free entertainment, pool etc. That being said you can spend a ton of extras if your not careful. We don't drink alcohol so we bought the pop passes almost 60.00 a person but we made good use of them. We didn't buy any of their pictures. They were way too expensive. We didn't buy the ship shore excursions instead we did our own research ahead of time and knew what we wanted to see in St. Thomas, and PR and we took a bus or cab to those places and walked a lot. We did a lot of swimming etc. We limited our Casino money to 50.00. 25 for hubby, 25 for me. We did take advantage of some of the sales they had on board for gifts but many of the gifts we brought back were from local shops off the beaten path. MUCH CHEAPER. In all we figured we spent 1750.00 a person booking 5 months in advance for the ship and 1 month in advance for the plane. Oh 75.00 split 8 ways for the limo to take us to the ship (we had eight people and tons of luggage) the same company picked us up and took us back to the airport for the same price. Diane