You have spent months and months saving and, in your 10-day vacation, all the money goes like water in your hands? Surely yes. It is really frustrating because one gets to the idea that it is only enough to travel like this once a year and the other getaways will have to be on weekends. “How to travel to Europe or Asia a month if I can’t even do it with 10 days?

Surely in your travels you have made costly mistakes that have gone unnoticed and affect you more than you think. In Finerio we help you to travel for much longer and that the money yields to you. We leave you some mistakes that travelers make and we tell you how to avoid them.

1. Travel in high season

Many travelers decide to travel when there are summer or Christmas vacations, which is synonymous with high prices: expensive flights, crowded hotels and crowded tourist attractions. There is no doubt that it is the best time for the tourism business, but not for you.

If you have not traveled at a time other than ordinary vacations, try doing so. It may be a bit complicated to travel with all your family or friends in those times because not everyone can, but if you dare and someone else accompanies you, you will see how you will enjoy a less congested and cheaper vacation.

The cheapest times to travel are before they are vacations or after vacations. For example: the last weeks of January and the month of February, the month of April and May, the months of October and November.

2. Be inflexible

The next mistake after traveling in high season is to make travel plans on a certain date and at a certain place without first checking the flight prices.

Before you start planning a trip and choose the date and place, we recommend choosing your trip based on flight prices. Various flight search pages such as Skyscanner or applications such as Hopper offer the option of flexible search anywhere to show you the cheapest prices in various destinations. Maybe instead of going to Merida, you can go to Cuba for a better price.

Tip: subscribe to alerts of these types of pages and receive the best offers.

3. Travel on tour

Many people choose to travel on tour because they feel that they will have the whole trip resolved, they are afraid to move around the city and build their own route, or to be in a foreign country alone, or they feel lazy to have to book the hotels separately, flights, restaurants, attractions, etc. Big mistake: maybe they are missing out on all the meaning that the word “travel” encompasses. A trip starts from the moment you imagine and start planning.

Many of the tours that are sold are too expensive because obviously, the travel agency has to have some benefit. There are few tours in which the price of a trip decreases. Instead of traveling on tour, design your own tour yourself. At first it is scary to be wrong, we know that. You can start looking for flights and buying the cheapest tickets. Continue with the various tourist attractions, sure on the internet you can find what places you can visit and their prices. We recommend you to take Free Walking Tours (tours in several cities that are free).

We assure you that if you do it this way you can save up to a quarter of the money you were going to spend, and that you can allocate for your next adventure.

4. Not knowing how to use money abroad

If you travel in a country that is not yours, there will surely be another currency, and therefore you will have to pay a fee for the currency exchange. Many tourists do not know about this and begin to change their money in exchange houses that are expensive or make several ATM withdrawals.

Avoid changing your money at airports because that is where they have the highest exchange rate. Also avoid making many cash withdrawals at ATMs, because every time you withdraw they will charge you a commission, it depends on your bank and the cashier in which you do it. We recommend talking to your bank before going abroad and asking about the commissions they have. Also, use your credit card as much as possible, because if you had a problem with the debit card, you would run out of money.

5. Do not use public transport

If you start using taxis, uber or others, the cost of your trip will increase significantly. The best thing you can do is travel by bus, subway, or use applications like BlaBlaCar where you can share trips. If you are staying longer, you may want to rent a car.

Have you made these mistakes on your trips? What do you think now?