As I age, the comforts I will give up to travel diminish year by year. What I would willingly tolerate in college sounds like an absolute nightmare to me now. Don’t get me wrong – I still stay looking out for a deal – but my hotel rooms have gotten bigger, my meals have gotten finer, and my airplane seats have gotten larger. In light of this, I’ve found a lot of bad travel “hacks” in years of wandering.

Most of these hacks are totally fine if you travel frequently to inexpensive, close destinations for short periods of time. If you travel frequently for work, or road trip to see family every month, it’s totally worth making your money and time go as far as possible. But when traveling for leisure, when traveling for fun, trying to “hack” the trip often leads to more of a headache than you might’ve intended.

Booking Flights on a Budget Airline

Flying a budget airline often becomes one of the most humiliating experiences a human being can endure. Many of these airlines skimp on everything – and I mean EVERYTHING. They have no free food or drink on board and the seats are usually even tinier and more uncomfortable than other airlines.

If you’re taking a quick flight, with minimal baggage, like our 45 minute one from Edinburgh to Dublin on Ryanair, it can often make little difference in your experience. But for a flight longer than 2 hours, often the money saved cannot account for the sheer human misery. In fact, because budget airlines typically have such high fees (Spirit Airlines charges as much as $100 for a carry-on) you may end up spending more money for the privilege of torture.

Finally, budget airlines tend to skimp a lot on the “soft” product as well. Part of the value of premium airlines like Emirates and Qatar Airways come from the immaculate customer service for passengers of all levels. And as a nervous flyer, I have to wonder: if an airline will skimp on what we can see, what are they ignoring when it comes to safety and maintenance?

Booking Flights on a Third-Party Service

The scene: Philadelphia, 2017, 4:00 a.m. I have 3 figures in my bank account, if you count decimals. I have slept upright at the Philadelphia baggage claim because I could not afford a hotel, and thanks to my 24 hour layover, the airline would not let me check my bag for my flight the next morning and sleep in the terminal. A mere 70 minute flight was the last leg to my home in Atlanta after leaving from Lefkada, Greece at 2 a.m. two days earlier.

I approach the counter to check my bag and hear the 8 worst words I could’ve heard in that moment. “I’m sorry, you’re not booked on that flight.” It turns out, because I had book using a third-party site (rather than directly with the airline), my ticket existed in some odd booking grey area where the airline saw me as a “soft maybe.”

After trying to console a sobbing 20-something for 2-3 minutes, the absolute angel of a desk agent rebooked me on an earlier departing flight. On that day, I learned a lesson. Read ALL of the fine print when booking travel with third-party services.

Using a site like JustFly may seem like a good idea when deals turn up, but if anything goes awry (and things almost always go awry), customers typically have very little recourse. Flights are often very crowded these days, and these types of bookings are the first on the chopping block. They often exclude typical amenities and options for refunds or rebooking. And speaking of…

Springing for Non-refundable or Non-flexible Train Tickets

Every country and train line has different rules regarding the time frame of train ticket usage. Lots of small lines in rural areas in the UK have generous ranges of time in which you can use your ticket without paying extra. However, they can also come with arcane rules. For examples, we had to wait another 2 hours after our departure time from Edinburgh to St. Andrews because despite the fact that my husband’s ticket had a specific departure time for early that morning, his ticket type was only valid between certain hours – and they were after his selected time. (But why, Scotland, but why?!)

Especially when traveling from one major city to another, train rules can be quite strict. I did not love spending another $200 at Gare du Nord to catch the next train because I missed my booking from Paris to Brussels. It’s tempting to buy a non-refundable train ticket, because refund options often carry a hefty upcharge. But for the anxious among us, ensuring your ticket is refundable can provide a lot of peace of mind.

Being a Die-hard Carry-on-only Believer

To paraphrase Glennon Doyle, when we die, no one will get an award for having suffered the most. Therefore, I refuse to waste my wild and precious life on whittling down my possessions to so little that I only need carry-on.

Now obviously, for certain trips, large suitcases are ridiculous. When I went on a shoestring trip to Iceland at 21, I brought my hiking backpack. When I went to Greece and traveled on many busses a few years later, same story. I once had to stomp on my large roller suitcase to get it down a medieval spiral staircase in Brussels. Was it humiliating? Sure. Had I known, would I have brought something smaller? Probably not.

As a lover of fashion and having access all my toiletries, I won’t magically become someone cool with neglecting my skincare routine and dressing in a boring manner while traveling. And speaking of boring clothing…

Packing a Merciless Capsule Wardrobes for Travel

If you genuinely don’t care about clothing as a means of personal expression, by all means, pack a capsule wardrobe. I won’t foist my love of colorful fashion onto others the same way I would not want an all-black wardrobe foisted onto myself.

In general, it’s a good idea to pack smartly on a trip. Unless you are a person in the fashion industry going on a fashion trip, for a single week you likely only need one coat, for example. Two, if your ol’ reliable coat (like my trench) can’t withstand more extreme conditions.

However, if you’ve been struggling with feeling like you need “permission” to be a little more kooky and disorganized on your trip, please take it! More than likely, your trip will be impacted very little whether or not you have a capsule wardrobe in mind! Pack appropriately for the weather, and read up if any of the religious sites or nice restaurants you may go to have a dress code. Otherwise, I release you! Join me in dressing however you want on vacation and not feeling weighed down by societal expectations to make yourself as small as possible, up to and including being the world’s most efficient packer!!!!!

Relying on Hotel Amenities

My husband, in his 30s, recently had an experience many women have in middle school: realizing that hotel air dryers emerged straight from the bowels of hell. He’s only ever used a Dyson, bless him. Because hotel amenities are designed to be as cheap and accessible to as many people as possible, they often simply miss the mark.

Hotel amenities are wonderful in a pinch – if you’ve forgotten, lost, or busted something, they’re wonderful to have on hand. But I have spent DECADES cultivating this routine, honey. I have spent too many years drying out my face on hotel soap and drying out my hair on hotel conditioner that refuses to leave the bottle.

Many high-end hotels have starting carrying high-end products. Sounds lovely. I’ve stayed at hotels and purchased the products I used there before. And there’s a very good chance I’ll need to use them again some day. But relying on them on purpose? No thanks.

Relying on Travel Credit Cards (if you’re bad with money)

This hack comes up almost as often as the suggestion to book via travel deals sites. And it’s true – many credit cards come with perks to help with travel. From a little kickback when dining out to lavish freebies, credit companies tend to throw a little extra your way.

The problem is, if you are not militantly careful with your money (which many of us are not) these cards are truly, truly, truly not worth it. I know! It looks great! That guy with that blog got a free first class flight to Japan! You want to go on a first class flight to Japan! But it’s a terrible hack for the financially irresponsible, and you must be ruthlessly honest about that.

Often you have to be quite wealthy (and be traveling pretty frequently) in order to use these cards in the first place. If you’re not – stick to your debit card and sign up for airline and hotel rewards instead.

What are you spending that money on?

1. Fees – Pretty much all travel credit cards worth anything have an annual fee, some as high as $695 per year. You have to do some significant travel math to make up for it.
2. Spending Limits – Many cards have minimum spends in order to access the rewards marketed, usually around $5,000 in the first 3 months of having the card. Business travel cards often have minimum spends in the tens of thousands of dollars. In other words – not the average individual’s budget.
3. Debt – Credit card companies make it somewhat difficult to pay back your balance within the timeframe where you don’t accrue interest – on purpose. Unless you are totally militant (which some people are capable of) it’s pretty easy to lose track of your balance.

Bottom line, unless you are a) good with money b) travel frequently and c) know you can pay back every drop of debt very, very soon, it’s really not worth putting your financial health in danger for that girl’s trip to Ibiza.

Avoiding Tourist Traps

The performance of this hack depends very much on your definition of a tourist trap. What some consider a “tourist trap,” I consider a necessary part of travel. If you go to Paris and don’t see the Eiffel Tower, sorry, you’re a monster. The Internet has become so obsessed with finding the next “cool place” that it has ironically created an industry of crappy traps that look great online, but are shabby and overpriced in person. Please don’t become so obsessed with having the perfect social media experience that you skip out on amazing world monuments!

Large world landmarks (like Pompeii, the Louvre, and Angkor Wat) are more than worth the bang for your buck you get exploring them (especially if you research the best off times to go). And you’d be surprised how many famous museums around the world are free!

Never Eating Out

Experienced travelers know the pain of paying $22 for a soggy turkey sandwich and a bottle of water at the airport. Eating while traveling adds up – fast. Bringing your own snacks and cooking (if your lodging has the capacity) is a great way to mitigate the expense. But much like the capsule wardrobe, I personally feel some people go to far when planning food for travel, as some people advocate literally never eating at a restaurant when traveling.

I will admit, I am a big Michelin girlie. I love a fine dining experience, and I have made my travel plans around a hard-to-get reservation. But what I’m talking about is even simpler than that. Part of the fun of travel is getting to experience the local food. Why would I want to eat sad, stale almonds from my backpack when I could have a fresh bowl of pho off the street?

Food is one of the great joys of eating, and you can do it smartly an relatively inexpensively (unless you’re going to Scandinavia, sorry). Don’t be afraid of street food and back alley restaurants! Treat it like an adventure, where dietary restrictions permit.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, take all travel advice, including this article, with a huge pinch of salt. Remember: it’s fun! You’re trying to have fun! If frugality and packing light enhances the experience for you, I wish you the best. But if you, like me, take your travel with a pinch of leisure, don’t feel hemmed in by extreme travel tips.

What are your thoughts? What makes travel easier for you?