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Have you ever as a child encountered those disappointing moments where your father or mother had to cancel some highly-expected trips because of financial reasoning? Or have you ever as an independent adult put off your own or family vacation due to lack of confidence in choosing the best of the best for every single aspect of your travel plan? If you answer yes to at least one of these questions, then this paper would definitely help you to understand the reason behind your parents’ action or maybe solve your own travel holdups problem in return. If you answer no to both of the questions above, then this paper would inspire you and take you to experience the sensational world of budget traveling. In this paper, there are going to be four major categories to be discussed and they are: the reason behind the travel cancellation for people in general, the definition of budget traveling, the benefit of budget traveling and last but not least, the ways and strategies of budget traveling.

Travel holdup that happens due to the product of financial considerations would probably the most common travel problem happening so frequently in our life. In “Luxury Travel on a Tight Budget: Global Travel and Vacation”, Chris Robertson (2007) states that many people when asked the reason why they lay back the idea of taking some time off for travel, unfortunately, would simply say, “It’s just a matter of time until I would’ve gathered enough money for my dream holiday.” Looking from this example, we could instantly perceive that money factor comes first on the list of the travel holdups reason. It is something undisputable that when having to face with financial dilemma, people would have the tendency to part themselves away from luxuries and other unnecessary expenditure including vacations.

Another motive, excluding money related factor, that would hold responsible for the push back on making such trips would be the weak mindset that these people have about traveling. People may see that working seems to be more justified than going away on holidays, as saving or making money is always encouraged rather than purchasing luxuries. These people, foolish in their minds, never actually thought about the real benefit of having holidays. The benefit of having a vacation would be apparent on its educational aspect to teach both adults and children by giving something much more vivid and perceptible for their minds to digest. In “The Family Vacation (Climate-Change Lessons Included), Eilene Zimmerman (2007) explains about the significance of vacations, including educational trips for children as they learn better from experience than just by reading textbooks and this works just the same for adults. People need a break from time to time to divert their already tired minds and bodies from all the daily business they confront each day and if they think of holidays as secondary necessities then they might as well forget the idea of having them at all because their foolish judgment has trapped them in a deep well without a rope to crawl out with.

Lastly, the reason on why people postpone their holiday plans would probably because they are just afraid to take the risk of having the image of their most well-charted travel agenda ruined; hence, stalling as much time as possible to try to achieve perfection, whereas in the real world, we all know that perfection is something unfeasible, relative to the mindset of the thinkers. My opinion is that there is no such thing as the faultless holiday; there are always the possibilities of something going wrong, even when it comes to the most expensive or most well planned itineraries, so it is just unjustified to think that the longer the wait, the better the result is going to be.

To prevent a further due in your travel, I would introduce budget traveling as the key to success for your vacation plan. Budget travel is defined as a tactful way to minimize the travel cost but still having all the chances in the world to relax and enjoy. “Six Budget Travel Secrets”(n.d., para.1) argues that “Budget travel is not just about finding ways to spend less. Their point is to have just as much fun while spending less”. Another point to clarify the meaning of budget traveling is also discussed by Steve Gillman (2007) in “Three Cheap Travel Ways”, as it argues that “Cheap travel means you get to go more often, go on longer trips or just save some of your money for other things. Fortunately, it doesn’t mean low-quality travel.” In our mundane world, the term “budget” is commonly misunderstood as inexpensive with inferior quality by people in general. When people hear the term “budget”, they would subconsciously demean the whole travel plans and would rather to put off the whole idea of taking vacation rather than to see the great benefits and journey awaits them. Hence, another main purpose of this paper besides informing people and discussing on how to become a smart traveler but also to change people’s negative perspective about budget traveling by elaborating on the benefits of budget traveling.

Budget travel serves the traveler community with double purposes; first, it does not only give people the satisfaction of cost reduction but also in term of something much more valuable than money. There are many possibilities to save some money through budget traveling, for example: staying in a motel rather than hotel would definitely put relieve in your financial dilemma such as: going to free tourist attractions, staying with your relatives or friends, and other things that could save you a penny would not hurt to try. Although, to budget travel means to carefully organize your travel itineraries, in every money-related aspects in the agenda, it gets so much more interesting and arbitrary when it comes to the journey itself. People are tired of going through sense of traveling that only works on the eye for that particular instant. They want something vivid, something that would leave deep impression in their hearts and this could be done by real interaction with the local people of the place they are visiting. According to Kurt Kutay, founder of Wild land Adventures in Seattle in the article “The Anti Beach Vacation”, “People want more meaningful travel experiences and they are finding them in interactions with people from different cultures” (cited in Christie, 2004, para. 2). In budget travel, it is strongly suggested to blend in with the local by going to local pubs, restaurants, or even local religious events since these experiences are something more valuable than the money that we spend for the air tickets of hotel rents. Hence, the hidden benefit of interacting and finding friends with the local people would be another brilliant way to be involved in the fun world of budget traveling.

Now that we know the great benefit of budget traveling, we are going to move on to the tricky, yet fun part of how people are going to go about to achieve maximum satisfaction in budget traveling. There are two ways to make cutbacks on the unnecessary extravagant travel expenses; first, people should take the benefits of fully exploration of a place for granted by staying in each new place for a while to get acquainted with the surrounding community. Steven Gillman (2007) in “Three Cheap Travel Trips” suggests through his real life experience that by exploring each new place long enough and not moving from hotel to hotel will benefit the travelers a lot for many reasons: they can enjoy the vacation more without being rushed by time, the cost of accommodation would be a lot of cheaper, and there is a big fat chance that they would find something interesting in that particular local area. Second, it is not atypical that people would spend the bigger proportion of their budget mostly for things like food, transportation, and accommodation, where actually they could have invested their money on other aspects such as to visit local public interest: bars, local food restaurants, local shows and etc. Gillman (2007) influences his reader/travelers to start acting smart and to become opportunistic travelers. The term “opportunistic” here would probably best defined as to be as alert and as informative as possible towards every alternatives in traveling aspects, especially those concerning about the money cost as they should be looking up for the one that cost the less. Being an opportunistic traveler means more than just getting the best price for food or gas in that area but it is also an effective way to help tourists to decide on what they prefer to see and know about their place of interests. According to another article by Gillman (2006), “Travel Tips”, there are many examples that smart travelers would do to get the best- priced accommodation while traveling abroad: firstly, “to find out where local visitors from within the country stay”, secondly, to bear in mind that almost all the room charges are negotiable, and finally to consider other cheaper alternatives such as hostels or motels. There are also some interesting travel tips that could be found in Gillman (2006), where it is suggested that people should not eat in tourist restaurants, but at the local diners, since in most cases tourist restaurants would have the tendency to be rather superficial and over- priced. Another tip that could be considered helpful in its nature would probably to look for free attractions and places of interest first followed by the common tourist destinations since there is a possibility that, after all the fun, there would not be enough time to do the expensive activities.

In the preceding text, there is a nice discussion on many ways to suppress the cost of accommodation but it would be an endless task to explain every single detail on how you can diminish your cost in every aspect of traveling, but as long as you can get the correct mindset and strong adventurous spirits, all these little details that you can do would become like a second nature and you would make your choices intuitively without having to waste a lot of time thinking what to eat, or where to go, or where to stay.

Budget traveling is something that could be applied from small to huge things; it is fun, it is adventurous, and it is certainly addictive. The world of budget traveling is a total “catch” for the modern travelers these days, where people could get enough interaction with the local culture of their destination places to actually learn and feel to become one of the locals. Looking from all the facts above, budget travel is a way of traveling that I would very much recommend to all of you as I would like to share one of my very own traveling experiences. Being an Indonesian, it would make Bali, the island of paradise as the perfect place for the my study site because it serves all the aspects as a top world destination with its negotiable perks, affordable airplane tickets (at least for me) and also last but not least, a great place to get sun tanning. The additional purpose of this research would probably to conclude whether money could buy the most successful vacation or not. The many trips I took to Bali would be accountable since I have been doing it since I was very young, but if there is one thing that never changed during all those trips would be the lavish, luxurious way I enjoyed them. Whenever I go to Bali, I would stay in five star hotels with their king-like catering and hospitality services, devouring on only the most famous restaurants in the whole island. I would have no complaints against how overly satisfied I was with all of these luxuries living but I have gotten so tired and bored with going through everything all over again every single time I set my foot on that place. In December 2006, I and a couple of my high school friends were planning to take a journey together to Bali and we were discussing about all the travel aspects that we need to solve for solutions, that would be mainly money-related problems, I read about an article of budget traveling in newspaper somewhere about this so called budget traveling, where travelers do not have to be fully loaded with cash but still having the opportunity to experience the same great satisfying journey. I shouted to them, “I knew it. We are going to plan nothing for our trips to Bali. It is all going to be done in budget traveling way”. Considering that it was a long holiday and we also thought we needed more time to actually explore the authenticity of Bali, we spent a couple weeks in Bali, staying in a cheap motel located in downtown area for a week, the key for successful shopping extravagant. From the very beginning we never set up arrangement with travel agencies, we decided that all the itineraries in our trip would be spontaneous and cheap. We explored every corner of the downtown area for four days, conversing with some of the locals, where as we got to know them better, would give about half-priced off, sometimes, free shell necklaces to put in as bonus. We would go to the local markets, where the locals bought their groceries and other necessities, tried their local food, including one delicacy that I would never forget in my life, that would be called, “babi guling” or suckling pig. The crunchiness of the pork skin mixed with the aroma of the spices would be a life time worth eating experience. If hypothetically I had not made that decision of going under the mercy of my tight budget, I would not have experienced all these random, breathtaking, and enticing understanding of Balinese culture. The money factor and the level of luxuriousness of place of interests would not really the biggest factor to determine the success of a trip, but it is the way it is being enjoyed.

Endless of saying, after personally undergoing some real life traveling experience under a tight budget situation, it would be ridiculous to disagree with the fact that budget traveling is one great undisputable solution for travel hold-ups due to that of financial factor. Budget travel seems to give the idea to a lot of people under good terms but the benefit of traveling on a tight budget would only work to the greater benefit of some people with the capabilities of sensing what the right decision to make and what is wrong to choose. People who are successful from budget traveling are usually the ones who are knowledgeable and daring enough to fix their own meal plans and etc. during their journey. They would be prepared of anything unexpected, including hunger or staying in unhygienic motels. In other words, people who want to do budget travel have to be fully informed about their place of destination and plan everything from beginning till the end with some precise measurement due to the budget-constraint. This final statement is not made to scare people away from doing budget traveling but only to give neutralization effect for those amateurs out there so they do not put exceedingly high expectations over their next budget traveling trips.

REFERENCESBudget travel: How to get the best deals on your vacation travel. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://budget-travel-tips.info/budget-travel-how-to-get-the-best-deals-on-your-vacation-travel/Christie, L. (December 2004). The anti beach vacation. CNN Money Online. Retrieved September 25, 2007.

Gillman, S. (2006). Travel Tips. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-20-2006-86845.aspGillman, S. (2007). Three cheap travel tips. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://www.buzzle.com/articles/three-cheap-travel-tips.htmlRoberson, C. (2007). Luxury travel on a tight budget: Global travel and vacations. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://ezinearticles.com/?Luxury-Travel-on-a-Tight-Budget:-Global-Travel-and-Vcations&id+459041&opt+printSix budget travel secrets. Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://budget-travel-tips.info/six-budget-travel-secrets/Zimmerman, E. ( March 4, 2007). The family vacation (Climate-change lessons included). The New York Times Online. Retrieved September 25, 2007.