How This Military Mama Travels on a Budget

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Today we have a guest post from Stephanie over at Military Travel Mama. She’s got some great tips for moms who want to travel on a budget and since I’m not a mom I thought it’d be great to hear from her!

Being a busy mother yourself I guess that you are already aware of all the hassle of providing everything that your family needs and that personal finance has a very steep learning curve.

Back in the days when I and my beloved husband were just going out, I used to have much more time to plan a travel or actually go traveling. Truth be told, having a service member for a husband doesn’t make it any easier to plan your travels, and to find a free time, to say the least.

Most of my travels had been associated with our family being moved to another location every time my husband was relocated for work. But, despite all the hardship of living a military life, we managed somehow to maintain the usual quota of 2-3 family trips per year.

How do we do that and on a tight travel budget (especially now when we have 2 needy kids to please)? Read on and I’ll share some of the magic with you.

How to Properly Plan and Organize for Your Trip

My kids grew literally overnight (bet all of us have the same feeling when it comes to our children). All of a sudden, they became heavily involved in our holiday plannings and I had 4 different personas to listen to and to satisfy everyone’s needs.

And Lord knows that it’s hard as hell to explain to my kids that their parents do not have enough money to go to Disneyland every other month.

So, what else was there for me? I have to work through a difficult time of explaining, trying to fulfill everyone’s desires and to stay within a very limited budget in a build-up to our trip.

But I think I figured it out. When the trip planning phase commences, I always resort to making a nice dinner for my family, so we can gather around the table and peacefully agree on our next location we should visit.

Only after everyone consent to what we agreed upon during the dinner is when I actually start looking for an arrangement. Yes, we actually ask our kiddos for their opinion.

The questions are more like – would you rather go swimming or riding a horse in the mountain? The husband and me, of course, settle on the exact location. But the kids can understand the difference at (least between the activities offered at locations) very early on.

Some should say that now comes the fun part, but it’s really perhaps the most overwhelming part of the whole process for me.

Since I’m handling the very thin amount of money, I always try to book accommodation and flight way in advance. That’s the only way you can do if you want to grab some discounts and if you don’t want for a holiday to seriously harm your family budget.

Tips and Tricks When Booking Your Trip

As I already said, this is not the most entertaining part of the process, but I’m pretty confident that some of you will have great fun in searching for the best deals online.

Years of experience in booking flights and accommodation for my family has taught me some pretty neat stuff that you might want to resort to also.

Most of the people search for the best deals on traditional booking sites (I’m sure that you already know a couple of them). That’s definitely the way to go as those platforms are very reliable and easy to use even for someone who is not tech-savvy at all (like me for example).

However, what people usually don’t do is to check the accommodation with the hotel itself.

Don’t forget: booking sites and services usually take a hefty sum for themselves just for playing intermediary in the whole process. And that’s fine, but why don’t you just skip to the point, cut the middleman and phone the apartment directly?

Believe me, when this first occurred to me, I was under impression that I was cheating somebody and made me feel bad.

Don’t be! This is a completely legit way of saving your hard-earned money by cutting off the middleman! I managed to get a discount of 15-20% in some cases just by making another phone call! Is it worth it? You tell me…

What Else Is There?

Finding a good accommodation and a proper way of transport and booking everything in advance is not the end of the road.

Now comes the fun part for me!

The thing I probably like the most when planning a family holiday is actually planning what will we do when we get there. Supposing that your family agreed on a destination full of tourist attractions in a close proximity – one thing that you should definitely do is a quick search on the ticket prices and see whether or not there is a discount for group visits and for booking in advance.

There is plenty to be saved by booking your tickets online – believe me!

For example, when we paid a visit to Lisbon a couple of years ago, I was extremely interested in visiting a nearby castle of Sintra. I remember that I paid $20 for the tickets online. Not to mention, a price for a single ticket at the entrance was 20 euros (we got a 3+1 discount on our price, again, after I asked for it).

The other time when we went to Cyprus on holiday, we spent unforgettable moments in the water park in Ayia Napa. Once again, we paid half a price in order to enter because, you guessed it right, this mommy booked tickets for my little ones way in advance.

By the time we got there, the whole seaside was already flooded with tourists and the prices went up twice as high.

I can go on and on with this but I’m sure that you get the point. Don’t be lazy and don’t be shy to ask. There is no harm in asking! And there is definitely more money to spend if you are proactive.