Can I Really Know The World For Free?

Last Modified:

June 7, 2023

Can I Really Know The World For Free?

Last Modified:

June 7, 2023

Do you have a tight budget? Do you want to see the world but you think it is too expensive? Do you want new experiences but you have absolutely no money?

These and many similar questions are what our readers have, and they constantly ask us for advice and recommendations on how they can travel without worries and on a budget.

It is important that you know that we CAN travel for free, but many times it is good to have some budget for food or transfers, otherwise, we will not have any control over our experience.

One of the main pleasures and goals in life is to have more and better experiences.

Traveling, meeting new people, different cultures and food is one of the main purposes of this life.

The more we know, the more we can relate and improve in many of the different areas of our lives.

So what is the problem?

Well simple. We are almost always limited by budget.

But regardless of whether you are an adventurer, a parent, whether or not you have dependents and want to have more experiences, we will try to cover the best possibilities for each of you so that you have the opportunity to travel and learn more within your own capabilities.

Be aware, we do not want to lie to you with the false advice that you should book tickets on a Tuesday night and other lies like that. We are going to give you places, ideas and contacts so that you can effectively save on your trips and in some cases even travel for free.

What is the first thing we look for when we want to travel?

It’s almost always the destination, right?

Well here is the bad news of this article, to really be able to travel on a budget or for free, you cannot have a destination in mind.

We will try to help you with the best tips and secrets, but the reality is that if your only option is to go to Disney at Christmas or ski in Switzerland at New Years, then the only thing you are going to find is going to be the cheapest hotels in places like booking.com, the discounts on packages in Expedia or entry tickets that you can find for yourself in different places like Undercover Tourist.

That does not mean that you cannot choose the place, but without an open mind to the possibilities, it is not the same that we help you to travel and discover Spain than to have the stubbornness of wanting to stay in a hotel next to the Cibeles Fountain in Madrid.

So what is the first step?

Well, the first step is very simple, we have to decide what kind of vacation we want…

What do we mean by this, we are going to mention below some very general categories but they will have a lot of impact in the following steps.

We know that many times your categories will be influenced by your age, marital status, work, school, children, etc. But be sure that even if you can’t have the vacation of your dreams right now, you will surely be able to have new unforgettable experiences.

The categories are:

Rest
Know
Backpacks
Adult or children activities
Meet people

You can put almost every kind of vacation under these categories, and the easiest way to choose is to imagine how you imagine your vacation.

You see yourself resting next to a pool while the children swim, you see yourself knowing museums, historical or cultural places, you may imagine traveling only with your backpack changing place every 2 or 3 days or you would prefer activities such as skiing, fun parks or even only meet new people, make new friends and grow your social network.

In the end depending as you can see you can take advantage of the advices we are going to give you.

Well, the first thing we are going to cover is traveling for free.

You will find many posts that will give you ideas of how you can travel for free, but in the end everything will be summarized in the category you chose and see if there is a way to mix the different opportunities with your intentions.

For any trip we have to cover 3 main expenses:

Transportation
Accommodation
Food

Of course, many trips will also include activities, tickets, equipment rental and more, but the main and escencial are the 3 things we mention above.

So you can you travel for free? Well, the reality is that getting free accommodation is not so difficult if you are willing to what this implies.

Food and transport are a bit more complicated and although food depends a lot on the type of travel you are planning, transport depends more on destiny.

We really believe that this is the most difficult expense to save.

It is true if you travel as a volunteer or as part of the team you can have this expense included, but that will be in exchange for work and if the purpose of your trip is to meet people or places you may seek to look for these alternatives, but if you travel with Any other purpose, so it is not an expense that you will be able to get free unless you win in a raffle.

Subscribe to our page and we will send you updates on ticket contests and we soon have information.

So the only way to get free transportation apart from the raffles is doing work right? And how do I find them?

We recommend reading these two articles if you are willing to work on a cruise, to be a voluntary or part of the Peace Corps.

In case it is not your cup of tea, then the question is how to make the expense as cheap as possible and here it depends a lot on destiny. If destiny is national or international? If you can arrive by another medium other than plane? and how many people are on the trip?

Depending on the answers to those questions, our recommendation is very simple. Always try to avoid the airplane. Many times a trip of a few hours by car or train can save you more than 90% of the cost of the plane.

If the train option is not viable, always check the option to rent a car before paying for transport. Many times not only gives you the comforted and independence that you are looking for but all the car rentals allows you to return the vehicle in the destination city.

If you have to travel by plane for your destination, do not create the false promises that if you buy Tuesday night it will be cheaper or other scams they publish online. In the end, the only things that really work are traveling in a low season, not traveling on the weekend and taking advantage of all the promotions that the different airlines may have.

It is annoying but if you want to save on your trips you have to enroll on all the points programs you know of all the airlines and hotel chains. Today they are almost always interchangeable between them and the more you use them more and more benefits and even free trips you will win. You can always ask you not to send you information but many times there is where many of the promotions come.

Now, if you really want to save on trips, you should keep in mind that you will not be able to choose the destination and you will have to hunt a last minute offer.

Many pages have a special section of discounts on hotels and airplanes sent by airlines and hotels when the date is approaching and could not sell what they had planned. The only problem is that you can only choose your destination depending on these offers.

Of course we know that after reading the previous section you can feel a bit disappointed, so we gave ourselves to the task of looking for products that really help you travel with the slightest postbile cost and we would love to visit them with a very open mind.

The best secret we found is Jack’s Flight Club. It is a page on which you just have to subscribe and every time flights with ridiculous prices appear they will let you know. Believe us are really ridiculous price, the only thing is that when you get these emails you will have to act quickly and choose some of the destinations that will appear.

The second jewel we found is called Booking Credits. Instead of joining all points programs because you don’t join one. That’s right, on this page, they take care of all the points process that you can get on a trip, add it they give it a value and they return that money directly to your card.

Really?

That’s right, instead of having points, what better than having money back.

Finally, we also find the cheapest travel agency on the entire Internet. His name is Freedom. You will not find anything cheaper we can assure you but it has a problem. Using it is not free. If you already have the trip you are going to make, you can register for a free 7 -day period and check what we are telling you. But after those 7 days, they charge you a monthly subscription of only $ 8 USD. That is why I decided to put it thirdly, since being a scepte option, not being free cannot be the first.

Now to the easy part. Taking into account that no hotel is going to give you a free room, to have a free or the cheaper accommodation as possible, you first have to ask yourself 4 questions:

Are you willing to take care of a house while you are on your vacation?
Are you willing to receive a person at home to give him accommodation someday?
Would you share the room or bath with someone else?
Would you be willing to stay outside your destiny?

These four questions can tell us if any of these four options accommodates you:

There are several sites such as Housecarers where you can find completely free accommodation in almost any location in the world. The only thing is that you will have to take care of pets, take care of the house, plants or some other work that implies a little of your time and effort. A very small price for having a free house for you alone.

Another way to have a free accommodation to join a social network of accommodations such as Couchsurfing or WorldPacker where other members will be willing to receive you in their homes and your accompaniment with the only condition that when they need it you can receive them. This option is the advantage that you often will have free or low price food too.

On the other hand, if you do not accommodate any of the above options, the next step at cost benefit would be hostels. That’s right, it is the cheapest accommodation that exists today but on several occasions you will share bathroom or even fourth, in the end there are so many options around the world and we find that the largest agency Sidea can find them is Hostelworld.

If none of the above options go with your intentions, you may consider staying outside your destiny. We do not mean that you change their destination or city, but many times staying away from the tourist areas you can save a lot in accommodation but you have to consider that this increase your translated expenses and decrease your available times.

Ok, now we are going to see the most difficult part of the trip.

Get free food.

Of course we are assuming that we are not going to eat leftovers nor are we going to look for waste. It is a reality that getting free food for a family group is much more difficult than for one person, but in the end, getting all meals free is going to be the most difficult task and in the case of family trips we have to be aware that not all meals can be free if we want to have family meals.

The first thing we should look for once we have transportation and accommodation, is all the events that are going to take place in the destination we are going to. Gallery open houses, grand openings, conventions, grocery stores, ice cream parlors, farmers’ markets, and chocolate shops are great places to find free samples or full meals. We recommend you always search social networks before going to the destination for the hashtag #destination to see if there are announcements of events in the next few days as well as enter Eventbrite or AllEvents.in.

The second thing is definitely to download the OLIO application. This application will help you find people who are donating food that they will no longer use but that are not leftovers. It is a worldwide community of people helping to reduce waste.

Also whenever you are going to pay for accommodation you have to try to consider two things:

Have a kitchen or space to prepare food
Have breakfast included.

You could save huge amounts of money by avoiding going to restaurants or buying street food.

Last and not so recommended is to look for free samples in hotels and supermarkets like costco and so on. The truth is that this is not very suggestive because you are not going to satisfy your needs and you are only going to waste a lot of time, but yes, if you happen to be in a supermarket for any reason, take advantage of the opportunity.

After so much effort to be on our trip for free or really paying the minimum, we have to ask ourselves:

It was worth it?

And the answer will really depend on how we take advantage of the time that we have left to make our experience more pleasant.

In the end our trip had a purpose, remember?

So how do we spend our time?

Well here we have as always two options, spending or not spending.

Without spending we have two very simple alternatives.

Look for attractions that have no cost such as:

- Museums
- Cultural places
- Free attractions
- Beaches
- Explore Markets & Shops
- Local parks
- Or events without costs.

Here we can recommend thousands of pages and blogs but the reality is that the best, most up-to-date and free source for this is Google. Just search for free events or free museums or park in … and with that you will be guaranteed to enjoy your time.

The second option, more than free, is to get paid to carry out an activity that has cost you or not. Here you will have to join pages like Tour4Fun. On their page as well as on many others they mention that you can be a Tours4Fun Influencer & Get Paid. Simply take photos and recommend Tour4Fun and they will be paying you for each person you refer.

On the other hand if we are willing to pay for different attractions, we do not recommend that you search on google. The truth is that you will not find better prices for attractions or tickets than through the different ticket and tour agencies that exist.

This is because the suppliers give them a special prices to help with the sale and it is always lower than the price at the box office or on the official website.

There are too many agencies like Tour4Fun for attractions of more than 1 day or UndercoverTourist for discounts in amusement parks or tours for children but we do not want to mention all of them right now. We just want you to always look for them to have a return policy for anything and that it is in your budget.

Well, as you could see, really traveling for free is not going to be the most fun and comfortable, but we believe that the experiences you live are priceless.

If you have a tight budget or simply the only thing you have available is time, we recommend that you have this guide and its advices at hand since they will be useful to you all the time because our team is always updating them.

We also recommend that you sign up to receive all the promotions, raffles and updates as well as much more information that can help you discover new experiences.

And finally, if you prefer to seek the possibility of traveling more comfortably, perhaps what you need is not travel advice but advice on how to generate that little extra money from home or from anywhere in the world and for that we recommend that you visit our Work From Home section with ideas, tips and much more to start earning something extra in your free time.