8 Great Alternative Budget Vacation Ideas

While many of us dream of traveling the world (or at least taking a few months off from work in pursuit of adventure), it’s not always feasible, even for those with the best of intentions. A lot of things can get in the way.

I frequently talk about long-term travel and round-the-world trips, but I know that realistically, not everyone can or wants to enjoy this style of travel. I don’t think traveling the world is hard, but I also know that what I do isn’t for everyone.

But even if I won’t find you backpacking Cambodia for three months or walking the Camino de Santiago, there are many ways to get on the road and see the world, so here are eight budget ways to travel and explore even if you are cash-strapped and/or time-poor:

Be a Local Tourist

How often do you visit the tourist sites in your own city? Hardly ever, right? I know New Yorkers who have never seen the Statue of Liberty and Bostonians who have never walked the Freedom Trail. I once took a Dutch friend on a tour of Amsterdam because, despite growing up there, she had never seen the local attractions that lure millions of visitors to the city every year.

I am also guilty of doing this. It took me five years to see the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok, and I’ve still never been to Bunker Hill in Boston despite spending the first 24 years of my life there. We always put it off until tomorrow, because when we live in a city, there is always a tomorrow.

So make your vacation that tomorrow. If you’re short on time and money, there’s no better way to spend some free time than to wander your own city. No matter what its size, it has a number of wonders just waiting to be explored.

Important: When you become a local tourist, check out of your house and into a hotel, hostel, or guesthouse. It’s important to get out of your familiar environment, because if you stay home, you’ll find something to do around the house and create excuses for why you can’t sightsee. Moving to a different location can help give you that feeling of adventure, excitement, and unfamiliarity.

Moreover, be sure to go to your local tourism office and get a city tourism pass. These cards allow you to see a wide range of local attractions for free or reduced prices and can be your way to see your local sites on a budget. They aren’t just for outsiders!

Travel Regionally

Travel brings to mind faraway and exotic destinations. It invokes images of all the places we’ve dreamed of and seen in movies. Because of that, few people look in their own backyard for adventure — as my Aussie friends always tell me before they jet off somewhere, “Mate, you’ve probably seen more of Oz than I have!” — but it offers just as many places to travel.

I could say the same thing as my Aussie friends. I grew up in Boston, and from there, I could visit New Hampshire, the woods of Maine, the bed-and-breakfasts of the Berkshires, or the farms of Vermont. New York was a four-hour car ride from home. How often did I do that? Not often enough!

Exploring your own region is an underrated and often overlooked aspect of travel. It gets the occasional lip service in magazines, but driving across the United States made me realize how much our own countries have to offer us and how often we overlook that for some foreign place.

So you don’t have to fly across an ocean to explore the world. Head to the bookstore, buy a regional guidebook, and see what there is to see in your area. Your backyard holds as many possible travel destinations as does a country half a world away.

Go to National Parks

The great outdoors present a great chance to go somewhere on the cheap. Camping, after all, costs very little money. Camping fees in national parks are as little as $15 USD per night in the United States, $15-40 CAD in Canada, $30-60 AUD in Australia, and $17-22 NZD in New Zealand. And in many places in Japan and Europe (especially Scandinavia), you can camp on public lands for free. Additionally, you go camping stocked with all your own supplies and accommodation (i.e., a tent), so you don’t have to worry about spending lots of extra money. Your food bill can be whatever you spend on groceries and nothing more.

You don’t need to love camping to spend time in the national parks, either. Personally, I hate camping. I’m not the camp-in-a-tent kind of guy; I need toilets, beds, and hot water. Luckily, many parks provide cabins. While hiking the Grand Canyon, I stayed at a national park lodge at the bottom. I had a room in a dormitory, but for a few nights, it was the cheap accommodation I needed.

There’s almost always a park nearby and spending a few days with nature is not only good for your wallet but also good for your soul.

Along these same lines, Camp in My Garden is a website that lets people camp in someone’s backyard (or garden). Got an RV that needs parking? Check out RV with Me, which finds cheap parking and overnight solutions for RV owners!

Book a Last-Minute Cruise (or Book Far in Advance)

Cruises are normally very expensive, with a seven-day Caribbean cruise costing over $600–700 USD per person for a small interior room. But if you’re the last passenger running onto that ship, you can get a sweet bargain.

Cruise lines always offer incredible last-minute deals. No ship’s captain wants to leave with half the cabins empty. If you wait until then, you can find some really amazing deals as cruise lines scramble to find passengers. A quick look at expedia.com/cruises shows last-minute cruising going for around half that, at $319 USD. Plus, cruise operators always throw in some on-board amenities, free upgrades, and cash vouchers to sweeten the deal. The website CruiseSheet often has cruises as low as $30 per day!

Conversely, if you book over a year in advance, cruise lines also offer amazing low fares for early birds.

Cruises are the one form of travel for which I recommend visiting a travel agent if you’re part of a big group. They have wonderful working relationships with the operators and can score better packages than booking online.

After you book, keep an eye out on prices, because if they drop, you can often call your travel agent or the cruise company itself to get a partial refund or vouchers to use for dining and alcohol on the boat.

Read this guide to finding super discounted cruises and how to save money once you are on board.

Think Outside the Box

Forget Mexico — go to Guatemala. Skip Paris — head to Budapest. Forget Italy — see Greece (it’s really cheap!). Ditch Brazil and take on Bolivia instead — the list goes on and on. Travel counter to the prevailing trend. Zig when everyone zags. If people are going in the summer, you go in the spring or winter. Skip the popular destinations and head off the beaten path a bit.

Contrarian travel will save you a bundle of money. It’s like reverse commuting. While others heading into the city in the morning for work are stuck in traffic, you breeze the opposite way hassle free. The same is true for travel. Flights to Europe in the summer can cost over $1,000 USD. In the winter? Half that. It might not be the most ideal time to go or your favorite destination, but thinking of unusual places to go and visiting in the off-season are going to save you a lot of money.

READ THIS –> 10 Destinations to Visit on a Budget

Book a Last-Minute Tour

Just like cruises, tours are best booked last-minute. Tour companies need to fill the seats just like cruise companies, because once that trip departs, they still have the same costs. Last-minute tour bookings work the same way as cruise bookings. My favorite company, Intrepid Travel, often offers 15–30% discounts on last-minute tours.

Why are tours so cheap last-minute? Well, think about how people plan vacations. You get the time off work, you book your vacation, you buy your flight, and you go. Since people pre-book, prices are higher in advance because these companies understand booking patterns and then price accordingly. As departure time nears, companies know people aren’t likely to turn up and book on departure day, so they sweeten the price to increase bookings. So take the time off work, wait until the week before, see what’s cheap, and then go.

Become a House Sitter

Accommodation can eat into the cost of a trip big-time. You might get a flight deal, but then accommodation — even if you can find it cheaply — might push the cost of your trip into unaffordable territory. A way around that is to stay somewhere for free. While I like Couchsurfing, it’s hard to do that for two weeks without annoying your host. A unique way to overcome this is to house-sit for someone while they are on vacation. You get free accommodation, a kitchen to cook in, and the chance to explore a destination in depth. It’s a pretty unique way to travel and one that I know a lot of world travelers take advantage of. You can even do this in your own region too, to cut down on transportation costs.

READ THIS —> How to become a housesitter

Grab a Cheap Flight

Nowadays, you don’t have to guess where the cheapest flight from your home would be. You can look up a whole list of flights (from cheapest to increasingly more expensive) using a site like Momondo or Google Flights. With those sites you can type in “(the closest airport to you)” for your departure city and “everywhere” for your destination. Then a list of the cheapest flights appears in front of your very eyes, so you can choose where to go within your budget. This is how I decide where to go when I don’t have a specific place in mind. It’s a great tool!

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Not everyone can jump overseas at the drop of a hat or spend six months backpacking around Europe or Asia. A fancy vacation to Mexico may be out of your reach. But while you might not have a lot of time or money, luckily there’s more than one way to see the world.

Travel is simply the art of going somewhere new and different and exploring everything the place has to offer. It doesn’t matter if you have two days, two weeks, or two months.

What’s next? Read these two articles to get more specific destination ideas for where to have a budget vacation:

• Five Destinations Under $30
• Cheap Places to Visit on the US Dollar