How We Saved Thousands While on the Road
Do you think it takes a lot of money to travel on the road? Wouldn't you like to make some of that money back?
My family and I have driven over 110,000 miles just in the last two years, and during that time we have found ways to save thousands of dollars on fuel, lodging, shopping, and restaurant expenses. I'd like to share some of these tips with you.
Booking hotels is inevitable when we take long trips, or when we don't have friends and family nearby to lodge with. We have found two great traveling sites that are easy, convenient, and give great rewards for booking hotels through them. The one we use for traveling in the States is Wyndam rewards. They have new promotions all the time. We keep track of our points and search their hotels on their app. We can also do this on their website. Because of their discounts we have booked their hotels on the same day $50 less than if we had just walked into the same hotel to check in. Once we've reached a certain amount of points we get a free night, with no price limit!
When we travel internationally, we use hotels.com. This a great site to use! They also have an easy to use app. This site is awesome for earning free nights for when we were traveling abroad in The U.K. They have promotions and discounts with this site and they always have after 10 stays at their hotels you get one night free. (The free night is the average cost of all your previous nights stays)
Eating out can be so expensive if we're not careful, so I've found some neat ways to save money on this. Before we go on trips, I always try to pack a bag of full of drinks and healthy snacks. This really cuts the costs of when we go out to eat. We don't have to "make it a meal" cause we already have our own bag of chips and drinks. We just have to buy the entrée. Another way my family saves is we all get kids meals (including us parents) we especially like eating at Culver's. Their kids meals are just as big as their adult meals, but less expensive ;) and the kids meal comes with ice cream and a coupon. When you get 10 "scoopie" coupons you get a free kids meal. But regardless of if you make it a meal or get the kids meal you can use restaurant apps to save yourself a lot of moola!
These are a few of the apps I've found:
Burger King: offers great coupons
McDonalds: offers buy one, get one free items all the time and many other great coupons.
Pennstation: offers a free six inch sub for signing up, and points for every purchase - adding up for extra free sides.
Moes: offers a free burrito for signing up
Starbucks: offers a free drink for signing up with a gift card, and a free drink for your birthday. They also give you two stars for every dollar you spend there. Plus, they do promotions to get extra or double stars. When you get to 200 stars you choose any item on their menu for free.
Road trips can be full of irritations. Fuel running on E and missing the last exit with a gas station, or paying $2.45 a gal only to see that in a couple miles a station selling gas for $1.95! Other times we'd be discussing where to stop for dinner then pass up the last exit with food, thinking that the next exit would have something; only to find the next 95 miles full of nothing but windy country roads and corn fields. Talk about being a little hangry. Well, a miracle happened! At least, for us that's what it was. We discovered the best traveling buddy app ever, IExit. This app tells you exactly what will be on every exit in the direction you're going. It tells you how far away the next gas station will be and even how much the gas will be at those stations. It also gives you options just to search specific categories like food, fuel, shopping, coffee, etc. It costed us .99 which we got back in savings the first time we used it.
Reward cards and credit cards, when used correctly, are our biggest way to earn money and rewards while on the road. Kroger is our local store that has a rewards card that lets us earn fuel points and save money on items in their store. Speedway, Sheetz, Thortons, CircleK, Marathon, just to name a few, offer free reward cards for free items or drinks and discounts on fuel. Discoverit was one of the first credit cards I had. It has a great rewards program and no annual fee. This was a great card for me because I was just starting out with getting a credit score. The key, was not spending more than we made. We always pay off the balance every month, and never let the balance carry over! This way we made money off of them, instead of them making money off of us. For every dollar we spent we got got 1-5% cash back, plus other bonuses and benefits. Almost every credit card company offers cash for using certain dollar amounts within the first few months that you have the card. You just have to check if they charge annual fees. We use our credit cards to pay for fuel, groceries, among other things and get cash back. These are items that were necessities and would have been paying for them anyway.
You can hardly travel very far anymore without having to pay tolls. Since we mainly travel on the east coast we bought an ezpass on the Pennsylvanian turnpike. This cut the cost of tolls in half for us, plus the first time we used it the cost of the tolls we went through that day were paid automatically free (which would have cost us $22 that day.)
How about you? What money saving tips have you found while traveling? Let us know in the comments!