How to Take an Inexpensive and Fun Road Trip

My husband and I recently took a 12-day road trip through the southeast USA without making any prior reservations!  We both have iPhones and decided to book hotels and decide on attractions along the way.  We had a wonderful time and loved the freedom of being able to change our plans if we loved a certain city.  I have compiled a list of tips that we used to make our trip awesome and still save a little money along the way.

From the beginning, we know that our trip would be expensive, so we tried to save money where we could without making the trip a drag or having to stay in seedy motels. I'll share my tips on how we saved money

Food
We saved money on food by bringing along a full-size ice chest on the trip.  We brought enough drinks to last us the entire trip and brought all of the components for sandwiches so that we could have sandwiches for lunch on the days we were driving all day.  On our 12-day trip, we ate sandwiches about 6 times.  We also brought other snacks with us to munch on throughout the trip.  To keep our food cold, we brought several ice packs and made sure to book hotels with refrigerators in them.  The ice chest also allowed us to take leftovers from our restaurant meals and eat those the following day for lunch if we wanted. Once we arrived in a city, we used our phones to find restaurants within our price range and with great reviews!  We used Google, Urbanspoon and Yelp for restaurant recommendations.

Attractions
Our main tool for finding great prices on attractions in the cites we were visiting was to use group coupon sites. This was the only part of the trip where we did some advance planning.  First, I subscribed to the coupons for the cities where I was are vacationing several weeks before the trip began. I watched everyday for deals that we could use on our vacation. Before we the trip, we bought two coupons: one coupon for a half-price zip line tour and one coupon for half-price tickets to a Shakespeare play.  We also found some of our attractions through the brochure racks in hotel lobbies where we stayed.  We made sure to pick up brochures when we checked in at each new city and used those to help us find events in case we found ourselves with some extra time.

Hotels
Hotels were a big chunk of our budget.  While on the trip, we used three different methods for booking hotels, all via our iPhones.  We booked two nights via priceline.com.  Using this site, you don't get to choose the hotel, so sometimes you end up with a crappy hotel or a seedy neighborhood.  We had one good experience and one bad experience with Priceline. Another drawback with Priceline is that you forfeit any hotel points that you might have received if you had booked directly with the hotel chain. We also used hotels.com to book one night on the trip.  I have used this site before and was once again pleased with the results.  We found cheap prices, a wide selection of hotels, and I was able to choose the exact hotel…no wishing and praying like with Priceline.  Our favorite way to book for this trip was to go directly through the hotel chain that we prefer.  We decided that Best Western would be the best choice since they are currently offering a summer promotion, have multiple hotels in every city where we vacationed and offer good rewards for continued hotels stays. We used bestwestern.com to book several of our hotel stays.  Toward the end of the trip, we wished that we would have booked all of our stays on this one site so that we could accumulate points for future vacations.

Gas
We didn't use one of those gas price sites on our trip because we were frequently in a hurry to arrive at our next destination and didn't want to spend extra time searching around town for cheap gas.  However, if you have several people in the car with smartphones, you can task one person with finding the cheapest gas on the route you are taking!  (Perhaps another person book hotels...and another for investigating attractions.  It might be a great way to get your teens involved on the road trip if they are carrying a web-enabled phone with them on the trip!)

Tracking Expenses
Finally, we brought along a laptop with us and kept a spreadsheet of all of our expenses.  We updated it in the car as we were driving.  The spreadsheet helped us to decide if we needed to cut back on our spending to make sure that we stayed within our overall budget for the trip.

If you have good tips for budget-friendly travel, please leave a comment below!