How to Create a Mid Range Trip Part 1: Flights and Destinations

Hi my name is Lauren and me and my husband are what I consider mid-range travelers. We aren't budget backpackers and we are not luxury travelers. We fall right in the middle. 

I am taking you along as we book our next trip step by step, so you can see you can book an amazing vacation on a mid-range budget. So lets get into it!

How do we pick our destination? And how do we find cheap airfare?

The key is FLEXIBILITY!

We either have flexible dates or a flexible destination. Having both date and destination be flexible is ideal, but oftentimes that isn’t feasible. The reason this works is it allows you to play around to find the cheapest flight.

I always recommend having a general idea of when you want to go (think in terms is seasons).

This time we knew we wanted to go in the fall. Preferably after my busy time at work and before any holidays! The exact dates for us outside of that were very flexible! 

On to location, we have a list of countries and places we want to visit. We started this list over 4 years ago and all the countries listed are places we are more than happy to visit. This always us to constantly have flexibility to whichever place has the cheapest tickets. We went to that list and looked to see what/where would have the best weather/things to do, etc. That helped us narrow our list down to around 8 places we would consider going during the time period we discussed.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ae5cd5_bb3a8b6222f649729d9db6792a79c800/360p/mp4/file.mp4

This list truly allows us to be flexible with direction.

After we went and picked the 8 countries we considered going to, the next part came being patient and waiting to see which country would have the best flight deals.

To find cheap flights we use a mixture of google flights and a premium service called FareDrop that will send you flight deals based on the departure airport you select. By allowing the flight prices to dictate the exact days and destination you can easily find a much better deal than trying to force one destination during very specific days!

I focused on the places we had talked about visiting or places close by that we could take a train, boat. or another short flight to. This is also another awesome trick to take a repositioning flight to get to your location if you find a steal of a deal on airfare!

So after 2 months of waiting and searching.......Drum roll please.....we found an amazing flight during the time we wanted for $620 RT per person to a country on our visit list. This is over 50% off what we normally would pay for a flight like this! 

This allowed us to already save over $1200 on this trip. As mid-range travelers, that will help keep us from overspending and allows us to reinvest that money we saved into hotels, activities, and other things we might want to see and do on our trip!

Stick around as we cover part 2: research and planning!