The Long & Winding Dollar: Saving Money While Travelling

The foldable bowl... budget saving magic.

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this, he was reflecting on his two-week trek by donkey through the Cévennes mountains of France.

But who knows what his expenses were? Travelling for the sake of travel is great, but you can do so much more of it if you can make your money go further – and most 21st century travellers have many more expenses than donkey feed.

Drawing on my own travel experiences, here’s a baker’s dozen of tips on stretching your travel budget:

1. Pack light. The obvious benefit of taking minimal baggage is mobility, but it also saves cash. For a start, budget airlines normally charge more for luggage stored in the hold. Secondly, if you only have a small pack you can save money on taxis by walking or catching public transport. For more details, check out my post last year on how I pack ever so lightly.

2. Plan ahead with transport bookings. Inevitably, flights become more expensive the closer you are to the date you want to fly. I remember one time I had to book a flight from Kraków to London just a week before, and it was cheaper to fly British Airways than the usual budget carriers. And that wasn’t cheap at all, either. The same applies to train fares, especially in the UK.

3. Check out transport passes. There are a number of good-value rail passes which can only be bought outside that country before arrival, which can then save stacks of money if travelling frequently. The BritRail Pass, for example, is only available to non-Brits before arrival. The venerable Eurail Pass, by comparison, can be bought in Europe but at a 20% mark-up. Much better to buy before you go.

4. Catch local trains rather than international. In Europe, international trains tend to be pricey. A way of saving money is to catch a cheaper local train to the border or just beyond, then switch to a local train in the new country. Fiddly, but saves €€€.

5. Buy a local SIM card with plenty of data. Everyone should know this by now, but you should never be tempted to use your smartphone’s data roaming capabilities while overseas. Telstra, Australia’s biggest telco, charges about $15 per MB while you’re roaming; to put that in scarier context, that’s $15,000 per GB – about the size of the average movie download.

Instead, drop into a local telco when you arrive in a new country and ask for a SIM card with plenty of data allowance, or pick one up before you go from a local company which imports them. It's well worth doing this when visiting Australia in particular, as free wi-fi is not so common here.

6. Get a stored-value cash card loaded with foreign currency. You can obtain one of these from a bank before you go, rather than withdrawing cash via your credit card once there. Although withdrawals from these cards still attract fees, they’re generally much lower and easier to understand than the fees charged on credit card withdrawals.

7. Take advantage of tax-back schemes. Some countries allow travellers to recoup the tax they’ve paid in the country while visiting or working, subject to various rules and limits.

8. Take out travel insurance. I know, it’s counter-intuitive – insurance costs money. But it can save you a truckload of expenses if you should be robbed or injured. Insure yourself with a company with a good track record, and check the fine print first to make sure the cover is what it seems to be.

9. Haggle (if it’s part of the local culture). In plenty of countries, the locals are happy to negotiate the prices of goods. But you should only haggle if you’re serious about reaching agreement and buying the thing, and you should always remain good-humoured during the process.

10. Aim for the free days. Sometimes local museums will have a day of the week when entry is free (this is common in Poland, for example). It does mean you’ll be there in the company of a crowd, but it’ll save you money.

11. Eat standing up. In some places, restaurant dining is vastly more expensive than eating at a street stall. When we first visited Berlin in the 1990s on a tight budget, I remember living off stand-up kebabs.

12. Shop at supermarkets. An obvious one – you can save plenty of money by self-catering. And while you’re there, pick up some muesli for use with my final tip…

13. Buy a fold-up plastic bowl. Camping stores sell these origami-like sheets of plastic, which magically fold and tuck to form a usable bowl [pictured above]. I carry one of these flat in my backpack (with a lightweight spoon), for those days when I’m exhausted by nightfall and just want to eat something quick and easy in my hotel room. It’s brilliant.

This post was sponsored by Taxback.com. Visit its site for information about how to apply for tax refunds after you've been working in Australia.

Clubbing in the Pacifique

There's something about islands, and the tiny airports that serve them. As our ferry pulled away from the quay next to Hamilton Island's airport, a big red Virgin Blue 737 roared unexpectedly over our heads, its takeoff having been concealed behind the headland we were passing.

This dramatic intersection of technology with nature seemed quite neat, as we were heading determinedly away from the high-tech outside world to the Club Med resort on Lindeman Island, part of the Whitsundays group between the Queensland mainland and the Great Barrier Reef.

Towards, in fact, a lack of mobile phone reception, unless you fancied a steep hike up to the 8th hole on the golfcourse above the resort.

Luckily there's wireless Internet access at the bar so, dear reader, I'm able to type this at you while seated on the outdoor terrace looking out over palm trees, a beach, a turquoise sea and a selection of vegetation-covered islands along the horizon.

Yes, I know, that sounds like a sample of bad copywriting for a travel agency poster, but what I can say? That's how it is. There's even a soft balmy breeze gently ruffling my hair. Well, not quite, it's too short to be ruffled, but you get the idea.

Anyhow, Club Med is... interesting. I'd never been to one, but had a vague idea of it being a place for sporty young couples and singles. It turns out that the Club Med in the Whitsunday Islands, at least, is very family-friendly. Partly that comes from the price, which is pretty reasonable for a week; partly from the kids' facilities and the fact that a self-contained island resort is a safe place for kids to run around; and partly from the all-inclusive nature of the tariff.

That's a very rare thing in the world of travel; you know once you're on the island that you won't be putting your hand in your pocket unless you want to use a few extra services such as massage. Though I can't help wondering what a non-drinker would think about subsidising everyone else's alcohol consumption. Though perhaps a non-drinker would go to a resort where they could pay a la carte instead.

Either way, it's liberating to leave the wallet in the room safe and simply eat and drink as you feel like it. It also eases all sorts of social issues such as whose turn it is to buy the drinks.

It's an unconventional business model which must limit the opportunities for the resort to make extra profits by offering tempting chances to spend more; and probaby explains why the standard of food and drink is firmly in the 3-star (actually 3-trident) range. However, the guests like the system a lot, so it must be a drawcard in itself, and certainly a point of difference.

And vive la différence. Another notable point about Club Med is the scraps of French terminology about the place, courtesy of its French ownership. The staff, for example, wear shirts with the initials GO, which stands for gentil organisateur; as opposed to gentil membre, a Club Med guest. There's something charming and faintly retro about the use of French in an Anglophone country with a mainly Anglophone clientele, a reminder of the time not so long ago when French was the langue internationale.

And, come to think of it, there's something pleasingly retro about the whole place. Although there's much more emphasis on guests making their own choices of activity (or non-activity) than there was back in the '60s when Club Meds were famous for their group activities, there are significant remnants of that era evident in the nightly cabaret shows performed by the indefatigable international staff (last night's had a Bollywood theme); and even more so by the curious 'crazy signs', a communal dance led by the staff, who assemble suddenly around the pool an gyrate energetially to loud music. It's deeply odd, but in a charmingly eccentric way.

It'll be interesting to see where this Club Med heads in the future. There's talk of an upgrade to 4-trident status, which would presumably raise the rates but allow for higher quality in facilities and services. The Club Méditerranée concept will be 60 years old next year, and obviously has to keep evolving further from its origins as a simple 1950s holiday camp.

It's not, frankly, a resort for those needing peace and quiet - there's a lot of sound and motion throughout the day, especially by the pool and the bar - but there's something attractive about its unaffected retro charm.

Tim Richards travelled courtesy of Virgin Blue and Club Med. Virgin Blue flies daily to Hamilton Island from Brisbane and Sydney.

An Essential Luxury

According to eTurboNews this week, Indonesia’s tourism minister Jero Wacik has an unconventional opinion on the ongoing global economic crisis.

He thinks it will benefit his country’s tourism industry rather than harm it, saying “The crisis is stressing so many people out. They need to relax to relieve the stress.”

Is this a supreme example of spin doctoring, or the most optimistic statement since the commander of the Light Brigade said “We can take ’em”?

I say this not to impugn the forecasting skills of Mr Wacik – he may well be proven to be correct. But it’d be against the conventional wisdom, which suggests that in times of economic downturn, people give up travelling.

On the surface, this makes sense. If companies are feeling cautious with their money, they may well cancel all non-essential travel and use email and video conferencing more. Individuals might also see travel as a luxury they can do without, and hoard their pennies in the old oak chest.

And that’s what this theory revolves about, doesn’t it – the assumption that travel is a luxury, rather than an essential. Especially for individual travellers.

But is it? Obviously it comes down to the opinion of the individual. I’d argue that, at least in my life, travel is an essential item I’d give up a long way down the list from many material comforts.

On my Facebook page I say that I love the way travelling through somewhere totally unfamiliar, preferably using a foreign language, engages all your senses and makes you feel extraordinarily alive. I’m sure many others who’ve experienced the stimulating joy of travel agree.

On top of this, think how much good travel has done in dispelling racist stereotypes of foreigners among everyday people. Sure, narrow-minded people still travel overseas and return with unaltered prejudices, and even broad-minded travellers might meet only the sort of pushy touts that give their countries a bad name.

But never again will governments be able to get away with the propaganda posters used in the two world wars, depicting the enemy of the day as a race of slavering inhuman monsters with hideously distorted features who bayonet babies. The fear of the unmet “other” is always worse than the fear of a people you’ve actually encountered, however imperfectly.

Intolerance will, sadly, always be with us. But travel does its bit to dispel its evil, and long may it do so.

Passage to Sunshine

It has to be admitted - international travel gets all the sexy press. When it comes to leaving home, it seems, 'more distant' = 'more exotic'.

It's not strictly true, of course; there are many highly exotic and sensually vibrant countries located between myself and the English-speaking nations of the northern hemisphere. Some of them, like Indonesia, are on Australia's relative doorstep. But there is a tendency toward assuming that domestic is duller.

But on the weekend just past, I was reminded how you don't always have to travel far to encounter the exotic.

We'd agreed to meet our Sudanese-Australian friends Anas and Inas at a new Sudanese restaurant in Footscray, an inner-city district to the west. For some reason people always think Footscray is further away from the city centre than it actually is, but it only takes a few minutes to get there by train.

As we walked through the streets in the commercial centre there, I was struck by what an stimulating place Footscray is. Traditionally a working class area giving access to industrial jobs, for decades it's also been a thriving hub for refugees and other migrants, a place for newcomers to get their bearings and start out with a bit of support from earlier arrivals.

The result has been a startling diverse area; we walked past a dazzling array of shops selling goods from other countries. A street of Vietnamese restaurants and other businesses gave way to a street of African cafes and shops, a magnet for the many African migrants Australia has accepted since the 1990s.

The restaurant, El Khartoum Centre (145 Nicholson St) looked just like any eatery we'd been to when we lived in the Middle East, with fairly basic decor featuring simple furniture with the tables covered in plastic sheeting.

We ordered Sudanese-style coffee from the waiter, talked with him a bit about Cairo, where it turned out we'd both lived, and waited for our friends. The food, ordered from a wall menu of ten or so dishes, proved tasty and intriguing. It had much in common with the Mediterranean cuisine we were familiar with, but also many differences, including a greater use of both chili and peanuts.

After lunch, we checked out the shops, including an jewellery place where the owner sells attractive African-inspired pieces made on the premises. Then I found some of my favourite ajvar (a spicy Croatian vegetable spread) in the Footscray Markets. That's always a good day - it can be hard to locate.

Just standing for a moment in the pedestrian mall, watching people from across the world bustling between the diverse shops, reminded me that you don't always have to cover long distances to feel like you're travelling.

And in honour of that sentiment, here's a video my brother John Richards and I created a few months ago, as a try-out for a TV travel show. Melbourne's most famous suburbs may be Melbourne City (museums, bars, shopping), St Kilda (beaches, live music, dining) and Fitzroy (coffee, retro decor, funky fashion) - but today I'd like to welcome you to Sunshine!

Coffee, Tea or Fee, Sir?

The hills are alive this week to the sound of airlines charging fees for things that were previously part of the fare.

The New York Times outlined the breathtaking range of fees charged by US carriers in an article entitled At Least the Airsickness Bags Are Free, including charges for coffee, blankets and pillows.

Not that Australian airlines have been slow to charge their own fees for an increasing number of services. Just this week, Virgin Blue announced that checking a bag into the hold would cost an extra $8 when arranged online, rising to $20 at the airport.

It reminds me that there are two types of fees that organisations charge: straightforward fees intended to make a profit, and punitive fees which are intended to dissuade customers from taking a certain course of action. The first type the company wants many people to choose, the second seeks to save the company from spending money on something it'd rather not offer.

And this is where it gets confusing. It seems obvious that a profit-making fee should roughly reflect the cost of the service provided, with a reasonable profit margin. On the other hand, a "dissuading fee" should obviously be prohibitively high.

But when does one type become the other? Banks in Australia have recently come under fire for their high fees for dishonoured cheques, overdrawn accounts, etc. You can imagine that these fees started out as a deliberate deterrent, but have since morphed into a tidy little profit-maker.

But back to the airlines. The NY Times notes with some surprise how accepting passengers have been of the new charges; there have been no consumer revolts in the air. They attribute it in part to people having little alternative. But I think it's something different: that most of these fees (so far) are for optional services.

After all, on a short-haul flight there's no need for food and drink (and it's airline food, people!), and there's the possibility of taking your own. You can live without a pillow or blanket, can read a book instead of paying for a film, and survive with unreserved seating rather than paying for the use of a particular seat. You can even stick to cabin luggage, if you master my mystical "rule of three"!

As long as you can theoretically avoid the fee, you don't mind it so much. You might even happily pay it, knowing that you had the choice to decline it. And with aviation fuel being so expensive, it seems fair that people stowing more luggage on the plane should pay more than those who don't.

So that's all good... so far. But how far will the airlines go? What remaining services will they decide to slap a charge on? Glance over the upcoming fee schedule of Air Profiteer...

1. Advantageous Gate Fee. This adds a bit of breathless anticipation to the flying experience, much like that of a blind date. Customers pay this fee in the hope of getting a closer departure gate than 29D (maybe even the mythical Gate 1). At midnight the evening before the flight, the planes are allocated gates from 1 onwards, depending on what proportion of passengers paid the fee.
2. Oxygen Mask Fee. For this fee, the customer receives a stainless steel face mask with a velvet rim in the event of an emergency, and a higher percentage of oxygen (other passengers receive more complimentary nitrogen).
3. Special Edition Safety Video Fee. The customer views a special version of the safety video, featuring Brad Pitt as the man in the suit, Angelina Jolie as the woman clutching a baby and Sarah Michelle Gellar as the woefully-miscast Japanese horror film extra. With a special guest appearance by Angela Lansbury as the seatbelt fastener.
4. Premium Peanut Fee. Passengers paying this surcharge receive a bag of peanuts which can be opened without the contents showering over the remainder of the cabin. Specially designed by NASA.
5. Tedious Commentary Avoidance Fee. This charge exempts the passenger from having to listen to the captain's inane commentary about flight direction, flight duration, and the time at the destination. Instead, soothing Vivaldi is played through the headphones.
6. Call Button Answer Fee. For this fee, a flight attendant will actually respond to the customer's call button when operated.
7. Express Loo Fee. Passengers paying this fee will be given access to a special toilet which dumps fellow passengers into the stratosphere if they take longer than 10 minutes.
8. Meaningful Security Fee. The passenger gets to bypass the most meaningless security measures enacted after 2001 by governments that wanted to show they were Doing Something. Toothpaste tubes and nail scissors are back on the menu!
9. Rigid Seat Back Fee. For this fee, the seat back of the passenger in front of the paying customer is locked into the upright position for the duration of the flight.
10. Edible Meal Fee. The passenger is served an edible meal. No, really.

Now why am I suddenly worried that the airlines will take this list seriously?

Fly the Low-Cost Skies (While You Can)

Some interesting rumbles emanating from the UK this week, as budget airline Ryanair faces its first loss in quite a while, according to this report in The Guardian.

For those who aren't familiar with the dizzy world of el cheapo flights across Europe, Ryanair is in the vanguard of a slew of low-cost carriers who grab headlines by advertising flights for as little as one shiny British penny (yes, you read that correctly). The devil, of course, is in the detail: to get those fares, you have to book way ahead.

The carriers then load you up with as many extra charges as they can: a fee for priority boarding, a fee to check a bag into the hold, charges for all food and drink on board.

Sky Europe, a Slovak-owned carrier I travelled on from Poprad to London (Luton) this year, even charges you to select a specific seat, with the amount depending on how desirable it is. And of course, government taxes and charges have to go on top of all that.

I'm not complaining about any of this, mind you; it's easy enough to avoid most of these extras if you plan ahead and travel light. And I can confirm that the absurdly cheap fares do exist. Last year I flew from London (Stansted) to Szczecin, Poland for a 50 pence base fare; and I topped that this year by scoring a £0.01 fare from London (Stansted) to Kraków, Poland. To put things into perspective, by the time the various fees were added, the latter trip cost around $50 Australian. Still very cheap for a 2.5 hour flight.

But the unreality of all this makes you wonder if it isn't just a fevered dream that's finally coming to an end. In a 1960s Batman-esque series of blows, the likes of Ryanair are being hammered by high fuel prices (BAM!); inflation (POW!); falling consumer confidence (WHACK!); and environmental concerns (KAZOW!).

Add the fact that those exotic Eastern European countries aren't as cheap as they once were (I can testify to this re Poland), and the future might look bleak for airlines that rely on leisure travellers making casual, discretionary decisions to spend a weekend in somewhere like Bratislava.

And the "discretionary" part of that has me thinking. Many people might see, say, a late-model car as an essential item, and travel as a luxury. I think the opposite. I like my material comforts, sure, but I'd rather have less stuff and more travel any day.

So even if the days of the super-cheapie fare are numbered, I hope people keep travelling. If nothing else, it's good for our mental health to realise that it is possible to exist for a while without all the consumer goods we seem to "need" in the 21st century.

(And yes, I know there are environmental factors to consider; I'll talk more about these another day.)

Poland 4: Hostel Headspace

Here's a curious thing. A few days ago I arrived in Wrocław (pronounced vrots-wahf), an attractive city in southwest Poland. I'd been here once before in 2006, when it was covered by winter snow but blessed with sunshine.

This time was different. It was cold and drizzly for most of the two days I spent there, and I learned that it's not at all easy to handle an umbrella, a clipboard and a camera all at once. One of them inevitably ends up on the quaint cobblestone street. The city, however, was as beautiful as I remembered it, even through the rain.

I'd booked a private room in a backpackers' hostel, one of a small chain I'd used before. I sometimes choose these places deliberately, especially at the end of a research trip when I desperately need to speak English at length to someone, anyone. You can always count on finding people willing to chat at a hostel.

There was a problem though, on the second night: the people in the room next to me were shouting, slamming doors and generally giving the impression of suffering from hyperactivity disorders. There was a reason for that, I discovered, when I ventured out to suggest a lowering of the volume: the next-door dorm was full of Polish schoolkids.

What the? After issuing two increasingly cranky requests to tone it down, I headed down to reception to enlist aid. The chaos subsided (eventually... boys will be boys), but I realised I was still feeling irrationally pissed off at the incident.

Then, thinking it over, I realised why I was so annoyed. Travelling in a foreign country is stimulating and fascinating, but also tiring. Hostels full of international backpackers aren't exactly peaceful, but they are a refuge from the mentally exhausting world outside - a curious international English-speaking zone where we're all on an equal footing.

A day earlier, I'd had a good conversation in the hostel lounge with a group of Dutch backpackers, talked over tea with a Brazilian, and shared breakfast and English language teaching experiences with a British woman working in a nearby Polish town.

Strangely though, having an onsite party of Polish students on a school excursion had shattered my mental refuge, turning an international backpackers' hostel into just another Polish one-star hotel with its peculiar challenges.

It was disturbing to realise I felt this way. Was I being racist in wanting a break each day from Poland, so to speak? I hoped not. It certainly wasn't a conscious aversion - I love the country and its people, and enjoy getting out there each day to encounter both.

I suspect, on further reflection, that I'd feel the same anywhere. When you're a stranger in a strange land, it's essential to have the occasional breather from the demanding task of engaging with the local language and customs.

Would Polish backpackers visiting Australia feel the same, I wonder, and enjoy the mental break of an international hostel after a day of grappling with Sydney or Melbourne? You know, I think they would.

Swings and Roundabouts in USA Tourism

A gloomy story this week in eTurboNews suggests that the USA is losing billions of dollars in inbound tourism because the outside world is convinced that entering the States will be a hassle - both in the time it takes to get a US visa, and in the potential delays and suspicion foisted on travellers on arrival.

Though they're a bit vague on whether the latter problem is based on reality, there definitely is a perception out here (outside the US) that immigration officials are looking for a reason to kick you out.

Certainly, some knee-jerk high profile knockbacks from recent years - like the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens - have made would-be travellers cautious.

This reluctance to head to America is ironic, though, for in one significant way there's no better time for outsiders to head Stateside.

For months now, my Australian dollar has been buying over 90 US cents, easily the best rate I can remember in my adult life. Travellers from other nations are also noticing the effect: the Euro, for example, recently rose to its best rate ever against the USD.

Curiously, the USA carries out little in the way of large-scale tourism promotion in other countries. Perhaps they could adapt Tourism Australia's recent unsuccessful campaign slogan, "Where the Bloody Hell Are Ya?", into something like "Where the Heck Are Ya - It's Cheap Here!".

As the article mentions, there are now plans for the US to set up a tourism promotion fund - by slugging incoming travellers more for their visas! Ouch. Hey guys, shouldn't you pay for it yourself?

Meanwhile, the Aussie dollar has quietly been rising against the Japanese yen as well. The tourism authorities there have cottoned onto the fact that their reputedly expensive destination is now distinctly cheaper for gaijin from Down Under and Europe; hence this promotion, Affordable Japan.

Hmm, that looks good... I think the US might have to wait until I've seen those cherry blossoms.