The Art of Making Travel Non-Negotiable

Over the years, a number of people have asked me “how I do it”: how I manage to travel relatively often, to far-flung places around the globe.  Plenty of others haven’t asked directly, but I can tell they wonder about this a little.  Every time I share that I’m going on a new trip, I pick up on a sense of “wow, again?” from some people (though most of my friends and family at this point have moved on from that reaction to one more along the lines of “well, what else is new?”)

There are tons of blogs and articles out there already outlining how to travel more: save money, stay in hostels, work while you travel (I taught English for a year in Prague to get to both live and travel overseas), and of course, be frugal (no more daily Starbucks for you!)  I don’t feel the need to add to this store of wisdom.  A lot of it is valuable, some of it strikes me as kind of silly and unnecessary.  (For the record, I will NEVER tell anyone to give up their daily Starbucks habit, as I myself am a Starbucks fiend.  Some things are sacred!)

Instead, if I had one piece of solid advice to offer on how to make your travel dreams come true, it would be this: start making travel non-negotiable.

What I mean by this is, don’t sit around and wait for travel to happen to you.  Don’t expect the travel fairy to drop plane tickets into your lap.  But most of all, don’t treat travel as something you’d kind of maybe like to do someday.  This is not how dreams are realized.

I’ll make all the usual disclaimers: I know not everyone can travel.  Many people are struggling to pay bills, or fighting illnesses, or caring for sick family members—there are plenty of factors that can make travel genuinely impossible for plenty of people who’d otherwise love to do it.  I’m not here to tell people in these situations that “just changing their mindset” will get them on a plane.  I know it’s not always that easy.

I realize, and appreciate, that I’m very privileged to be able to travel as much as I do.  Some of this is luck and circumstance.  However, a lot of it is the direct result of my own hard work and ultimately, the attitude I take towards making travel a major part of my life. Without this attitude, I can tell you I’d be nowhere (literally and figuratively).

And so, here are a few tips from my own experience (or the story of how I’ve made it to twenty-seven countries in the last ten years).  I hope some of them are helpful in making your own around-the-world adventures happen!

 

How I Make Travel Non-Negotiable:

• Attitude.  I know it sounds cliché, but sometimes they’re true for a reason: my attitude is the single most important thing that keeps me traveling.  By this I mean that I quite literally treat travel as non-negotiable.  If I have a steady job and any vacation time and money, I’m going to be traveling.  That’s not a hope or a dream; it’s a fact.

 

I keep a list in my Iphone notes section of countries I’ve visited, trips I’m actively planning, and places I want to visit that I haven’t been to yet (the latter still contains roughly forty countries).  Every year, when new years’ and the resolutions roll around, I sit down and plan out my travel year.  Where do I want to go?  What can I fit in, realistically, given time and money constraints (we all have those, right?)  I think, I dream, then I plan (see #4 for more on this step).

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that lots of people who say they want to travel never make it to this step.  They talk idly about how they’d love to go here or there, but they never tell themselves, definitively, “I’m going to do it!  This year!”  Their attitudes are passive rather than proactive; all too often, they treat travel as negotiable…a thing they’d like to do someday, with more time or money, but not now.  That attitude keeps you grounded.  The only way to fly is to change it, and decide that no, you won’t put off your dream trip any longer, and yes, this is the year you’ll finally do it.  From there, with a little money, planning, and strategy, so much becomes possible!

 

• Priorities.  We all spend money every day.  What you choose to spend your disposable income on is your business; I’m not going to tell you to spend less on this or that.  But as a fairly frugal person, I find that saving in some areas of my life that I prioritize less allows me to spend more on (and save more for) the areas I prioritize the most.  It’s a different equation for everyone, of course, but I find that moderation is often the key, as well as finding balance between what you really want and what you don’t really need.  For example, I love Starbucks and go there almost every day.  However, I drink maybe one alcoholic drink a week (and it’s almost always a happy hour special).  I’m not a big drinker or partier, so this tradeoff works for me.  Likewise, I love getting salads for lunch at the fancy salad place near my office, but I’m not willing to shell out $10 a day for this (which would add up to $200 a month—money much better dedicated to a travel fund!)  So I go once or twice a week and brown-bag it the rest of the time.  I love massages and mani-pedis, but I’m also a huge fan of free museums, which luckily are abundant in my town.  I enjoy the occasional fancy brunch out with friends, like every self-respecting city dweller, but I do this once every month or two, not once a week.  My yoga and kickboxing classes come free as part of my gym membership.  You get the picture.  Yours will look different than mine, but ultimately the key is to make sure you’re spending money on the things that bring you true joy (including travel!), and not frittering it away on things you really don’t care that much about.

 

• Save. Step Three is pretty self-explanatory (if not always fun) but I want to spell it out here anyway. If you really want to travel, start saving!  And make that savings a regular part of your budget.  It doesn’t matter how much or how little it is to begin with: if all you can save is $50 a month, it will still add up over the course of a year.  The key is to make it a regular part of your life.  I have a set amount of money that I transfer from my paycheck to my travel-specific savings account once a month.  Every month, I watch it build a little more until I’m ready to set off on my next adventure.  It’s practical, and also motivating…once you start and see the numbers in your savings account rise, you want to keep at it.  No time like the present to begin!

 

• Research. Travel costs money: this much is obvious and sadly, won’t be changing any time soon.  But often, it doesn’t cost as much as people think. One commonality I’ve noticed among friends who don’t travel often is that they tend to think it costs a lot more than it really does to see the world.  This is where research comes in handy.  Decide where you want to go, and then figure out how much it will cost to get there and have the trip you want.  Or on the flip side, figure out how much money you have to work with and start looking at where you can go with that budget.

How do I research?  I usually decide on a place from my endless list first, then start reading about it on travel blogs, buying guidebooks, and talking to anyone I know who’s been.  I search my Skyscanner app (the best thing ever, and free to download!)  to check airfares on different dates and see what a typical flight will cost.  Depending on whether I want to go budget or a bit fancier, I then either check out www.hostelworld.com or look in guidebooks or places like www.hotels.com for sample hotel fares (admittedly, I do a lot more of the latter than the former these days…perks of adulthood).

 

One final point: I know a LOT of people who believe that foreign travel is inherently expensive, more than domestic travel they may have done.  This is not always true.  If anything, I think America is a bit overpriced (you can get a nice hotel room in plenty of parts of the world for far less than it would cost you in lots of U.S. cities).  If you can get a good deal on a flight (check out Skyscanner and sign up for Scott’s Cheap Flights emails to help find these), you may find on the ground costs overseas far cheaper than you would expect.  A few of my personal overseas budget wins include a round-trip flight to Iceland for under $300; an entire weekend in Budapest for $150 including transportation  (I mean, I was living in Prague at the time but still, that’s not too shabby!); a $10 hourlong massage in Cambodia; and my personal favorite: a luxurious beach-adjacent hotel room in Thailand for $25 a night.  There are deals out there to be had, so start searching!

 

• Plan, Plan, Plan! It’s a bit of a running joke that I am ALWAYS planning a trip, even when I don’t have one imminently scheduled.  Planning creates a wonderful kind of forward momentum that helps everything else fall into place. If you book a ticket to Italy (hopefully with a great fare you found through doing your research!) you’ll be much more motivated to keep saving steadily, to cut back on unnecessary expenses, to scour for hotel deals online, and to start planning your itinerary (booking museum tickets online in advance can be super helpful!)  Of course you want to allow some spontaneity in your trips too, but the more you plan, the better prepared you’ll be when the time finally comes around to depart on your adventure.  It’s all part of keeping travel a non-negotiable part of life, which, if you do it right, will pretty soon start to feel like second nature.

So, those are my tips.  I hope they help inspire you to seize control of the narrative of your life, to transform yourself from someone who’d like to travel into a traveler, and to start making your next adventure a reality!