- What's up traders? Welcome back to Hong Kong. Once again, my favorite place in the world. I'm leaving today for Vietnam in a couple of hours.
I wanted to do this video quickly. To share with you some tips on how to travel. How to travel the world for cheap. I've been traveling for now two years and I wouldn't do it any other way. Especially if you are trading and making your own income. Experience the world, visit places.
So I wanted to share with you some tips. Because it doesn't have to be expensive at all. I'll have a bonus tip at the end, so make sure you stick to this video. I'll share with you exactly how to save thousands of dollars with flights and hotels and just being able to stay in cool places like this. So, look at this, this is amazing! First time in Hong Kong that I have a view that's worth it. On the harbor, 23rd floor, this is pretty cool and this hotel's been pretty cheap, so if you spend a lot of money on your hotel, you don't need to. You're wasting your money. I
f you spend a lot of money on your flights? Again, you're wasting your time and your money. So I wanna share with you some of my tips. These are the best thing ever, so let's jump right into it because I know these are gonna be very powerful. By the way, if you're wondering, I've been traveling to, so far, 22 countries in this world, and I plan to do a lot more in the future, of course. Is this a place you recommend? Comment below, I might have been there before. If not, I'll have a good place to go and visit. Send one of your thoughts below and let's get going with that video.
The first thing I wanna talk about and address are flights. Now there are different ways to book flights. I've found that most people overpay by far for their flights. They try to go online on different websites that they're familiar with, and things like Expedia, Travelbook and these places, and very rarely are you gonna have the best price for your flights on those sites. Now I've found two things, two websites I use all the time are Skyscanner, which is really good, can find the website where you can book for the cheapest price. And Google Flight, now Google Flights is really nice because you can kind of look at dates and you can find the cheapest day for your flight.
And that just saves you a lot of money. You can look at dates, you can look at even places that are the cheapest, so if you don't know where to fly, you just wanna fly to some place you like? Then look at the flight from one place to anywhere in the world, and you can see all the prices on the map. Which is really cool, so I really like that. That's usually the best way to find cheap flights. Now the only thing you've gotta think about is the fact that flight prices change based on the days you've booked.
So you might book your flight to fly out on like, a Tuesday, it's gonna be cheaper than the weekend. But the other thing is that you might book a flight, you book it on a Saturday to fly out on a Tuesday of the week after or whatever, and the price will vary based on the date. So you always wanna look at the flight prices for a couple of days before you book. You could book it on the spot if you want. I do this sometimes now because I don't care that much about saving $20.
But if you wanna kinda be sure to have a very cheap price then look a little bit at the other price first, book it a little bit in advance, and you'll be saving a lot of money over time this way. Guess that's an awesome tip! Now when it comes to hotels, here's also a place where some people were asking if I spent $200, $300 per night on hotels and the answer is no, never.
Because you could do this and stay in big chains and stuff but usually you will find that the smaller hotels. So by smaller, I mean hotels that are not big chains they're gonna be cheaper, you get a lot more value for your money, and you can stay in pretty cool places like this over here in Hong Kong. So, what I do is, I use a couple of different websites. My two favorite are Booking.com and Hotels.com. Now with Hotels.com, you tend to have a sometimes a good price, because they run promotions a lot. Also because of the fact that you get 10% back on your purchase, based on the fact that you book a hotel. After 10 stay you get one night free, which is pretty cool. So it's 10% off, now, you can decide.
Look at that and use that, or find a place where the cheapest price. You can simply sometimes Google the hotel for the days you want and it's gonna give you the prices by website. So if you really wanna save money, look at that and save money on that and pick a cheaper site to book your hotel. Because that's kind of a cool thing, very rarely have I found that hotels' website are the cheapest, usually they're not. So I mean, the site of the hotel is rarely cheapest. They're gonna try to give you more perhaps but you won't get the cheapest price with that site. You can really spend a lot of money uselessly that way. So be careful.
Now one thing I like to do is, I have this rule with myself of never, ever staying in a hotel on a site that's below eight out of 10. So people rank and give up their reviews. If it's below eight out of 10, I'm probably not gonna stay. That counts for Google, so it's gonna be a four out of five, Hotels.com is gonna be an eight out of 10, and Booking.com is gonna be also eight out of 10. Okay, so, you wanna look at that very closely because these site, they tend to overestimate the reviews. So if it's a seven out of 10, it's gonna be pretty crappy. If it's an eight, it's gonna be pretty alright. But below eight is really hard to get quality.
So what I do is I set the filter when I look for my hotels. So I'm gonna set the filter for at least eight out of 10 of the reviews, and then I'll just look and might even scroll by price, hide all the also's and stuff because I don't wanna stay there anymore. But I'll just kind of filter by price then. So I know, cheapest ones are gonna come first. Then I can just look at that, and I always has this kind of location in mind I wanna stay at. That we can kind of filter the bad ones. Only get the good ones, at a good price. So you filter by price if that's something you look at. Now, if you just want to spend a lot of money on your hotel, and stay at a big chain, that's fine too. We'll have a word for that a little bit later. It's going to be very useful. But in general cases, just go for the best price. You cannot afford to spend three or four thousand dollars per month on a hotel. Unless you really want to, and even then, it's only going to be $100 or $200 per night, okay. But especially if you travel in Asia. Very simple to spend less than 100. Even $80 per night, Canadian.
So, less than that in US, and get a pretty decent place. Even a four star, five star hotel, no problem, no worries. Okay, now of course I'm going to spend more if I am traveling to Hong Kong or straight up places like that. But, or the UK for sure, but even then you can look at other things. The other option, of course, is AirBnb. Which, of course, you can find some good places there. I kinda got a little bit tired of them. I still prefer hotels, I like the room service, the room cleaning and stuff, but you decide which you prefer and you go with that, you can experiment of course, go with different sites and stuff.
Now, the third point I want to talk about is food. Food is not that big of a deal. There's not much to talk about here. You can cook your own stuff if you want. Save money that way. You can buy stuff onsite maybe that way. But very rarely will you have to spend more than $30, $40 per day, especially in Asia. That's pretty simple. Now, here in Hong Kong, I've been spending a lot of money on food and different restaurants and stuff. But I tend to like these exceptions sometimes. And I don't like spending more for quality. So, depending on what criteria for have for yourself you won't need that much money, you can cook. Cooking is going to be very cheap, but other than that, just go out and grab food anywhere. Of course, local street foods can be cheaper, local restaurants could be street food or not. But, you decide what you prefer. You decide your standards and you decide what you like. It's about understanding yourself as well.
Because if you eat street food all the time and maybe you don't have that much energy, that's going to cost you more than what you save on the food. So think about the fact that if you get food for energy and I prefer to say that which by the time I spend food to get energy, I would much rather spend more on a healthy food than a non-healthy food. Because I don't get the energy I'll have I'll be able to use it to make back the money I spent. That's kind of what I think now. I didn't think that way before at all.
So, I started to travel and go through eating street food all the time, cheap stuff, all the time. It will be fine at first, but, you get that you want to change that, and not just spend money on food that's going to be cheap and instead look for quality on food, okay. So that's something you gotta think about for yourself. Just one thing, is please, don't fall for the toursity restaurants where they overcharge you for everything. Those are going to be on the main row sometimes. They have really bad food, and you can get sick very easily there. But, so please don't fall for those. Those are going to be the bad ones you want to avoid. If you go with local stuff or if you go a little bit outside of the touristy streets, you can find some really good spot for a fraction of the price.
Which is always better in my opinion. There is no point in eating bad food for a higher amount of money, no point, okay. These places you can recognize very easily. Places like The Fifth Avenue and Playa del Carmen, which is very touristy. You just go one street next and you'll find pretty good restaurants for cheaper. So, that's something to think about. These are going to be places like the Mexican Street in Bangkok and that's a pretty bad place for food.
Just go a little bit outside of those streets, like other side, and you're going to find some really cheap food. Places again like in Bali, there's this main Legend Street which is also very bad for food, just go outside a little bit. Once again very affordable and always better for the taste. So, that's it for food, nothing to talk about that much.
So, now we'll to talk about Transport. This is something where I got into so much trouble with taxi drivers in the past and transport and getting lost and getting to the right place at the right time. That I decided to give up first of all taxi, but give up the lack of direction which means I'm usually not always going to get the SIM card when I travel, except for some countries where it is easy to get Wi-Fi. But, I just want to go with the SIM card now. Kinda, can I have this in my cell phone be able to go anywhere, and of course, for this you need to have your phone unlocked, but that's not a problem for most people. However, if you want to not spend too much money on a SIM card, not spend money uselessly, then don't buy the SIM card at the airport, 'cause they are going to be a lot more expensive, and you get no better value, it's just a tourist trap that they have at the airports.
They sell you SIM card and you can go there and get SIM card but there's no point. So I prefer to always find a way to get to the airport to my place which is easy to find. You probably always have Wi-Fi anyway at the airport to get to Uber or Grab or taxi. That's not going to be too expensive. Then, from there you can find actual hotel staff or a place to buy a SIM card. They are going to tell you, you're going to save a lot of money this way, that's been really helpful for me. There's no point in doing the safe dump because the time you spend and the ways in trying to find the Wi-Fi, get the Uber or the taxi from somewhere, it's time completely wasted.
It's much better to be efficient, get less worried and just feel more peaceful overall. Which you do by getting the SIM card and not worrying about anything else after. Okay, so that's it for Transport. Try to get used, as well, to the local transportation. So, the bus, the subway and stuff, it will better in general because you will avoid the traffic. You have, will see the city better, and you can just get your place faster, in general, most places. Transport is really cheap outside of the US and big countries, so, you go to Asia and it's going to be always cheap. Even in Hong Kong, so, that's awesome.
Now, the last point I want to make. This is a bonus tip, and I've saved, as I said in the beginning, thousands of dollars with that, been able to stay in like pretty cool hotels, and get free flights, and that is by using credit cards wisely. Now, there are a lot of great cards. Now I just started doing this last year. So before I just paid for everything myself. I realized now and I learned that there are credit cards that work with points. And you can save a lot of money this way. So, look every credit card you sign up for in Canada or the US or some of your countries give you a bonus of points. So you start to open the account if you are approved you can spend the minimum requirement and they will give you points.
Now these points, you redeem for flights for hotels and they can pay very quickly for a return flight to anywhere you wanna go. Or a hotel for a couple of nights. I've been starting to use that for the past year. So I spent money for hotels in Mexico and Asia, flights in Australia as well that I didn't want to pay I didn't have enough points to pay for them, and that can save you a lot of money without spending more. Now the point with these credit cards is that you don't want to spend more just to get the points. Or do you won't want to spend more just to have the chance to pay for your flight. You want to spend what you spend now. Which I kinda spend a lot on the business on my travel anyway, by booking hotels. This is something that you can use to accumulate points.
These points are all, will pay for travel. Will pay for flights, will pay for anything else. So that's a cool trick. So, I for example have this credit card with SPG, which now became Marriott Bonvoy, which is a program by Marriott, as you guessed it. You get 50,000 points from the start. Now, that's something you can redeem for between two and five nights in a hotel, I believe. So, you can use them for more stuff, you can stay at bigger hotels or other hotels in the future. But if you're going to spend, you can save easily from the start just by opening the account. Spending the minimum requirement, which might be $3,000 in three months, so $1,000 per month. You can earn roughly around $500 to $600 just for that. That's pretty awesome, so, pretty good to have. I have a couple of cards, I think I might try to leave some links below and you guys are going to be having a referral link, if you sign up, you get more points for this cards. I am not sure how this is going to be available worldwide, because I have my cards in Canada. So if you are in Canada, you're pretty lucky.
You can use those links and get some pretty big bonuses for these cards when you sign up and you're approved. But if not, you can just go on the site and change for your country and get the card for your country. If you are in the US, you can have bigger bonuses sometimes, because that's how it works. But, in general you can just get these cards and start to save some points, and you'll be amazed by how fast they can accumulate the bonuses on these credit cards, and for me that's just been awesome. Without doing anything more, just spending what I'm already spending anyway, using these cards when I can use them. So, I tend to favor American Express because they give a lot of points and they are easy to get approved for. That means they won't be used anywhere in the world, sometimes, some countries don't accept American Express. Sometimes stores don't except them. But in general, especially if you spend online on Hotels.com or Booking.com you can almost always use your American Express cards.
That means you will save a lot of money, and it can make you a lot of points, and you can just redeem them after for anything, so that's pretty awesome. I have a gold card from them, I have an SPG card, the Marriott card, Marriott Bonvoy card now, as well as a cobalt card, which is just the first card I got. Which is just like a very cheap thing to have. Overall, that's pretty awesome.
Now, the other thing you have to think about is the fact that you are going to pay some membership fees for these cards at first. But this is money you will gain back. Of course, the first year if you get a bonus. So, if you get 50,000 points on your first year, and you have to spend $150 for that, it's worth it. It's like $500 you get back for $150 you spend. So, useful in that case. Now, I'll just put some links for you guys to check out to get the better bonus, that's it. My last tip for flights, hotels, food, transport and using credit cards.
Hope this was useful. Comments with your thoughts on this video. As always, I want to hear your thoughts down below for sure. Here are the comments on past videos. Appreciate you guys always for leaving the comments down below in the comment section. So I'll catch you back in Vietnam in the line tomorrow, ciao!