As odd as it seems, yes, I still try to save money while on vacation. It’s not even just because I’m a personal finance blogger, I try to save money on vacations so I can have more of them! By learning how to travel cheaper, I find that I can still have just as much fun, and make it easier for me to go on my next trip. Just because you’re on vacation doesn’t mean that you should leave your mind pay home and pay whatever something costs! Learning to know when to spend money and knowing when to save money will help you go on a lot more quality vacations, and won’t leave you coming home feeling broke!

My wife and I recently returned from our vacation to the US Virgin Islands. It was an incredible trip, and I’m already looking forward to the next one! If you’ve been a reader on the site for a while, you’ll probably remember that I’ve done a similar post a while back in which I went over some tips on how to save money while on vacation. I actually used many of these tips during the past vacation, and actually found even more ways to save money, and wanted to share them with you!

Find the grocery store and become best friends with it

I suppose this tip doesn’t really apply if you’re going to an all-inclusive resort. I’m not sure how YMF feels about all-inclusive resorts, I’ve never been to one as I tend to believe ala-carte to be a cheaper option, but I could be wrong! It didn’t take long after paying way too much for way too low quality food for us to realize that honestly a ham and cheese sandwich would probably be better than what we were paying so much for. Drinks at the hotel were like $9 for the local ‘rum punch’. By the end of the first day, we’d spend $20 on drinks, $30 for lunch and $70 for dinner. Now, of course, I’m not that frugal to the point of not spending any money while on vacation, but I do want to come home without busting the vacation budget. On the 2^nd day, we hit up the local grocery store and bought plenty of food, snacks and 2 gallons of water. We also bought a bottle of the local rum ($8) and some fruit juice ($6). We were set! For the rest of the week we were able to spend $0 on breakfast, $0 on lunch and $0 on drinks (thanks re-usable water bottles!), and were able to ball out at dinner. The local grocery store was convenient and cheap, and we saved a bunch of money!

Figure out what you realistically can do on your own

We picked up lots of brochures the first day on the island, and were browsing for ideas of adventures we wanted to go on. We found a tour that would take you to several sites for $65 per person. Not terrible and they were mostly sites that we wanted to hit on the islands, things we wanted to see anyways. We figured having a local drive us around with a few other tourists would be a good way to see the island. False. We actually rented a Jeep for the week and had our own means of transportation. Upon looking at a map and at the sites the tour would take us to, we quickly realized that we could see them all on our own. There wasn’t anything super special about this tour, and that we could save ourselves $65*2 and do them ourselves! Conversely, neither Christina nor myself are boat captains, nor did we have a boat. Therefore, sailing to the national park for the famous Buck Island sailing trip would not have been possible. For this adventure, we happily paid up, but we definitely price compared first!

Shop around, and shop around some more

The beauty of being on vacation is that time is on your side. Our itinerary consisted of: waking up late, exploring the island in the morning, beaching it all afternoon and then finding some food at a local restaurant for dinner. Before making any purchases (even down to the souvenir postcards!), we shopped around. For our souvenirs, we looked through multiple local shops. For restaurants, we utilized Trip Advisor and local/other tourists’ reviews. For our local excursions/adventures, we called around and looked online at both reviews and prices. Just because you’re on vacation doesn’t mean you should be lazy and book with the first sailboat operator you find! Not only will shopping around get you a better deal, you’ll also find better services/products. The only thing worse than getting ripped off is getting ripped off with a crappy product or service!

Although vacations are often something we’ll save up all year for, they shouldn’t be something that we ‘waste’ our money on! Do you really need to eat overpriced food to have a good time? Should you pay for a tour that you could take on your own? Learning to travel frugally will mean higher quality trips, as well as a higher quantity of trips to be frugal on!

Hey! What kind of an interest rate are you earning on your savings account? Is it more than 0.75%? If not, consider switching over to a Capital One bank account. I did it and so can you!