How to Be a Frugal Traveler

If you’ve got time, you can take a cheap boat down the Amazon. If not, fly the same route, but scenes like this will be hard to see.Seth Kugel for The New York Times If you’ve got time, you can take a cheap boat down the Amazon. If not, fly the same route, but scenes like this will be hard to see.

The most common question I get from readers is, “How can I get your job?” while the most common question I field from friends is, “How can you stand your job?”

Readers imagine that traveling around the world, even on a shoestring, is pure joy, and friends (now mostly professionals in their 30s and 40s and used to a certain level of luxury, or at least a minimum thread count) think that youth hostels and 24-hour buses and cold water showers and 2:30 a.m. flights are a special form of torture.

No matter where your comfort zone lies, though, to be a successful frugal traveler you may have to shed your preconceived notions surrounding six areas. Once you do so, the rewards of seeing the world exceed the inconvenience of going without a plush terry-cloth robe.

Privacy

The degree to which you feel at ease around strangers from both strange and utterly normal lands is a major factor that determines your frugal journey. How willing are you to share a dorm room, say, with a helicopter pilot in training in Lafayette, La.? (I was, and wish we were still in touch.) Can you tolerate a thin-walled room in a guest house with a next door neighbor who coughs all night, as recently happened to me in London? No? O.K., then, settle into your hotel. But you’ll have to make up for it by traveling via bus rather than rental cars, or subway over taxi, or eating at the counter at a place like Guerrin in Buenos Aires, where that’ll get you 30 percent off on your slices compared to table service.

Lack of privacy can be intolerable, even for me, as when a young guy with a teeth-grinding issue moved into my hostel dorm room in Los Angeles. The sound from his bed was so piercingly rhythmically torturous it was as if a cricket was chirping inside my pillowcase.

Bathrooms

There are few more controversial topics in frugal traveling than what makes for a tolerable bathroom. And the variety out there is vast — outhouses, shared bathrooms, crumbling bathrooms, leaking bathrooms, leaking bathrooms with low water pressure, tiny bathrooms, cold-water-only-bathrooms, hot-water-only-in-the-shower-and-only-via-a-tangle-of-scary-looking-wires bathrooms. And then of course, that dividing line between those that provide soap and those that don’t.

Could you bear sharing a bathroom like the ones at my $14 a night hotel in Zacatecas, Mexico if it meant you were staying in a private room looking out on a pretty courtyard at youth hostel-prices?

Share a bathroom, and get this great room for $14 a night.Seth Kugel for The New York Times Share a bathroom, and get this great room for $14 a night.

If there’s a real cultural payoff, like a $4 a night homestay with a retired farmer and his wife the town cheesemaker in Mexico, would you put up with a brutally frigid shower and located easily within smelling distance of the pig sty? If traveling down the Amazon is your life-long dream, can you put up with a toilet and a shower in the same stall, used by dozens? For me, the answer to all of the above was yes.

But of course you’ll have to set your own standard. One thing that you should not have to ever compromise on to save a few dollars is basic cleanliness. I’ve turned down places with dirty shared bathrooms (or occasionally stayed in them, but only briefly. Curse ye, Ayres Porteños!) But even what amounted to a shared outhouse near the bungalows where my parents and I stayed in Nicaragua was scrubbed regularly and beyond reproach. (Except for the frogs that hung out in the stall.)

Time

Time really is money, and it helps if you have a great tolerance for money-saving, time-killing tasks, like waiting in line for discount theater tickets or building a day around a museum’s free nights or taking a two day boat trip instead of a one hour plane trip in the Amazon.

Flexibility in dates is also obviously key to keeping down airfares. (If I have just a weekend to see a place, I’ll give in and take a taxi.) And, of course, traveling in the off-season has helped me keep costs down

Restaurants

Your wallet can afford becoming a taco-tarian in Mexico. Can your stomach?Seth Kugel for The New York Times Your wallet can afford becoming a taco-tarian in Mexico. Can your stomach?

In our foodie and locavore obsessed culture, eating “where the natives eat” is just as important as seeing castles and climbing mountains and windsurfing. But travelers may not want to risk exposing their intestines to street food and hole-in-the-wall spots, especially in cities where government health inspectors are not all that active.

What can you stomach, both literally and figuratively? Becoming a taco-tarian for a week in Mexico can save you money, but only you can decide whether that means street-only or if it includes upscale interpretations of local cuisine, complete with luxuries like napkins and a sink to wash your hands. I advise everyone to err on the side of caution — look for the clean stalls, and the ones with long lines and lots of movement. I’d have lamb’s head soup for breakfast at a crowded market stall long before I’d have something as simple as French fries from a lonely street vendor.

Sleep

“You’re not normal,” my friend Adam said during our recent trip in the Amazon as we headed to a post-midnight, pre-Carnaval night party after sleeping maybe 10 good hours over the last four nights. It’s true. I don’t need that much sleep to enjoy myself the next day, which maybe explains my willingness to take overnight buses to save money on hotels, and not care too much about mattress quality or packing four days of activities into a weekend visit. If you’re someone who gets fussy without eight uninterrupted hours (i.e. Adam’s interpretation of “normal”), look elsewhere for savings.

Risk Tolerance

Are you willing to drink dirt-cheap chicha out of the same gourd as these characters?Seth Kugel for The New York Times Are you willing to drink dirt-cheap chicha out of the same gourd as these characters?

We all take risks at home from driving on highways to drinking milk a day past the expiration date. So the question is not whether you are a risk-taker but by how much you are willing to step it up while you’re on vacation?

Sometimes, entire destinations are pegged as too dangerous. I will never forget the woman I interviewed on the famous walkway along Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro who refused to stand still because she had heard if she did she could be mugged. Here’s an idea: if you believe a place is so dangerous, don’t visit it.

I can tell you the two groups whose travel advice should be scrutinized carefully: the State Department’s, which issues warnings and advisories that are often specific to a region within a country but are often misread to include the entire country, and local elites in some places, who can’t understand why anyone would ever want to set foot in a working-class area.

The best way to figure out if an area is dangerous is to research whether tourists have been targeted lately, and then figure out if you look like a tourist or can pass as local.  You’ll almost certainly want to avoid empty streets, especially at night — but be ready to make exceptions: rural areas don’t count! Women will want to be especially conscious and ask fellow women, rather than rely on a foolhardy male blogger.

It’s not always just the destination that poses a risk — it can seem unsafe to follow local custom. Like taking motorbike taxis with no helmets, or sharing a gourd of an odd fermented beverages with intoxicated but friendly men in Bolivian bars. My main rule is pretty simple: if tons of local people all do something some way, I’m usually willing to do it too, temporarily, while I’m traveling there. What? If everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would I do it too? Get back to me when everyone is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.

There’s one category that didn’t make the list of considerations for how to travel frugally: “Destination.” I’m happy to report that you can go nearly anywhere on a budget these days, as you’ll find out next week when I report on my $100 weekend in Paris. Sure, shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive and safaris in Madagascar may be out, but those are the exceptions. And isn’t that why we have Walmart and the zoo? But for everywhere else, it’s not really whether you can survive on a budget, but finding a way to do it that fits your style.