Travel Tips & Tricks No One Ever Told You About!

Source: Google Images

*Longish Post: Keep popcorn and passport ready!*

Over the past couple of weeks, The Husband and I have been busy planning trips for us, family and friends. First up was planning our Bali trip with K+T (our partners travellers in crime, Karan & Tejal. You’ll be hearing a lot about them soon), then came along the USA trip for my parents and relatives, then came up trips for The Husband’s friends – Scandinavia Summer,  Nice-Cannes-Paris and Austria-Germany-Croatia-Czech-Hungary.

It has been quite a busy summer packing off people for their vacations and counting days until you go off on yours!

Most of the times The Husband, K+T and I, we travel together and more often than not, we’re all asked questions about our last trip, where would we be going next and how do we manage to travel so much! Hence, thought of sharing a few travel tips that we have figured over the years from our experience. Follow all the points together to have a cost-effective trip. They all tie back to one other and work towards reducing the trip cost.

1.       A penny saved is a penny earned

This is the THE ONLY rule to travel more. Like everyone, we are also people with limited means, families to support, salaries that just aren’t enough and ever increasing inflation. The only way out is to save more.

The Husband and I don’t go out much for fancy dinners every other week. But once in a month, we pool in the dinner money and drive down to Lonavala or Pune for a dinner coupled with a weekend out of Mumbai. That’s budget travel. Plan for it in advance and you can get good Pune hotels for a steal. Once we stayed at the Hyatt in Pune for Rs.1800! Our fancy Mumbai dinner would have definitely costed us more than that! If you do the math, a dinner for 2 costing about Rs.2000, once a week in a year, would put you back by Rs.104,000. That’s how much a Thailand or a Ladakh trip would cost for 2 people for 10 days! One thing has to fund the other. That’s the new law of the land! Read point 4 for more details.

Let’s face it, there no such thing as a free lunch. It’s always going to be a choice between one or the other. For us, it was travel over fancy dinners, it could be something else for you. Choose wisely :)

Saving isn’t just about trading dinners for trips, it about trying to save money in a more holistic way. Read the rest of the post to see how saving intertwines into everything related to travel. 

2.       Plan your own trip. And plan ahead!

When we went for our honeymoon, The Husband and I planned our Australia trip for 4 months before the trip, much to the chagrin of our parents who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t just go as part of a tour. For our Norway trip, The Husband, K+T and I spent some 6 months holed up in K+T’s old home planning the entire trip. Only microplanning both our trips, last to the smallest detail made the trips in a budget for us. (Australia trip of 21 days for 2 was about 5 lacs everything included, considering we were novice travel planners and Norway trip was 1.65 lacs/pax for 18 days everything included)

The advantages of planning your own trip, you ask?

• Familiarity. The joy of living and breathing a place before you’re actually there. And the acquaintance with the place when you’re actually there. You’re then experiencing the place as a local and not a tourist. I couldn’t stop beaming from ear to ear, when during the NYE fireworks in Sydney, Husband’s friends mentioned how I knew more about the vantage points for seeing the fireworks than them, who were Australian citizens!
• Flexibility. You’re no longer chained to the tour operator’s schedules or routes, you make your own schedules and routes. And even modify them midway.
• Cost-effective. You’re basically saving on the margins that you would be giving to the tour operator. You can see 1 more city/spend 2 more nights in the same city/stay in a slightly expensive hotel/go for another weekend trip somewhere else. The possibilities with money saved are endless!
• Cons: Food Issues: If you’re a vegetarian, food will be an issue when you’re not travelling with a tour operator as you have to fend for yourself. But worry you not. There are many ready to eat food packets now available that you can carry. Also, you can always visit the supermarket and make your own sandwiches :)

A picture of all our Norway bookings and the tools we used for our Norway trip. The iPad - for research and bookings and the DSLR to capture the beauty that Norway is!

3.       Research till the last page on Google’s Search Results

When you’re planning your own trip and want to make it as cost effective as possible, keep looking for information until Google also gives up. (Now you know why it takes us 4-6 months to plan our trips). Many a times, there will be some shortcut or a caveat or a trick that you may come across on the latter results which may not be on the pages up ahead.

Also, bets deals are always hidden in the labyrinths of Google Search Results. You’ll have to dig them out!

Like when we wanted to hire a car in Australia to drive down from Adelaide to Kangaroo Island to Melbourne, we weren’t getting any car rental company to get us a car for this route. But on page 4 of the search results, we saw a listing that solved our problem and was 60% cheaper than the other cars available on the previous pages.

4.       One trip should fund the other

Somehow we have developed a knack to look hard enough, to unlock deals and offers leading to free or cheaper nights.

Like, for our Bali trip, 60% of all our hotel stays are free or cheap nights in 4/5 star properties that we discovered because of our Thailand trip last year. So the major cost for our Bali trip is only the airfare J (which we also got at half the price of Rs. 12k per person for a Bali return flight)

Also, whenever you’ve to take a long distance flight that has a layover, always park 1-2 days to see the layover stop. Like this, you’ll be saving money to specially go there. If it’s a European city, then doing this will save you time on your next trip and choose a different layover city every time. If it’s an Asian city, then depending on the city and airline you can have free visa for 48 hours.

We did this for our Australia flight when we flew Malaysian Airlines. We had free 5 day visa for Malaysia and we finished KL. So now, we won’t be doing that leg for a while. Similarly, during our Norway trip, we chose our layover in Paris. And since it was the Christmas Eve, we couldn’t have asked for anything better than attending the Midnight Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral. Though knowing a bit of French would have helped comprehend the carols! But still, you couldn’t miss the Christmassy vibe in the air!

5.       T&C Apply. And that’s not a bad thing!

Don’t just ACCEPT the user agreement, read it first. Especially when it’s about travel. This has helped us not once, but many times.

In Abisko, Sweden, we were supposed to take a cable car ride to the top of the mountain to a observatory to see the Northern Lights. Now, due to some mechanical failure, the cable car wasn’t working and our ride was cancelled and they arranged for a walking trip around the National Park. The walk was something we couldn’t have done by ourselves and didn’t need to pay through our noses for, hence we asked for a refund. They declined our request saying that their Terms and Conditions don’t allow for refunds. Now, well, the T&C mentioned no refund due to issues related to weather, but didn’t mention anything about technical snags. We raised it to them and they processed our refunds on the spot. Now, we had about 50 other people who couldn’t take the cable car ride and didn’t ask for the refund too. You just have to ask what’s yours. And luckily, we used this refund money to go on an additional Northern Lights chasing tour that wasn’t planned earlier. 

And trust me, this tour that was decided at the last minute, funded by a cancelled cable car ride was the highlight of our entire trip! All the Northern Lights pictures you’ll see on this blog/Instagram are from this epic night!

This is just one incident. We could fit in our entire Norway trip in 1.65 lacs/pax (including a cruise, skiing, snowmobiling activities, Northern Lights chasing tours only because we read and re-read the T&C.

During an airfare sale in Nov’15 which said that all Air France flights to Europe originating from Mumbai will have a flat 15,000 discount. Now, we wanted to use this to fly to Norway. While we were getting this offer for Mumbai-Paris, they weren’t accepting the coupon code for Paris – Oslo. After chasing for a day and rationalising with deal offerer on their own T&C, they agreed and manually processed our discounts. With this, we could fly BOM-CDG-OSL in just 21k. The Husband sometimes spends more than this for a BOM-DEL return flight!

6.       Keep fighting until you’re (almost) banned!

Now fights with Tour Operators are easy. You’re the consumer and they the service providers. If they ban you for stalking them, you can always create another account and start stalking them afresh. The issue with doing the same with an embassy is that you have only one passport and you don’t want it banned!

So, for the Norway trip, K+T got their visas early on and with just one week to fly, we still didn’t know the status on our visas. Apparently they needed some more documentation from The Husband and me, but never informed us about it, until I stalked them on mails/calls/social media (they don’t entertain queries on social media. Emails are unanswered and calls are allowed only during certain days of the week on stipulated times). None of my stalking helped, yet I continued calling them and even had The Husband plant himself in front of the Embassy in Delhi until they mentioned what the issue was. Issue mentioned, issue resolved and visas granted on Monday, 2 days before we were to fly, with a call to The Husband from the Embassy asking him to reassure me that the visas have been granted and I can now stop calling them!

So, moral of the lesson is to keep following up with Embassies in case your visas don’t come on time. Usually Schengen visa takes about 7-10 days. If yours takes more time, please start following up with the Embassy directly. Don’t rely on VFS, they won’t be able to help you much.

7.       Plan for contingencies

Anything can go wrong anytime. Make sure your itinerary with hotel address/contact details are known to your family and friends. Always plan for buffer time especially when you’ve got flights to catch. There can be unexpected traffic anytime, anywhere.

If you’re driving a rental car, make sure you’re always on a full tank. On our honeymoon, we were staying in Kangaroo Island, a 200km small island, population of about 4000 people and with only 2 gas stations. The bigger one was at the harbour, at one end of the island and the smaller one was near the sight-seeing spots – a national park, which was at the other end of the island – 200 km away. We were staying between the 2 – about 100 km from each end. Now as fate would have it, we were short on gas on Christmas Day and could drive only one way.

Unlike India, people abroad take their holidays very seriously and EVERYTHING stays shut on Christmas. We were at the hotel, trying to ration our fuel! If we relied on the sight-seeing gas station and it was shut, since it was a smaller station, we would be stuck there in the national park with animals for company at night and miss our ferry the next morning. Going to the harbour was the only option we had. We packed our bags and sat in the car, in case we didn’t get fuel, we’d stay at the harbour and at least take the ferry the next day, and of course not be eaten by the animals in the national park! Luckily for us, that station had fuel but you could use only a chip and pin credit card to get the fuel. This was the time when our credit cards didn’t have chip and pin, so we were stranded again! After waiting for what seemed like hours, a few Chinese boys came to fill their tanks and we begged them to help us. And more often than not, help is always given when asked and we were stranded no more!

This day I realised why the world fought for oil!

I really hope this post inspires you and helps you plan for your next trip. These were tricks and tips we have learnt from our experiences and I’m sure these aren’t covered by any listicle on travel websites!

Do spread the word about my blog if you liked it. And if you want us to plan your next trip, do drop me a line at throughsepiashades@gmail.com. We’ll be happy to help!

You can read my detailed post on Kangaroo Island here and Northern Lights here.

And, don’t forget to follow us on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/throughsepiashades/

P.S: This one's dedicated to you Colleen, for the hot chocolate dates we have in the canteen!

The Hunt For The Green Lady

Sitting with our feet buried ankle deep in the sands of the sequestered Gokarna Beach on the New Year’s Eve, taking in the cold of the sand. Looking at the vast expanse of Arabian Ocean outstretched in front of us, we saw a distant light source in the sea. Anchored in, yet floating on the surface, we assumed, was to light up the sky for the fishermen at sea during the dead of the night. This light source, however, was green in color, and from the distance that we saw it, made the entire horizon have a green band of light.  

“This is what it would be like to see the Northern Lights? The sky completely green against the black night?” said Karan

“I’m sure it would be way more spectacular”, answered Tejal.

“We really wouldn't know how it is until we see it” I chipped in

“It’s better to see it once than hear or wonder about it a thousand times” Himir nonchalantly mentioned.

This was the last day of 2014, when we, four friends sitting on a secluded beach, making plans to see the one of the most amazing natural phenomenon and braving the harshest winters.

And on the last day of 2015, we were standing under the Stockholm sky, bringing in the New Year with a marvellous fireworks display and waiting for the Northern Lights leg of our trip.

Between the two New Year Eves went in months of research, numerous changes to the itinerary, waiting for deals to book, optimizing on the budget and just waiting to go to Norway! And yes, of course, incessantly talking about the impending trip and annoying everyone around us. 

  

In the posts to follow, I’ll write about our entire journey about how we made our itinerary, short-listed places to see, booked our tickets, optimized every stage to save money, even if it was as less as 1 Euro, our experience of actually witnessing the fabulous Aurora show and just relive Norway all over again as I write!

I’ll start off on how to start planning for Northern Lights and Norway!

1. Expensive Norway!

• Scandinavia is expensive. Food, cabs, hotels, public transport.... everything! Even though the exchange rate was about INR 8 for 1 NOK/SEK, everything is priced high. A trip to Scandinavia will burn a deep hole in your pocket.

• If you thought prices cab/rickshaw Mumbai are expensive, wait until you set foot in Norway. About a kilometer in a cab will cost about INR 800. You’ll have an outpouring of love for the Mumbai rickshaws after a trip to Norway.

2. Make a budget and stick to it

• More than a making a budget, it’s important to stick to it. More often than not you’ll come with temptations to stay in a slightly better place, eat at a fancy restaurant and take the cab instead of the metro, but, resist the temptation and stay in control.

• Once you have decided you’re going, start hunting for deals. For flights, for hotels, for your excursions, for everything. Getting good deals is essential to seeing more in less money. Before the start of our trip, we had fixed a budget of spending not more INR 1.5 lacs per person, we stuck to it religiously, save for a pint here or there, and spent close to INR 1.65 lacs per person for an 18 day trip. Yes, you read it right. This was inclusive of flights, hotels (Radisson and likes), food, excursions, expensive cab rides and other miscellaneous expenses. I’ll write more about how we managed our budgets soon.

3. How cold is it actually?

• It is going to be COLD. But, with the right clothing, you can manage it. The Norwegians have a saying, ‘There’s nothing like bad weather, only bad clothing’. I couldn't agree more. I'm a person who feels cold in Mumbai winters. And if I could go to Scandinavia in winter and come back alive and not in a frozen state, anyone can!

• Everything under a roof in Norway/Sweden is centrally heated helping you manage the cold. But still, it is easier said than done. Personally, I felt that more than the layers what helped us manage the cold was the fact that we were mentally and physically prepared for the cold. We even prepared ourselves physically for the cold by not wearing a jacket when the office temperatures decided to mimic the Polar temperatures or not asking the husband to turn off the AC while sleeping and shiver away all night. All this helped us immensely. And now that Norway is over, screaming at the Office Maintenance guy and the husband to turn off the AC is back!

• More than cold, it’s the wind that gets to you.

• Yes, you will have to dress in layers. 5-6 or more depending on cold tolerance. But resist the temptation to over pack. Please travel light. Carry not more than 10-12 pairs of clothes per person. You don’t sweat nor smell there. Dragging heavy suitcases on snow covered roads with hands protected by mittens and you in 5 layers of clothes is not easy!

4. All this is fine, but what about the food?

• If you’re a non-vegetarian Norway is your paradise.

• If you’re a vegetarian and Ambani’s kid, you’ll survive eating out at the Norwegian prices.

• If you’re vegetarian, not Ambani’s kid and travelling on a strict budget, CARRY FOOD. Ready to eat meals, soups and now that Maggi’s back, carry tons of Maggi. Even if they come back uneaten, you can stock and sell it in black if it gets banned again. This is what my uneaten Maggi stock is for!

• If you’re a Jain with strict eating policies, may God bless you in Norway. You have no option but to survive on theplas and khakras. Luckily, due to the cold, the theplas will last longer. Ours didn’t go bad in 18 days.

5. Where exactly is anything to do with the actual ‘Northern Lights’ in this post?

• In very simple terms, Northern Lights occurs when certain solar particles hit the particles in Earth’s atmosphere and because of a lot of stuff that was taught to us in Physics classes about electrons, ions, magnetic fields, energy states and the works, the sky lights up!

• Since the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis is a natural phenomenon depending on the solar activity, you will never be able to predict for sure of an Aurora display. So yes, all your money spent on this trip is a huge bet.

• Sometimes, the Auroral display will last for hours and sometimes, only a few minutes. So basically, you’ll have be ready once it’s dark.

• Photographing the Auroras is quite tricky. You’ll need a DSLR camera and will have to make a few setting changes to take pictures. A normal digicam or your phone won’t do. For iPhones, there’s an app – Northern Lights Photo Taker (Rs.60) is a decent enough app to take pictures.

• There’s too much to the Northern Lights to be able to fit in the sub-point of a point in a blog post. It deserves more!

And yes, the most important thing about the famous Northern Lights that no one will tell you – The magnificent Aurora Borealis is nothing like what Google Images or National Geographic or Instagram pictures have been telling you. To know more, keep watching this space. Till then, enjoy the slideshow I've created on the Northern Lights pictures we've clicked.

Photo Credits - Karan Mehta