Travel hacks

Hello,

I am a software developer from Turkey, and I have a standard 9-6 office job. While having this job, I and my wife travel a lot around the world.

Due to time and costs, most people raise some questions:

• How do you manage your yearly vacation days?
• How do you afford flights, hotels?

My checkin map for a last couple of years. It includes 17 countries.
Some trips to asia and america are not included.

Planning vacations, managing time

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I have 14 days of paid leave with my current work. Instead of using it two parts (1 week + 1 week), I connect my fridays or mondays with weekends, so I can use 3 or 4 days to travel a country/city I have never seen before.

That works out very well, you can at least have 10-15 travel oppurtunity considering additional bank holidays.

For the places I have been far away (like asia, america, where flight duration > 4 hours.) I try to visit these places on huge bank holidays, religious holidays so I don't exhaust my yearly paid leaves.

Cheap Flights

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Source

Cheap fligts are possible. You can have them if you:

• buy your tickets 4-6 months ago. You need to be an early bird.
• follow the low-cost airlines seasonal promotions
• use a credit card related wtolow-cost airlines. (I have 3-4 flights for free once in a year.)

If you don't follow these rules, You might end up spending so much into flight tickets which is an intidimating thing for your next trip.

Hotels

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• Always look for this the best price in multiple websites and compare them. (booking, hotels.com etc.)
• If you book off-season, hotels are much cheaper. Same with the flights.
• Sometimes calling hotel directly grants you cheaper prices.
• If the hotel has a breakfast, that's a plus.

Daily Expenses

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Transportation

Source

Walk! Walking is the best thing to explore a new city and it's free. However, I understand sometimes you can't go your destination by walking. For that cases, use public transportation. (subway, buses.)

Paying a taxi 30 EUROS is not helping. Also, there are some cities like Amsterdam, when you can rent bicycles cheap and move around easily.

Eating

Street Food! Eating in a classy restaurant is totally okay. But if you (want) to travel a lot, you shouldn't spend much on every destination.

Most of the street food are tasty and cheap. Also, you try new things since the food and taste changes every place you visit. (hello Thailand)

I even eat sandwiches (bought from supermarkets) for my lunch most of the time.

Step outside your comfort zone

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After putting hard work in the offices for 1 year, people tend to use their vacation in expensive places with huge costs. I understand that's a preference but if you have in mind travelling, seeing more places before you die, that's a NO - at least for a typical 9-6 worker.

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