I have a friend who tells me, regularly, that he’s jealous of my life. All the places, all the stamps. And I’ve told him, just as regularly, that he could fly out and stay in my spare room for nothing — the only real cost is the flight, call it eleven hundred dollars round trip. He won’t do it. He’d rather stay jealous.
Now, eleven hundred dollars is real money, and I’m not going to insult you by pretending it isn’t. But it’s money he has — money he’ll spend without much agonizing on the things he’s already comfortable with, a home project, a newer car, the familiar stuff. What gives him pause isn’t the number. It’s the unfamiliar sitting on the other end of it. And that, underneath all the “someday” and “I wish I could,” is the real thing standing between most people and the world. It isn’t the price. It’s the fear, wearing the price as a costume.
So let me try to take some of the fear apart, because the affordability half is genuinely on your side.
I could travel the expensive way. I almost never do.
I’ll be straight with you, because pretending otherwise would make this whole piece a lie: I’m comfortable enough these days. I could book the expensive version of any of this. But I started doing it long before I had money — Iceland at twenty-five on a shoestring, floors and hostels and whatever was cheapest — and I never stopped traveling that same way, because being open to the deal was never how broke people cope. It’s just how travel actually works. I’ve been to 64 countries and splurged exactly once. Sixty-three of them were cheap by choice, and that choice is available to almost anyone.
That’s the trick almost nobody uses. Most people pick the expensive answer first — a specific country, a specific week, a resort they saw on Instagram — and then act surprised when the world charges them for it. Flip it around. Be open to the destination and the whole thing gets cheap in a hurry.
What cheap actually looked like
My first trip to Europe was affordable for a boring reason: I met up with a friend who was already over there, and he had friends we could crash with. Lodging, which is usually the budget killer, was close to zero. Travel gets remarkably cheap the moment you’ve got a floor to sleep on and someone to point you around.
My second trip I did alone, and it was Iceland — a round-trip flight for $320 and four nights in a hostel, at twenty-five or twenty-six. I’ll be honest: I barely saw the country. I didn’t do the glaciers or the ring road or half the postcard things you’re supposed to. What I did instead was fall in with a rotating group of college students from all over Europe staying at the same hostel, and I spent most of those four days with them. That was the trip. Not the landscape I skipped — the education of sitting up late with a dozen twenty-somethings from countries I’d barely thought about, hearing how differently they saw nearly everything. You don’t get that two states over.
And if you want the ultimate open-to-anywhere hack, look at repositioning cruises. When a cruise line moves a ship between seasons — say, from the Caribbean over to the Mediterranean for the summer — it has to sail the thing across the ocean either way, so it sells that crossing cheap just to fill the rooms. About twelve years ago we took one from Miami to Barcelona: sixteen days, five of them at sea, with stops in the Azores, Portugal, southern Spain, and Gibraltar before we landed in Barcelona and stayed a few days of our own. Room and board the entire way, an ocean and a fistful of countries touched — and the single most expensive part of the whole trip was the one-way flight home.
Yes, a cruise is a shortcut on any one destination — you get the sample plate, a taste of each port rather than the marrow. But here’s the part people miss. A ship pulls its passengers from all over the world, and cruisers tend to be a social bunch, so if you actually get out among them you come away with the same thing that made that Iceland hostel stick: an education in people you’d never otherwise have met. You take the shortcut on the places and, strangely, the long way around on the humans. Several countries and a floating cross-section of the planet, bed and board included. Per dollar, almost nothing beats it.
The tool that ties all of this together is knowing how to look. I wrote a whole separate piece on how I use Google Flights to find this stuff — the short version is you pick a big airport within reach of home, leave the destination on anywhere, filter to nonstop and cheap, and then play with the calendar, a lot, because sliding your dates around is where half the bargains hide. Let the map do the deciding. Do that and the “I can’t afford it” story tends to fall apart in about ninety seconds.
Here’s the one move I’d most want you to steal from it: find the major airport nearest you and look at what flies nonstop out of it. A big hub is a firehose of routes and price wars, and the deals that fall out of one can be genuinely startling — I’ve seen Seattle to Taipei for $550 round trip, a trans-Pacific flight for less than some domestic tickets cost. And it isn’t only an international trick. Run the same nonstop search for flights inside the country and you’ll turn up weekends three time zones away for less than you’d guess. The hub near you is a launchpad. Most people never once check what actually leaves from it.
Even my one splurge was mostly my own fault
The Maldives is the exception, the one time I really spent — and there’s a lesson folded into how it happened. I knew going in it was expensive; I figured that was simply what the Maldives costs, and I paid it. What I didn’t realize until later was that I’d booked straight into Valentine’s week and Chinese New Year — which, if you don’t know, is one of the biggest travel periods in and around Asia. So I’d taken an already staggeringly expensive place and unknowingly stacked the two most inflated weeks of the year on top of it. The Maldives was always going to cost a fortune. I just managed to pay the very peak of the fortune, and didn’t understand why until it was long behind me.
I bring it up because it’s the honest asterisk on the 64. My one big spend was a place I overpaid for by not watching the calendar. Everything else — the other sixty-three — I did on the cheap, on purpose. If I can splurge exactly once in a couple of decades of near-constant travel, “it’s too expensive” is not the wall you think it is.
The part people won’t say out loud
Which brings us back to fear, and the shape it usually takes: I don’t speak the language.
I understand it, and I want to be straight with you about it rather than wave it off. In all my travels, I genuinely cannot think of a place where knowing only English left me truly stuck. Tourism infrastructure runs on English far more than people expect, kindness translates fine, and for everything else you now carry a phone that will translate a menu, a street sign, or a whole conversation in real time. That safety net simply did not exist a decade ago. The language barrier is the most real-sounding of the fears and, in practice, the one modern tech has most quietly dissolved.
You will feel out of your depth sometimes. That’s not the danger you’re imagining — it’s the entire point. Feeling slightly lost in a place you can’t read is the thing that rearranges you, and you come home a little larger than you left.
So, actually: go get your passport
Not for a trip you’ve picked. Just get it, so the door is open. Most of the people telling me they’re jealous don’t even have the book — the barrier isn’t a plane ticket, it’s a form they haven’t filled out. (If you’re weighing whether it’s even worth the bother, I made the case that a passport beats a REAL ID for most people — it does more, for less hassle, and it’s the one document that actually opens the world instead of just the airport.)
Then pick your hub, open the map, and let it show you somewhere real for the price of that couch or that transmission. Stay open to where. Crash on floors when you can, take the hostel, take the bargain sailing, watch the calendar so you don’t Maldives yourself. The version of travel that bankrupts you is the one where you decided the expensive answer before you started.
I’m going to keep doing this as long as I’m able to — that part I don’t take for granted anymore. But you don’t have to have seen 64 countries. You just have to see the next one. It’s closer, and cheaper, and less frightening than the story you’ve been told. Go find out for yourself.
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