What better way to spend the holidays then on a tropical and sunny island. Just imagine yourself writing your Christmas cards on a white beach with a cocktail on your side. Last year I spend the Christmas holiday that way and enjoyed every second of it. Many people don’t even think about doing this because they think it’s too expensive. In a world where the cost of flying goes down every year, this is not true at all. If you invest a little time in a good planning you will have a very cheap holiday and can even make some of your money back by sharing your stories online.
I have spent last year’s Christmas in Phuket, an island of Thailand. For me it was not standard to go on a holiday for the Christmas period but I have no regrets about it. To me the Christmas feeling doesn’t mean that much anyway. I just see it as a time where you eat as much as possible in a short time. In Thailand you can do this everyday of your holiday and the food will be much better and cheaper then most other places of the world. The highlight of the holiday for me was definitely when I talked to friends from home online, telling me that their car was snowed in and they couldn’t leave the house. After hearing about all of their misery I poored myself a drink and went for a relaxing swim in the swimming pool.
Now you will probably ask yourself, I can’t afford this. All of this is however, reasonably affordable. The only thing you do need is some flexibility with your flight schedule and some investment of your time. Many people want to book everything in advance so that they don’t need to worry about anything during their holiday. This is understandable if you take kids with you and just want some relaxation. You could however save a lot of money by just going to your destination without booking any accommodation. You would then need to search around the area for good deals and make comparisons. Most of the time you get charged less if you are there in person. You will also be able to visit accommodations that are not advertising on the internet which are cheaper then ones that do.
Going to your destination without any reservations might feel a little adventurous or even dangerous. To me it felt very unsettling at first because I wasn’t used to it and was thinking about everything that could go wrong. The truth is that you can almost always find a hotel with a free room, wherever you are. If you are not completely comfortable doing this, you can always find a good place to stay for the first couple of nights and find another accommodation from there. There are also many forums on the internet at which you can always find stories of people going to the place you are interested in. A very resourceful and popular forum is that of Lonely Planet.
When you are looking for a plane ticket online, most sites will only let you search for a set day or week. Many of the websites run by airlines do not give the possibility to look for the cheapest flight for a whole month or year. They don’t do this because many people have a set date that they want to travel on or they don’t want people booking the cheaper flights only. A lot of money can be saved if you could just find these cheaper flights. The website Skyscanner does just that. You just have to select a departure and destination point and they will give an overview of the cheapest date. It is so far the best site I found for cheap airplane tickets and it has saved me a lot of money. A round trip ticket from Europe to Thailand can be found for around €500,- or $660 per person.
Besides saving money you could even earn money on your holiday. It is very easy to set up your own blog and post information about your holiday. Think of it as an online diary that you keep of your traveling experiences. This can also come in handy to keep your friends back home informed. If you want to find out more about a holiday blog which can make you money, you should check out the blog that Dave Lee made. Some months he has earned over $4.000 with his blog. It contains all the information you need and he is very open and honest about his own earnings and what he did to achieve it.
Another way of making money could be by selling your photo’s or making money on your video’s. A website like iStock offers the possibility to sell pictures. Because there is a wide offer of these on the internet, you would have to offer a high quality to be able to make money with these. If you have a lot of interesting video’s you can upload them to Youtube and make money on advertisements if you get a lot of viewers.
A year not travelled is a year not lived. That’s my current life’s motto. I truly believe that you are not living your life to the fullest if you never leave your home environment. For me the best thing about traveling is coming back home and looking at normal every day things in a complete new way. A wise man once said “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land”.
