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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Slate Money Travel. This is the last episode of this miniseries and it's kind of the best one because this is, we don't like to be too servicey around these parts, but this is the very servicey one. This is the one where we actually get get real about money and stop talking about luxury hotels and start talking about the fact that we are cash constrained on this planet in our lives and we are time constrained and we want to make sure that we can get the best bang for our buck. And the person we have to explain how to do this is Lale Arukolu from Conde Nast Traveler. Welcome.
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B
Hi.
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A
Not only are you Conde Nast Traveler, but you also have your own podcast.
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B
I do have my own podcast.
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A
What's your podcast?
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B
It's called Women who Travel. It's part of a whole franchise that we just launched last month for context Traveler called unsurprisingly, Women who Travel. And it is by women for women. Anyone who is a self identifying female can join our Women who Travel Facebook group. They can come on as a guest on our podcast. It's every week. You can get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the places that you listen.
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A
To podcasts, wherever you get sleep, Money Travel.
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B
You can find us where you can.
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A
Find women who travel.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you manage to travel the world while counting pennies. It sounds horrible, but in fact it's loads of fun.
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B
It can be really fun. And I say this as someone, I'm going to immediately lose any authority on this subject, but I am notoriously terrible with money and having to travel so much for work has taught me how to be better and also has taught me that budget travel can be cool and it can still be fun and you don't have to actually sacrifice anything. And also that everyone's trips on Instagram is an absolute lie. They're all also pinching pennies and your trip is no less glamorous than theirs.
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A
Which we are going to talk about solo travel, we're gonna talk about group travel, we're gonna talk about food travel, we are gonna talk about domestic travel, which is kind of awesome. We have a whole jam packed episode of Travel Tips and budget tips coming up on Slate Money Travel. Okay, so Lale, you work for the famously flush Conde Nast and you swan around the world staying in eight star hotels on astonishing expense accounts and you're gonna tell us all.
- [02:30]
B
If this was 25 years ago, then yes, that is accurate, but it's 2019 now.
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A
You're actually like slumming it with the rest of us and traveling on a budget.
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B
Sometimes I'm getting the best of both worlds here, but I think the words budget travel have a really bad rap. They sort of, for me, conjure images of not very cool hotels, group tour buses, not really getting to splash out on anything particularly enjoyable. This is probably my inherent snobbery coming through. But it really doesn't have to be like that. Budget travel can be cool. Budget travel is about prioritizing what you're interested in, whether that's food, hotels, adventure. It's about finding what's right for you and then adapting your money around that.
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A
Okay, so I'm mostly interested in food.
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B
Excellent.
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A
And the good thing about food is that there's like an inverse correlation between price and quality. So I just go to wherever the food is like best and cheapest and then everything just sort of falls into place from there. Right?
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B
Yeah, sure.
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A
So where do I go?
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B
That's one way to do it.
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A
So, okay, so my first question is where's the best cheap food? I've asked a few other people on this show, this question and I've got some good answers. What's your answer?
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B
For me personally, it's got to be Mexico City.
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A
Okay, so all right, I'm down with that because now I have an itinerary just from previous guests. I'm going to go to Mexico City, Delhi. Our previous guest, Kim Nerazetti said Delhi and then Catherine Ma said Beirut. I think so, yeah. I think Mexico City, Delhi and Beirut is a good itinerary. And then I'm just going to go back to Istanbul because I feel like.
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B
I was going to mention Istanbul and I'm biased because my dad is Turkish. So I've been spoiled in that regard. But oh my God, the street food there is great.
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A
Okay, so let's, let's get practical about this. So is this something where I need to do more work if I have a sort of cash constraint? Is there a way in which I can have a good holiday but I need to like, make sure I have things a bit more planned out? Or can you actually be more spontaneous when you're just making up as you're going along?
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B
I think it depends what sort of trip you're wanting to go on in the first place. Are you going on some two week long haul journey halfway across the world or are you going for a weekend away? Because those are going to be two very different types of budgets to start off with and two very different types of savings.
- [04:54]
A
Plans leading to it. So, okay, so this is the other thing. My intuition here is that the biggest ticket part of any trip is the plane flight. And so you really want to amortize that plane flight over as long as possible. So weekends are always going to be more expensive than two weeks, and two weeks is always going to be more expensive than like two months because you only have one plane flight and you can divide that by more days if you're away for longer. Is that, does that make sense?
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B
I think so. In a sort of abstract, you've just written like loads of equations across a chalkboard for me and tried to crack some sort of code. I would say if you're trying to be spontaneous, flight deals are probably the best way to go. If you sign up for something like Air Travel Watchdog or Scott's Cheap Flights, you'll get like a daily email that tells you what deals are happening that day. They usually only kick around for about 24 hours.
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A
These are deals to leave, like, very soon or they can be a hot deal today for flying in like a month's time.
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B
Absolutely. Often it's sort of a limited time frame in that it will be flights to London, for example, between September and November.
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A
So you might actually be forced to plan quite far in advance, but you get to pick the dates where it's cheapest.
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B
Exactly. And, you know, you're never probably going to find a cheap flight for London during Christmas time, but you might find it in the autumn or in the spring in a time where people aren't necessarily flocking there quite so much. I actually had a colleague get a. I think it was on JetBlue, there was a deal to Martinique which she had, like, never really factored in as an option to even travel to. And saw there was the sale, it was sort of six weeks out from when the flight was departing. And she just booked it and then just came back from this trip and is now obsessed with this place she'd never thought about before. So I think being open to destinations you might not have considered is another way of finding a great cheap flight and actually having an amazing experience on a budget that you might never have factored in before.
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A
One of the things which is very popular in Germany is this thing they call Last Minute Reise, where you literally just go to the airport and there are all of these little kiosks selling tickets on flights which are leaving in, you know, an hour or two hours or three hours. And, you know, these are empty seats and they just want to fill them at any price. And you just look down the list of destinations and go, that sounds exotic. And you hop on the plane and go there. This has been a thing in Germany forever, but like I feel like it's, it's an obvious thing that should have become like a whole big digital service, but never has.
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B
It sounds like a supermarket suite for travel. It is amazing.
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A
But like there's, that's not a thing right in, in America.
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B
No, absolutely not. I've never heard of that before. It also sounds incredibly un ger.
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A
It's actually incredibly German. Germans famously can never do a census because at any given point in time something north of 10% of the population is on holiday in a foreign country.
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B
That's amazing.
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A
I mean, you know better than I do that like there's nowhere on the planet that you can go where you won't find a German.
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B
It is true. As a Brit abroad, I can confirm.
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That like however exotic you go, oh look, here are the Germans and they do get everywhere and they have insane amounts of vacation that they take every year and they use all of it.
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B
And well, I think also that spontaneity speaks to having that much more vacation days here in the US you have so few days that I think there is this mentality that you have to make every single one of them count. And if you only have 10 days annual leave, then you don't want to waste it and you want to make sure you have this sort of blockbuster trip. And if you have that much more time then you can think, okay, I'll like go here and I'll go here and maybe I'll just, just apparently rock up at the airport and just decide to go somewhere on a whim. Last minute.
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A
I went to Munich to meet my sister once when she was studying in Germany and it was May and there was still snow on the ground for some reason. And we were looking out and just basically looked at each other and said this is stupid. Why are we going to stay in this like godforsaken mid spring nothingness. And we looked down the list of last minute riser things, saw something saying, something exotic, something santo something, we're like, let's get on that. And got on an airplane. And then about five hours later we were like, wait, we're still on an airplane. Why haven't it landed yet? And discovered we were going to the Dominican Republic. And we were like, what? We're crossing the Atlantic, what is going on? And we had a fantastic time, but we had no idea, literally we didn't know like what language they Spoke what currency they had nothing.
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B
That is slightly terrified for you. How often have you experienced the Earth that way?
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A
It's a good way to fly. So here's. Here's my first top tip for anyone who finds yourself in Europe with time to spare, just rock up to a German airport and see what happens next. You might surprise yourself.
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B
I mean, that is true. The joy of traveling in Europe is you have so much at your fingertips.
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A
And actually Bangkok is the other one where you can do that. There are flights from Bangkok to more or less every awesome place on the planet and they're super cheap for some reason.
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B
I have a friend who's based in Tokyo and it's all about the continent you're on, because suddenly he has all these places at his fingertips that he never considered before. And I think for me, moving to the States, one of the amazing things has been suddenly realizing that I can go to Mexico for the weekend and actually South America is that much closer and I have all of the States to explore. And sometimes I think it's really easy to think that you need to go really far away to have an amazing trip, but you don't. You can actually stay super close to home and still have that travel experience and still see new things and learn new things and eat great food, most importantly.
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A
So I want to ask you about that because obviously the flights become a lot cheaper if they're domestic and it becomes a lot easier to do a long weekend because you don't need to be sitting on a plane for 12 hours. But what you don't have is that wonderful thing that you get in much of the world where things are just cheaper because the country is cheaper. Like, how do you do budget travel in the United States?
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B
For me personally, I think about accommodation. I think when I travel around the States, I always stay in an Airbnb or some sort of home share like immediately.
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A
And is that cheaper than a hotel?
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B
That is cheaper than a hotel. And I think you get more bang for your buck. You know, if you've never used Airbnb before, I think you can feel quite nervous about, you know, showing up at the place and it not being what was promised or if you're traveling alone. And we talk about this a lot at Traveller because we have a sort of of sub vertical called Women who Travel. And we talk a lot about traveling alone as a woman. And, you know, people are concerned about safety when you check into an Airbnb by yourself, but you can book through a super host, which means that there's sort of Another level of verified on the platform and you're sort of guaranteed certain perks and it's sort of more legitimized. I would also like look through all of the reviews if, if a listing has appeared within like the last two weeks and has one review, I would not book through it. But I've stayed in some amazing places for really reasonable prices in neighborhoods that either don't have hotels or only have very expensive hotels. Like when I go to la, I always stay in an Airbnb in Venice because I love Venice. But Venice also doesn't really have any hotels to stay in.
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A
So how much does it cost to stay in an Airbnb in Venice? It sounds, I mean, you know, I feel like I have this vision of Venice as being full of, you know, Snapchat millionaires and everything is ridiculously expensive, but you can do it on a budget.
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B
So. All right. So one downside of Venice, in my opinion is the abundance of bird scooters that have appeared there, which has got the tech Bros. Zipping around on the sidewalk. But one thing I noticed there is that a lot of people have these gorgeous Venice beach bungalow house type deal with cactuses and hammocks and it's all very hippie, rich hippie, but they often have tiny little bungalows in the back that they rent out. And it's just sort of like a studio apartment almost. I stayed in a couple of those and it's been really nice.
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A
Give me a number. How much?
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B
I'm trying to think, what was it? It was, I think I paid 150 a night. 120. Another great place for Airbnbs I found is Austin. I was just there for south by Southwest and try and find anything in.
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A
Austin during South Bay.
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B
It's impossible. Which is why we, we left it too late and we did not book a hotel, which is why we were in an Airbnb. And it was actually so much more fun because we were right on South Congress, which is sort of, if you've been to Austin before, you know, it is the, the hub of bars and restaurants and hipsterdom and it's a lot of fun. And I've also stayed in an Airbnb in Austin where they have like an air trailer out back and they've converted it into some sort of Airstreams. Airstream.
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A
Always stay in an Airstream if you can. I'm always astonished at how much Airstreams cost. If you, if you like, stay in like the official Airstream hotel. Oh yeah, this wasn't official There's a wonderful one called El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas, which is fantastic.
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B
Oh, really?
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A
But we're getting sidetracked here. I want to get back to this whole question of money, because this is slave money, after all. And the question of the other way of amortizing expenses is intuitively like, number one is like spread your plane costs over more days. Number two is maybe it's cheaper if there are two of you than if there's one of you. Or is that not true?
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B
I think historically that's been true, but it's changing. Solo travelers used to get a really bad deal because of of single supplements, which meant essentially they were having to pay the price of two people for a room for one person, which made traveling by yourself pretty unappealing and you feel pretty ripped off and not very looked after. But that is changing. The hotel chain called the Hoxton now has what they've dubbed shoebox rooms, which.
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A
Are basically shoebox rooms.
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B
Shoebox. Really attractive, very appealing. But they're beautifully designed. And they are. They've basically split their smallest room size in half. Yeah. But if you just want it as a base and you want like, it's clean and it's beautifully designed, you have like a nice mini bar and a great shower, then I think that's perfect. There's also. If you're traveling by yourself and you're trying to do it on a budget, but you feel like your hostel days are behind you, there is this new trend of sort of the adult, more spruced up hostel. There's the Freehand and the Generator. There's a few dotted around the US and in the uk and the Freehand actually has. In Miami, they have a brilliant bar called the Broken Shaker, which is very fun to check out.
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A
The Freehand bar in New York is pretty good as well.
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B
Yes.
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A
Bars, I should say also the Broken.
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B
Shaker on the roof. And so you kind of have the lower price point and vibe of a hostel where you can also meet people if you're traveling by yourself. But you're not going to find cockroaches under your bed.
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A
Yeah. Which is always useful.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Ideally, you don't want seem to be a trend to make the rooms smaller, but then put a lot more effort into the sort of common areas.
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B
Exactly. And I think if you're traveling by yourself for the at least personally, like, I don't have a massive desire to spending a lot of time in my room or hotel anyway. I want to be walking around and eating that street food and meeting new people. And having a drink at a nice.
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A
Bar and drinks are a, yeah, great way to sort of a meet people and baby, not spend an insane amount of money. Yeah, you can rock up to the swankiest hotel in any city on the planet and have, you know, a drink and it's not going to break your budget and you're going to have this astonishing environment.
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B
Well, then I think the other great thing about traveling by yourself is you can be totally selfish and so you can completely build your own itinerary and you don't have to think about anyone else. You know, I often travel with a group of friends of mine and we all have very different incomes and working for Conde Nast Traveller might sound super glamorous, but ultimately I'm still journalist earning a journalist pay. And so, you know, there have been times when I've had friends who have wanted to eat at one restaurant and I've been sort of gritting my teeth and thinking, okay, well, maybe if I just order the salad, this won't be so eye watering. But if you're on your own, then you can decide, all right, I'll just get a couple of tacos for lunch and it will cost like $5, but I'll splurge on dinner tonight and that's going to be my treat to myself. You know, you can decide what's important to you and what you want to make part of your trip.
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A
So to end, I'm going to name my greatest fear.
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B
Okay.
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A
And you can talk me off the ledge. There's literally nothing I can imagine which is worse.
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B
But group travel, yes, it does invoke great fear in me too.
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A
So we can agree on this. We just like the answer to group travel is don't do it.
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B
Absolutely not. So I am a very judgmental person and I dismiss everything. It's probably because I'm British. And so I always thought that group travel was sort of going to be my worst nightmare. And then I was sent on assignment to Japan last year for work and had to tag along with an all women's hiking expedition along the Kumano Kodo trail. And it was surreal to say the least, but it was actually so much fun. And I think a huge part of it was that I got to explore a part of Japan, having never been to that country before that I wouldn't have been able to have done by myself. And if I had done it by myself, it would have been exponentially more expensive. But because I was part of this group trip that, yes, I didn't know whether I would enjoy. And I was going for work, but I would say try it. If you really want to go somewhere and you don't know how to budget for it, you can sign up on a group trip that will budget it for you, and you will have an itinerary that you can essentially opt into as much as you want.
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A
You didn't need to, like, hike from A to B every day. And then your luggage would wind up at B and then you'd have to hike from B to C. I mean, it sounds like that's a hiking group. Is the most regimented of all groups.
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B
It was the most regimented of all groups. They threw me in the deep end. But I also think it's really good if, you know, if you are traveling alone and you're slightly nervous about it, signing up for some sort of group trip is a good way to do it. I also just got back from one that travelerhood organized to Colombia. And that was a great way of seeing the country in a way I probably wouldn't if I was on my own.
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A
So groups are not always terrifying, I have to admit.
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B
I think it depends on the group.
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A
It also depends on where you're going. As you say, I. The one. The one time I was stuck in the group, the one place you cannot go on your own, basically, it's basically impossible to go on your own, is the greatest trip I've ever taken in my life, which is Antarctica.
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B
Great example.
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A
You have to get on a boat and there are going to be other people on the boat, and you're going to be stuck with those people. So pick the boat carefully to make sure it's like the kind of trip and the kind of people that you want to spend a couple of weeks with, because you are going to be stuck with them. But it is the most magnificent place on the planet, and you have to be part of a group.
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B
Yeah. There are some. Some parts of the world that you can only access in a group. Do you need to push someone over the side of the boat?
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A
Then, you know, you know, the Zodiacs have very, very small. You can. You're sitting on the edge of a little shove. They get eaten by a killer whale. They're never seen again.
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B
And if there's one way to bond everyone, it's figuring out who's the person in the group to hate. Then you'll be fine.
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A
Just don't be that person.
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B
Yeah. If. If you think, oh, everyone's so great, it's probably because they all hate you.
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A
Okay, here's my final question.
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B
Okay.
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A
Now that I'm a, you know, happily married person, how do I persuade my spouse to let me just go off traveling on my own?
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B
Have you ever considered that they might want to be traveling off on their own?
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A
It is true that she's about to disappear off to Spain for two weeks or three weeks or something. So I can.
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B
I think that probably gives you permission to go off on your own.
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A
I will try that at some point. Laliaracolu thank you for coming on. Sleep my travel.
- [20:41]
B
Thank you so much for having me.