How I Find Amazing Hotel Deals While Traveling 🌎

How I Find Amazing Hotel Deals While Traveling 🌎

Welcome back to the channel. My name is Ian. I’m known as WanderBeard around these parts and in today’s video I thought I would talk to you a little bit about how to find good hotel deals everywhere you go. It is a question that I get asked all the time, which surprises me a little bit because I don’t think it’s all that complicated, but. Anyway, I will kind of give you the lowdown on how I kind of find some good deals. So a lot of these questions sort of initially sprung up from my 51st birthday video and I mentioned that I was staying in a place there for $15 a day. And people were very skeptical, very confused as to where you would find somewhere for $15 a day. Well, the truth is that in almost a year and a half of travel now, my average spend on a place to stay. In Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua was $23 US and if I was to take out the 10 highest spots or 10 most. Spencer spots that drops to under $20 a day. The process that I’ve used to do this, I’ve sort of refined over time. So I started initially when I was traveling through the US and Canada. I was booking almost entirely through booking.com. I’m going to take a walk down to the the beach here through this path while I talk get away from some of the traffic noise. So. One of the reasons I ended up sticking with booking.com for most of the initial trip was because they have a rewards program with three tiers, and as you progress through the tiers you get more perks and benefits and it’s not that difficult. To accumulate up to tier three, once you get to tier three, you don’t lose it. Like it doesn’t require you to continue booking places going forward. Your tier 3 for life, so to speak, which is awesome. So there are three tiers that they have. The first tier is only I believe a couple of bookings, the second tier is 5 bookings and then the third tier is 15 bookings over a two year. If you complete that then your tier 3 for life and some of their perks are additional 20% discounts. Some places to stay, Some places include free breakfasts, free room upgrades, those types of things, and you get additional discounts on some of their offers for packages or adventures or tours or those kinds of things. So for me, I said, well I’ll stick with booking for now. I’ll get to the 15 bookings and then once I have that established then I can start looking in other places. And that’s what I did so that by the time I finished. Baja California and Mexico, I had already completed my 15 bookings. Now. I would say that. The US and Canada and Baja, Mexico portions of the trip were some of the, well, almost all of the most expensive places I stayed. The US and Canada for obvious reasons, and then Baja is a bit more expensive than the rest of Mexico just because of the. Lack of options. Things are very spread out and there’s not a lot of tourism in Baja that’s passing through. You’ll see a lot of ex Pats and gringos and things like that there, but generally speaking you don’t get a lot of. Backpackers or long term travel people passing through that part of Mexico. So yeah, so once they got the booking requirement done for their 20% discounts and stuff, you know, I started looking at other places and what I have found over time is that. Sites that do multi site searches such as Trivago have been really good for finding great deals. Now I should say none of this is sponsored. I don’t have any affiliate leaks for any hotels. I don’t have any you know. Influencer programs or any of that kind of stuff for any of these places or any of these sites. This is all just my own personal opinion. From what I have found from experience, what has happened is that with Trivago is that you put in your place, you put in your dates of course, like any of the other sites. And what you end up finding is that the best deals are usually spread all over. I have picked places to stay now from about 12 different sites in total, and that doesn’t even include the times that I’ve spoken to owners directly over WhatsApp. I would say WhatsApp is probably saved me more money than anything else on my trip. So some of the tricks that I’ve used. I’ve actually gone through and done a full book. Right up to the point of confirmation. And then once you get the contact information for a place, you reach out to them on WhatsApp and say, hey, I just made a booking. Do you have a better rate if I booked directly with you? And the answer to that question is usually yes. And so oftentimes, I will book it through them, we’ll confirm with them through WhatsApp and then cancel the booking on the other site. I have saved anywhere from 10 to 40% doing that WhatsApp. Process I guess is the best word for it. We’re going to take a little walk down the beach here as I keep talking. So some of the sites I’ve used, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list, but I have booked through hotels.com, expedia, trivago, booking.com, Kayak, Airbnb has been really good… VRBO. And even Google, to be honest. Google has listings obviously for all the hotels and stuff, so sometimes that’s a good starting point. So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t necessarily be loyal to one site if you’re looking to maximize your travel budget and maximize your budget for places to stay. I just came over to sit down for a second to find some examples here, so I’m going to put a couple of examples here on the screen of what the price difference can be and this is solely just looking at some random cases on trivago. This isn’t places that I’ve necessarily stayed at or you know, that sort of stuff. But this does give you an idea of just how different the prices can be. And you can see that these are the same room, same styler rooms, have double room or single room and same amount of time and everything else. And the prices, you know, 10 to 20% different in some cases. And that is merely based on the site you booked from. So don’t always feel like you have to be tied to one particular site or the other. That’s why I like using a site like again, like Trivago is hte one I used these searches on. That’s good because it gives you the choice of where you want to book through. One of the other recommendations I do have is to always create an account on those booking sites. Often will provide even deeper discounts if you are a registered member on the site. I think a lot of times people just kind of browse and they look at prices and they’re like, ohh, you know, that’s not what I’m looking for, that’s too expensive. But then you create an account and then you do the same search and you find that the prices are five, 10-15% cheaper. Which may not sound like a lot on a per night basis if the prices are already pretty affordable, but over time it definitely adds up. It gets to a point where it can be hundreds of dollars per week in the difference or thousand in the month if you want to look at it that way. So that’s something to keep in mind. When you’re doing these searches and stuff is that, you know, just create an account. You have a Google account. Most of them just let you sign in with Google, which is great. And then you can kind of continue the research from there. Also, I’m going to give you some examples of some prices I paid. Prices can fluctuate quite a lot in certain areas of the world depending on the season and how busy it might be and those types of things. I’ve seen price swings, you know, double from month to month depending on where you are and when you’re going there. So you know, you don’t always have to travel during high season. It’s always good if you’re looking to try.. I mean, if you’re traveling full time, it doesn’t matter. You’re traveling anyway. So you’re passing through places when you pass through them. But you know, like a lot of places may have a high season and a low season. Like I’m here in Costa Rica right now in what’s called low season, and it’s beautiful. You know, yes, it rains a bit more and stuff like that, but it is, you know, the weather’s amazing, so it doesn’t really matter. Come when best suits you, not when you think the weather is going to be the best because you just don’t know. To answer one of the questions I always got, by the way, before I forget, people asked me, Ohh, well, where were you staying for $15 a night when you shot your birthday video? And the truth of that is I was in Playa del Carmen in Mexico. I flew back up there to spend some days for my birthday, and I found a really great place there that was great. It had a little kitchenette, it had a bathroom, very comfortable bed, great AC, great Wi-Fi. It was about 3 blocks to the beach right in the downtown area and it was $15.00 US per night. I can put it on the screen here. I’ll give you the name of the place and but it was awesome. And I mean, that’s just one example. You know, I’ve stayed in places. I stayed in a place in Guatemala around Lake Atitlan, which is, you know, the most popular place in all of Guatemala to visit. And it was $9 a night US. Was it the fanciest place in the world? Absolutely not. Did it have comfortable bed, and a good shower and some great Wi-Fi and, you know, a private space, with a private bathroom? Yes. So I think that one of the lessons that I’ve really learned over this time while traveling is just how atrociously expensive places are in the US and Canada, and I assume Europe and some other places as well. But speaking from personal experience, the prices in the US and Canada are eye watering and I don’t even understand how they are getting those prices for places, it boggles my mind. You know, I’m from Nova Scotia and my family lives in Cape Breton and even there in Sydney, you’re seeing hotel rooms for $200 and $300 a night and I don’t understand that at all. I just… are they fancier brand name, corporate hotels? Sure, a lot of them are, but not all of them and you know, even the cheaper places that I’ve seen, are $150+ and then you get into issues of safety and concerns like… I’ve had no problems everywhere that I’ve stayed. You know, I haven’t had to use a safe or an extra padlock on the door or any of that kind of stuff at all. Everywhere I’ve been has been very safe. But then, you know, last year during Christmas, I flew home to see my family and I stayed for a couple of days in Halifax where I used to live and to meet up with some friends. And we went bowling and had a great time. And my good friend had his room broken into the one night we stayed there. So like, it’s just to me, it just seems crazy that places are not only getting 10/20/40 times the price in the US and Canada, but then you know you’re also not getting great spots to begin with. One of my worst experiences so far, well, my two worst experiences were both in the United States last year. When I was in Chicago I stayed at a place that, you know, had shared rooms because Chicago was very expensive. You know, there were places of hotels that were upwards of $300-$400.00 a night in the downtown area. So I found a place on booking that was I think $40? I’ll put the price on the screen here, but I think it was like $40 US per night. And that was for a shared bed with shared accommodations like shared bathroom, the whole bit. The room had six beds in it and it was a terrible place. It was sort of down in the southern part of Chicago. And you know, the people that were running it, just the place was a mess. It was, it was horrible. And then my other bad experience was, um. When I went to Yosemite National Park in California and again, very expensive part of the world because of all the tourism. And so I found a place in a town called Twain Harte and it was, it was like those places you see in horror movies, to be honest. Everything was dirty. Everything was kind of covered in like mold and windows were broken and it just didn’t feel like a great spot. You know, I ended up moving rooms once and then they charged me more money to move the room because the first room was so bad. So, you know, those types of things are not great experiences. And again, I was paying, I think that place I paid $100 a night and that was the cheapest place around. So it’s giving me a lot of reflection on the cost of places to stay, especially like once they got to mainland Mexico and then, you know, pretty well all the rest of the way South. You know, I haven’t spent, I don’t think I’ve spent more than $30 on a place with few exceptions. El Zonte I paid more because I wanted a nice place to relax. You know, it was a little bit fancier and all that kind of stuff. You got to treat yourself once in a while, right? As they used to say on Parks and Recreation, treat yourself. And so, you know, every once in a while I would do that. And that’s fine. But the average was $20 a night. You know, and my entire time in Guatemala, I don’t think I paid more than $20 a night. If I did, I’ll put it on the screen. So I guess what I’m trying to say with all of this rambling that I’ve been talking about now for the last 15 minutes is that it is very feasible and very easy to find places that are very affordable and will work within a budget that you set to travel. And this is all again the point of me staying in private rooms for 98% of the time. I have stayed in like sort of shared hostel style accommodations now I think three times my entire trip, and that’s mostly because I like to try and have a quiet spot. Get some work done. I have found it’s very difficult to get work done in sort of shared hostel environments. So yeah, for the most part this has been private rooms, private bathrooms, sometimes with kitchens, sometimes it’s shared kitchens, which is fine. But overall it’s been a real eye opener to see just how expensive things are. In, you know, in US and Canada, and like I said, I assume obviously in other parts of Europe and things too, where I’ve heard some horror stories about some crazy prices. So my final point I’ll mention here now is just a reminder that WhatsApp can be a real key to saving a lot of money when you’re traveling. I have used it, like I said earlier, to save anywhere from 10, to upwards of 40% in certain cases. It’s been remarkable in, you know, it’s also a great way to talk to owners if you have issues or if you want to get more information about a place, if you want to talk to somebody about, you know, restaurants. Local guides, that kind of thing. You know, people aren’t around necessarily. A lot of places self self check in these days. They’re still reachable on WhatsApp and usually very helpful when you do talk to them. So those are awesome things to consider and um, I hope that this kind of information is useful to people and answer some questions so that people can finally say, oh, I don’t understand how you’re finding places for 10 or $15 a night or $20 a night. Well, again, it wasn’t rocket science. It was just a process of figuring out the types of sites to use and some of the tricks that I figured out along the way. And so now I’m providing this to you again here on this video. You know, again, I don’t have any affiliates or any referrals or any of that kind of stuff set up, so this is just my own personal opinions, but I think it’s a great way to travel. It’s a great way to save some money and extend your trip for as long as you want. So that’s it for this video. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you did find it useful to take away some of the information here. As I mentioned before, I have a section on my website set up with my own hotel information for the places that I’ve stayed. Continuing to build that list out as I go, and also releasing short reviews of all of the hotels that I’ve stayed at from the beginning of my trip on forward. If you did find it useful, leave a like or comment below just to let me know that you were here. I would really appreciate that. If this is your first time coming across my channel, feel free to subscribe. It doesn’t cost you anything and it’ll give you alerts when next videos are coming out and I’d really appreciate that. If you do want to support me further, there’s a few different ways you can do that. I have some membership set up here on YouTube. I have three different tiers and the cheapest starts at just $3 Canadian per month. There are also one time donation links through PayPal and Bitcoin on the screen here and down in the description. So if you want to do that and then I also have merchandise available for sale through my own site at wanderbeard.com and also through here YouTube. They all they all go to the same place. So if you want to check some of that stuff out, that’d be really cool of you. And that’s it. Thank you so much, and as always. Life is Short. Wander. And I’ll see you in the next video.

Finding a great hotel deal isn’t just luck — it’s a strategy I’ve built after more than a year on the road. 🌎

In this video, I share exactly how I find amazing accommodation deals while traveling full-time — including the different websites and apps I use, how I negotiate locally, and why WhatsApp has become one of my most important travel tools.

I also share a few of my *nightmare stays* — because let’s face it, even with experience, not every night on the road goes smoothly.

If you’ve ever wondered how long-term travelers keep costs down and still find comfortable, safe, and affordable places to stay, this video breaks it all down.

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WanderBeard is the vagabond name of Ian Daye, former IT specialist for over 25 years who’s decided to go wander the world and share his adventures here. I’ve been traveling full-time across the Americas for over a year, sharing my experiences from diverse cultures, people, and histories along the way.