As lovely as it can be to visit popular cities and tourist attractions, sometimes we just want to get off the beaten path. However, with expensive car hire, remote accommodation, and airport transfers, the price tag can soon add up.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Here’s how to get off the beaten path on a budget.
Using flexible travel tools to find transport links away from the major airport hubs and tourist traps is an easy and affordable way to see more of a country or region. You’ll often find that the accommodation and restaurant costs are a lot cheaper out of the big cities as well, so it’s perfect for us budget-friendly adventurers!
Flexibility is your friend
Okay, so to start off I want to precursor this by saying flexibility is your friend. If you have your heart set on a particular destination or only have hard dates to stick to, this guide probably isn’t for you.
This is for the traveler who doesn’t mind where they go as long as it’s somewhere new, budget-friendly and doesn’t have a ton of crowds. If you’re still with me, this is your kind of travel guide.
Picking your destination
First things first, you need to pick your destination. There are a few things to consider here if you’re on a budget.
- Available cheap flights
- Transport links
Cheap Flights
If you’re traveling from further afield, all decisions start with the flights. Now, if you’re not too fussy about where you want to go, I’d 100% recommend using the Skyscanner or Google Flights Anywhere or Everywhere feature.
You can add in your home airport, and your rough dates, and it’ll show you the different places that you can fly to. I’d also add the direct flight filter to make your life a little easier. If you’re not using these sites already, you need to!
Now, you’re looking for cheap direct flights from your home base that go roughly to an area you’re interested in. For example, flights from Liverpool to Bergamo in Northern Italy are always really cheap, but we’re not interested in going to Bergamo this time. That’s where the transport networks come into play.
Transport networks
This is where you find those off-the-beaten-path gems. Once you’ve found the airport you want to go to, open up the Flixbus website. They have a route map feature which is one of my favourite travel tools for finding day trips or new destinations.
Select the airport you’re flying into or the nearby city and the route map will automatically show you all the towns and cities that you can get to from this location. It’s amazing.
If you need to find a way to get from the airport to your nearest city and Flixbus isn’t an option, I always use Omio because it shows you the bus and rail options, rather than one or the other.
Both of these options are normally really cheap, and especially in Europe, you can cross borders on a budget. For example, you can get from Bergamo to Lugano in Switzerland for around £20, whereas flying into Switzerland and using their more expensive public transport can easily cost twice that.
Of course, if you know that you’re going to need rail connections, RailEurope is a great option. Many major European airports have train stations attached and you can use their network map in a similar way to the Flixbus Route Map to find lesser-visited destinations.
Check your transport timings
As much as I love Flixbus, they’re not the most frequent option. Before you book your trip, make sure that you can get to and from the airport with plenty of time to spare.
I’ve previously planned trips and almost booked before working out that I’d have to be in the airport city the night before because of the lack of trains or buses early in the morning. That’s the thing about cheap flights – they’re always at ridiculous times!
Logistics are not exactly the most fun part of travel, but they’re a necessity – especially when you’re on a budget!
What does this look like in practice?
Okay, so this all sounds great in theory, but how does this work practically? I’ve done this a lot, so I have a few itineraries to share.
Lake Como
While I have done a full post about traveling around Lake Como on a budget, the way we chose this trip was pretty much a result of this guide.
We wanted to go to Italy and the flights to Bergamo airport were only £30 return. However, we didn’t want to stay in Bergamo and Milan is super expensive. So, I checked out the Flixbus map to see if there were any links from the airport itself or from Bergamo city centre.
While there were some links from the airport, there weren’t many destinations we wanted to go to. We also only had four days so we limited our search to under three hours on a bus or train.
For a while, we were looking at going to Trento in the southern Dolomites, but the return bus times meant that we’d have to spend the night in Bergamo, cutting our travel-free days in half!
Between FlixBus and Omio, we found great links to Lecco on Lake Como, and the prices for accommodation were reasonable. There were also great links to other places around Lake Como and trains into Milan for a day trip.
Southern France
This was less about getting off the beaten path and more about making open-jaw flights work for us. We’d planned a short weekend trip to go and see the tennis in Monte Carlo on a budget. However, we could only get flights from Nice one-way on our dates.
After a quick search, we found that we could get return flights from Marseille on the dates we wanted and at our budget price point. While Nice and Marseille share a coastline, the public transport links between the cities and airports are a little intense.
Using a combination of FlixBus and Omio, we managed to get between the two cities and out to the airport with no issue. Yes, it did take a couple of extra hours, but the savings were huge. It’s all about budget vs time and if you can strike a balance between the two, you’ve hit the sweet spot.
