Traveling the World on a Shoestring Budget

Written by: Annalise Parks

Edited by: Willa Rodencal

College is the time to make the memories that will last a lifetime. It is a time to see the world and learn new things about yourself that you might not learn if you don’t take a giant leap out of your comfort zone. While not many college students are in the financial situation to jet off to Rome or Paris for the summer, traveling the world may not be as far out of a college kids’ budget as you might think. It’s important for kids to travel and experience different cultures to broaden their point of view.

On Sunday, March 1st, 2020 I interviewed my friend Alyssa, a UW- Stout student who in the Summer of 2019 traveled around the continent of Europe for six weeks with her sister, a backpack, a few thousand dollars and a whole lot of adventure. This trip was the definition of traveling the world on a shoestring. Alyssa’s adventure that she had with her sister, illustrates how students can travel to extravagant places on a budget. Traveling through Europe doesn’t have to be expensive; it’s only expensive if you make it expensive.

Many college students are jumping into their cars and traveling across the country, admiring the beauty that is found all over the United States. But for many students, staying confined within the US borders is not the adventure they are looking for. Hopping on a plane and flying across the ocean is another option.

One thing that needs to be taken care of before leaving the country is getting a passport. This needs to be done in advance as the processing of a passport usually takes about six to eight weeks. The next step would be to start thinking about is travel insurance. This is important for any vacation you are going on, no matter where the destination is. Travel insurance helps protect you and your property if the unexpected were to happen. These unexpected events can include loss of luggage and any medical emergencies or assistance that may occur along the way. Travel insurance, if an emergency does occur, can save you thousands and thousands of dollars.

Plane tickets are usually one of the priciest expenditures when planning a vacation. When it comes time to looking for a plane ticket, many people start by looking on google flights. By using google flights, the search engine can look through multiple different airlines and provide many different options available. There is even an option to view the ‘date grid’ which can show which days its cheapest to fly. One thing that can be very helpful to reduce the price of tickets is having flexibility in the dates of your trip. With flexibility, finding the cheapest ticket is much easier and can help to reduce the overall price of the trip by hundreds of dollars, in a lot of cases.

For currency exchange, there are a few options. The first option is to exchange currency at an airport kiosk. This option may sound the best and the most convenient to many people but if you can this should be avoided. There are extremely high exchange fees that must be paid in most places, sometimes up to 20% in fees! One of the best options is to rely on your credit card. It first has to be pre-approved to use abroad. Credit cards get the best rates and offer the closest value to the official rate. Debit cards can also be an option. Although there are many foreign transaction fees and such, that can go along with the use of the card. It is hard to know how much is in the account as it may take days to weeks to know how much was charged for purchase. Foreign currency cards can also be a good option, pre-loaded with the amount of foreign currency on it. There are high fees that can go along with this option as well. Alyssa found that for cash, exchanging in the country they were in worked the best for them as they could get the amount they needed, and the fees weren’t so outrageous (CompareRemit, 2019). Having a majority of your money on some sort of card can be helpful to keep track of how much you are spending each week, keeping track of your budget overall.

Looking for a place to stay can be kind of nerve-racking when you’re halfway around the world, but many different tools can be very beneficial and helpful to use during the search. The HostelWorld app allows users to search hostels near them quick, easy and cheap! A hostel is a place where travelers can go and stay, and other travelers are staying in the same place. It is a shared accommodation, instead of renting a private room with private bathroom, you get to share it with others that you may not know. Hostels have become very popular for travelers as they can be very affordable and a great place to interact and meet new people. Alyssa and her sister took full advantage of the hostels on their journey, and the relationships they built here were one of the best things they took away from the trip, as these relationships evolved into adventures they might not have ventured on if they stayed in their own private accommodations. Staying in a hostel is a great way for students traveling on a limited budget to save some extra cash. If staying with other people in close quarters is not the ideal situation, the Airbnb app can help students find cheaper private accommodations near them. Airbnb’s tend to be more expensive than hostels, but they do come with private bathrooms and other facilities. Not all Airbnb’s are expensive as in Croatia Alyssa and Hailey found an oceanside room for $11 a night. The location you are staying in can affect the price of a room, no matter if you are looking for a place to meet up with fellow travelers for the night or crash in your own bed and catch up on some sleep in your Airbnb.

When I sat down with Alyssa, I was originally thinking I wanted to learn about how she traveled and what she and her sister did to save money while they were there to make sure they had enough to remain in Europe without depleting their funds too fast. The more we talked, I became more interested in why she was inspired to travel and what kind of things she. Learned along the way. These questions had more interesting answers.

Alyssa and her sister Hailey had a dream to travel through Europe and see all of the beautiful tourist hotspots you hear about from others that have traveled Europe. They saved up a few thousand dollars each by cutting back on the everyday things that can add up over time, like eating out once or twice a week or the mini shopping sprees that do not need to happen. Every little bit of money you save goes a long way when you are trying to plan a trip as a student. Next, they got on their computers and searched flights to Zürich, Switzerland on google flights. They found a round trip ticket for the right dates for about $430. They booked their flights and soared off to follow their dreams.

A day in the life:

“It was crazy actually, when I think about it now. It was so exhausting. I remember the first night being so concerned because we just ended up at this little hostel called ‘Otter Hostel’; we walked there, and it was the most expensive place we stayed the entire trip- $40 per person.” To calm herself down Alyssa tried to pretend like she was in living in the United States, rather than sleeping in a room with her sister and two strangers an ocean away from home. It took time for the girls to get used to traveling to a new place every day. They were always on the run. When Alyssa and Hailey had seen all they wanted to see in a place, they moved on. They would look for a cheap bus ticket and head on their way.

From Switzerland they traveled to Italy. When planning the trip, the girls expected to stay in Italy for 10 days or so; they wanted to travel through Milan, Venice, up and down the coast. They took a bus from Zürich to Milan and they were terrified; it was not the experience they were expecting to have at all. They ditched their plan and ditched Italy. “That’s why not having a set plan on a trip like this is huge. We planned on spending ten days in Italy and we only spent two days there… the best experiences we had on our trip were unexpected. We never planned on traveling to Hungary, but our experience in Budapest was literally so amazing.” Alyssa said. She put a lot of emphasis on not planning things and just going with the flow. You’ll never really know where you’ll want to go until you get there. As Alyssa and Hailey went on their way, they met so many different people that instructed them on where they should go and see things. “Taking suggestions from strangers that are in your situation is so much better than listening to the internet,” Alyssa said.

“One of the best things was meeting all the different people in the hostels. We met two girls from Australia and one girl from Canada and we all instantly became best friends. I remember we went the kabob place in Munich Germany at like 3 am and got a plate of this nasty food and we were all just eating it after getting back from the clubs… those are some of the memories you’ll never forget. That was crazy; probably the craziest time of my life,” Alyssa expressed. Growing up as a kid, you always hear about stranger danger, but making these connections on trips, can create some of the best memories and great relationships with people from so many different places in the world.

As the weeks went on their bodies and minds needed a break. It was exhausting to be constantly moving from place to place. Taking a rest day can make a person feel guilty, being in a beautiful place, but the only thing that you want to do is sleep all day. After walking an average of 17 miles a day, every day, for two weeks, their feet were blistered, and they started to get sick. The break days were essential.

Alyssa’s Travel Experiences:

Alyssa and her sister grew up in a very small town in north-western Wisconsin and she knew that there was so much more out in the world that she wanted to see than her little tiny town. “I want to see everything and everywhere; there’s a lot of cool places out in the world and I want to see them and take pictures of all these cool places and things,” Alyssa states. Structured planning was not a huge focus on this trip, as when they were flying into Zürich, Alyssa and Hailey they didn’t even have a place to booked for the first night, “we were really just winging it.” The sisters had made an outline of a few things that they had in mind on what they wanted to do and where they thought they wanted to go. Other than their plane ticket to Zürich, their schedule was clear for the next six weeks.

When they were searching for places to stay the night, their go-to search engine was the HostelWorld app. Here they searched for nearby hostels to crash at and get a decent night’s sleep to recharge for the next day of adventure. As the weeks went on, staying at a hostel every night was not ideal as there were always a lot of different people around and there wasn’t anywhere private. “We’d look for Airbnb’s if we wanted to relax and actually hangout there, because you didn’t want to hang out in the hostels- they could be gross and scary, but cheap as hell,” Alyssa recalled. On the days that the girls needed a break from traveling, whether it was because their feet were too blistered from walking or their bodies were just physically drained from always adventuring day in and day out, they would splurge a little bit and get a room they could have all to themselves.

Saving money was important for the girls as they only had what they saved, and they were scheduled to remain in Europe for six weeks. There were many little things they did to make sure they didn’t deplete their funds too soon into their travels. One thing that saved them a ton of money was to dine in, not out. Yes, of course they tried some of the famous cultural cuisines while abroad, but they made sure that they were saving a majority of their cash to spend on making more memories on adventures, rather than eating everything in sight. Bread was their go-to meal as they could buy a loaf for twenty-cents to a dollar.

Public transportation is very popular in Europe as so many different countries are only a bus or train ride away. As much as they could, the sisters road the bus. “Riding a train was a faster way to get places, but they were definitely more expensive… for a bus ticket to go from Slavonia to Hungary, which would be a few hour bus ride, we could find a ticket for like $11.”. Once Alyssa and Hailey got to their destination, the rest of their transportation happened on foot. They walked everywhere. “We’d take the buses to the cities and then we would just walk everywhere from there. We would walk like 10 miles at a time with our backpacks on,” Alyssa said. When they were estimating out the trip, they were expecting to be spending up to $200 a day, but throughout the trip they learned how to slum it a little in order to save as much money as possible, even if that meant only eating bread. Obviously, if there was an interesting ‘must have’ meal, they would get it, but the goal of this trip was to see the world, not just eat it.

 “I think when you travel as a student you realize you can actually do anything. Traveling by yourself or with a friend, you learn to become so much more independent and you realize how much is actually possible and how far you can go with a backpack on your back and a couple thousand dollars.” Alyssa expresses. “I have the confidence now, that if I want to go anywhere, I can. I’m not afraid to buy a plane ticket by myself. That’s a cool feeling.” She goes on to talk about how if she can survive 6 weeks in Europe with just a few things, she feels that she has the confidence to do almost anything. “Going alone places is scary, but if forces you to take a big step out of your comfort zone. Confidence is a huge thing and knowing you can do a trip like this cheap, because then it doesn’t just become a once in a lifetime trip, it’s always an option to me to go back, because I did it before.”

“Traveling makes you grow a lot as a person as you’re being put in uncomfortable situations that you’re not used to,” Alyssa said. “When Hailey and I landed [in Zürich, Switzerland] we were like, ‘where are we staying tonight?’ We were literally in the airport, our phones weren’t working, we didn’t have any wi-fi, nobody around us spoke English… we didn’t know how to get on a train and we weren’t sure how we were going to get where we wanted to go.” Alyssa and her sister questioned how they were going to make it in Europe for six weeks; they couldn’t even figure out how to get out of the airport. That experience set the tone for their trip as they knew in order to be able to make it, they were going to have to push through the hard times, “It was scary, but just from that experience alone, I know I can handle a lot. Traveling and being in these uncomfortable situations is huge for young people, especially our generation; it just proves that we are capable and can do many things.”

“Experiencing the culture in these different countries is so different than the American culture. Nobody drinks until they’re passing out. Everyone drinks a few and has a good time and get home safe,” Alyssa said. Getting to live life in a different culture than the culture you grow up in can open a person’s mind up to so many new things. Students getting this experience now, while they’re young can be so beneficial and influence the way they see the world.

The landscapes differed greatly from place to place. Alyssa described, “When we got to Croatia, Hailey and I were like ‘where are we’? Croatia was kind of like being on Mars. The ground looked weird, the trees looked weird; it was like nothing I have ever seen before. The water was crystal clear blue with dolphins jumping around and it was amazing.  Croatia is awesome and so cheap.”

Some of the best tools that Alyssa packed for the trip included things such as a package of baby wipes, a pocketknife, and a rain jacket. The baby wipes were very helpful for many reasons on her travels. She considered them, “A shower in a bag.” Baby wipes can come in handy in many situations you might find yourself in, along your journey. A pocketknife is also one of those tools that can have many different uses, whether its for opening packaging, slicing up pieces of food, or cutting sea urchin spikes out of the bottom of your feet, as Alyssa and Hailey had to do after an incident they had in Croatia. A light rain jacket that you can roll up and stuff in the bottom of your backpack is also a great idea as weather is always unpredictable. A jacket can also be used as a pillow for a bus ride from one country to the next or if you just want to take a little nap by the ocean. Some other items that might come in handy are aqua iodine tablets for water purification. It never hurts anyone to be on the safe side of things, as getting sick from drinking contaminated water would be a real damper on your trip.

A have-to-see place: Switzerland. Alyssa’s favorite cities were Interlaken and Lauterbrunnen Switzerland. She describes them as this tiny, perfect Swiss town in the middle of the mountains. To get to Lauterbrunnen from Interlaken the girls took a 15-minute train ride through the valleys of the Alps. Every country they travelled to was magnificent and had their own, different qualities that set them apart from one another, but Switzerland is on the top of the list for must-see places in the world.

Traveling on a shoestring has changed Alyssa’s life. Not only has she been able to see some amazing places on this planet, she has gained a variety of soft skills along the way, such as confidence, assertiveness, and independence that will aid her in her future plans. Experiencing these different cultures also gives her new perspectives on situations that are going on in the world around her.

Not every affordable vacation for students has to be living out of a backpack for six weeks, trekking across Europe, but Alyssa’s story shows that an affordable trip is possible. There are ways to make an amazing vacation affordable, and still make memories that will last a lifetime.

Advice for students that want to travel:

“Just do it. Buy a plane ticket and go see the world. You don’t need to have a big extravagant plan. You can just figure it out as you go and save on the little things. There are so many amazing memories that can be made along the way, you just have to step out of your comfort zone and do it!” -Alyssa