My Top Travel Tips

I love traveling, who doesn’t?! I grew up traveling and exploring the world with my family and if I am being completely honest I have learned almost all of my travel tips from my own Mother. I definitely inherited her travel bug. Having grown up traveling I have learned a thing or two along the way and I would love to share my top tips with you!

Wanna hear something crazy? My husband and I had our honeymoon in three different countries; Iceland, France and England. But that is not the crazy part…. we were able to book round trip flights from our home to Paris, France with a stop over in Iceland (for 2 days) for a total of $900 dollars. FOR BOTH OF US ROUND TRIP, WITH A BAG. See, crazy right? When others ask how we were able to do such an elaborate honeymoon as a young, newly married couple their jaws practically hit the floor when I tell them that the flight total only cost us $900 dollars.

Since our honeymoon my husband and I have also traveled to 3 other countries along with smaller stateside trips. So, today I am excited to share with you my top travel tips!

#1: My first and by far most important tip is to travel where its “cheap.” Now stay with me on this one . A lot of the time people say, I wanna travel to Thailand, then they get on google flights and see that flights are well over $1,000 dollars and then they say, “oh never mind, I could never afford that” and they give up on their dream to travel there! These people are going about traveling all wrong. What I mean by traveling where its cheap is just that, go where the airline deals take you. While I was living in Utah I followed an Instagram account called, flights from home. This Instagrams account sole purpose is to post cheap flights/ deals that are currently happening. This is how Ryan and I were able to find such cheap flights to Paris!

It may or may not seem funny to some but I actually booked our honeymoon before we were engaged… I saw the deal on the flights from home Instagram and knew I needed to jump on it. That is probably the only down side to this tip, you need to act fairly quick if you want to take advantage of the cheap airline deals. Once enough people start booking their flights with the deal, the airline notices and raises the price again. Which is why I ended up booking our honeymoon without even talking to my then boyfriend (:

I also have to mention that this trick has not only worked for us this one time. Less than a year later Ryan and I were talking about where we wanted to go for our college spring break when we saw an insane deal from flights from home, round trip flights from our home to Sydney, Australia for $500 dollars each. We booked the trip in less than 12 hours. Needless to say traveling the world on a budget is totally doable!!

#2: Although this trick is not as exciting as tip #1 it is still just as important. Book where you are going to stay ASAP. We have had a lot of success with Airbnb. Although on some of our travels we do choose to stay in a hotel, I much prefer Airbnb because I feel that they allow for a more organic/ real experience wherever you are traveling. Airbnbs are generally people renting out their vacation homes or their own homes at times, for travelers. Because of this, you are able to stay in areas that, a lot of the time, have less tourists (which I prefer.) I have also found Airbnbs to be cheaper 9 times out of 10 when compared to hotels. To help really stress this point, I have to tell you about the time Ryan and I could not find a place to stay in France. Traveling together at this point was of course new to us and we had not realized the true importance of booking where we wanted to stay sooner. While looking on Airbnb for a place I found the most beautiful, Paris perfect apartment to stay in for only $45 dollars a night. Not only was it a beautiful place and a good price but it was also in the heart of the city, which is where I wanted to be. You guys should have seen the views from this apartments windows, it was a total dream. But because we took so long to book this apartment it was no longer available for our dates… it had just been booked a few days previous and I was devastated! We ended up having to book an apartment in a not ideal location and the idea of that beautiful apartment still gets to me!

#3: Look for experiences, booked together, at a discount. We have done this in countless places we have traveled and I have found this to be the best bang for your buck. We have used CityPASS countless times and we love it. I highly recommend that you see if they offer a pass (or a pass like CityPASS) in the next city you visit. They offer tons of museum passes, restaurant discounts, experiences and more.

#4: When I asked Ryan what some of his top travel tips would be he mentioned making sure you have a good balance of going and seeing/adventuring mixed with relaxing and really enjoying wherever you are. We always make the joke that we still need a “relaxing” honeymoon because the one we got was so go, go, go and busy. We are both grateful that we did our honeymoon the way we did because I can honestly say we saw everything (and more) that we wanted to see but I do wish we would have scheduled more time to simply be present and slow down. We have incorporated this new rule into some of our more recent travels and it really does make a big difference. It helps you not need a vacation from your vacation (:

I have so many other tips I’d love to share but I do not want to make this post too long. I’ll do a part two soon! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments or if you have any of your own travel tips, I’d love to hear them!