Liese Travels: How I Book an Affordable Weekend Getaway?

How to book a budget weekend getaway in 5 minutes? Explaining how I do it without losing my mind.

I want to preface this with a couple of things that might apply to me, but not you or someone else you know.

The examples and experience I will be using are mostly from travelling around Europe as a European citizen. I will not be including places like Japan or the US simply because those destinations will never be in a “on a budget” folder for me, due to my location.

I also don’t mind travelling in off season, I actually believe off season is the best time to travel. Fewer crowds and everything is cheaper, isn’t that what dreams are made of?

And with that, let’s begin.

What you will need to plan a getaway in a couple of minutes: a website, another website, your credit card data and probably a pen and paper. At least, I like to compare totals on paper and decide what the best option is by having the numbers all together in front of me.

A weekend getaway isn’t a vacation you’ve dreamt about since you were five and have a whole bucket list of things to do while visiting. Trips like these take months of planning, saving money and booking a year in advance. What we will be talking about is more so, “I’m so tired of this routine, I need to get away from here for a bit.” It’s a change of scenery, a quick refresh and a chance to relax and see how other people live.

My preferred time for weekends away is 3 days. If you are lucky and your flights align, it could be a Friday-Sunday trip, which is easier to book off in your calendar at work or school. You get 2 half days and one full day to explore, two nights to sleep in a different bed and 2 mornings with a different tasting coffee.

It could also be a two or four day trips, but that needs to be heavily adjusted depending on the flights and transportation from the city centre to the airport.

So I will lead by example, and let’s say I wanted to book a getaway right now. I know it probably won’t be next week or in two weeks, but next month sounds great, some time to prepare and make adjustments in my work schedule.

Step 1. Open Skyscanner.

A great website that I always use to choose my next trip. The ones I’ve always dreamt about won’t be made through the selection of flights with the filter “cheapest.” Which is what we are going to select. Put your airport of departure, select destination “Explore everywhere”, select the month you are interested in (for me, right now in this example it’s February). Uncheck the “Add a hotel” button, because we will tackle it differently and let’s look at our options.

For me, someone who is located in Europe, the best options will always be Scandinavian countries. Currently, I'm looking at the offers of 30 euro flights to Norway, 31 euro flights to Sweden and even 34 euro flights to the United Kingdom.

Step 2. Choose your fighter.

Not a very successful Mortal Kombat reference, but we move on. For example, I’m giving myself a budget for flights to be 50 euros. You think - Austria also fits, great! No, I do want to choose my seat on the plane. I am a big lover of Scandinavian countries, which is why I’m planning on visiting Sweden for the third time this year, so let’s use it in our example today.

You are presented with various choices, and I’m very grateful to it for showing me if the flight is direct or not without having to open the tab. The choice is obvious, we are going back to Stockholm.

And now you are presented with a price calendar, in a mobile app, which offers you the cheapest trips for the number of days you prefer. I love that feature more than the price calendar, but both are really useful, especially when you have specific dates in mind.

On the left are departures, on the right are returns. February 13th looks the best to me, so I’m going to choose that flight, with the day of my return - February 15th.

Now, we will be faced with the choice of airline and flights. You might think that Norwegian’s offer is much better than Ryanair’s, which isn’t entirely false but also isn’t entirely true. Let's see.

Norwegian is offering better flight times, you get more time in the city, you arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, which is close to perfection for 3 day travel. I agree with that, no doubt.

But then you select the Norwegian flights, and once you are on their website and booking those exact flights, the price doesn’t look entirely the same.

What happened, you ask? Some scammers, some hidden fees, you know, the usual?

Prices that you see on the calendar will rarely be accurate, especially with airlines like Norwegian. Third-party ticket sellers are offering great “cheaper” deals, which brings the shown amount down by approximately 10 euros, sometimes more, sometimes less. It’s 16 euros, which isn’t the absolute end of the world, but at the same time, that is how much a Ryanair ticket costs, so why pay for 3? Considering Norwegian has almost the same policy, only one small bag is included. Don’t get me started on their prices for seat selections. 48 euros will turn into at least 78, if not 88, if you want to make sure you sit by the window. Yes, their seats recline, but for a 55-minute flight, that’s not the most important feature.

Let’s take a look at what we get by choosing those flights on Ryanair. Only one euro difference, not bad. Alongside their seat selection being twice as cheap.

By showing this, I’m not trying to tell you to boycott Norwegian and always fly Ryanair, no, absolutely not. Just sometimes you need to be aware of things not being as they seem. With some, you need to account for more money or choose a different flight time. 16 euros isn’t that much to switch airlines and make a big deal out of it, but as we are creating a budget getaway, you want to spend as little as possible. Especially considering that the decision to get away was probably last-minute, and funds are limited.

So that is flights taken care of. If you don’t add seat selection and priority, you will be left with this exact sum - 35.08 euros, which I’ll allow myself to round up to 35 for the simplicity of mentioning it further.

Why not take priority? Why not choose a seat? You can add anything you want and anything you can and want to afford. I always choose a seat, especially since I rarely travel alone, so I want to sit with the person I’m with, not on different ends of the plane. On Ryanair, you can choose seats starting from 6 euros, and that’s what I like about them.

Anyway, we’ve got our flights for 35 euros or 47 if we want to look out the window. Let’s decide on a hotel now.

Step 3. Find a hotel.

This is my main advice - use booking.com to look, not to book.

Treat it like Google for hotels; it does a great job putting them all in one place, but 80 euro price increases are not what we are looking for here. I don’t want to pay 280 euros for my hotel stay when I could’ve booked directly with the hotel and paid 200 for all of the same features.

Let’s take a look at the hotel I have stayed at before. I do recommend this chain to those looking for budget-friendly options (CityBox is an amazing and affordable choice in a lot of countries).

Junior Suite price on booking.com.

Don’t know about you, but I’d rather keep my 36 euros and spend them on food or souvenirs. This isn’t the most drastic difference, and obviously, booking takes commission and their fees for driving traffic to the hotel, so there will be a price difference, which isn’t surprising.

But it’s not 2 or even 5 euros, so it will be way more cost-efficient to just find the preferred hotel and book on their website. It can give you even more opportunities in the future, or the chance to join their member program (which I will always recommend doing!)

But for our budget-friendly getaway, we won’t be staying in a suite, even though no one is stopping you if that’s what you wish for. I will go for a more affordable room at the same hotel.

If I’m going alone, I can stay in the hotel that’s a step from the city centre for 1627 SEK (152 euros). Which keeps our total cost for flights and hotel under 200 euros (187 to be exact).

With flights and a hotel room booked, honestly, you could already exhale and end the booking journey here. Maybe you don’t even want to visit any museums and simply want to stroll the city streets with a coffee in hand? That’s a great way to relax, trust me, I’ve been there.

But obviously, 187 euros won’t be the final amount you will be spending. For Scandinavian countries, you need to add a minimum of 100 euros per day. But then again, the transfer from the airport to the city centre costs 6.99 with FlixBus, so add 14 to the total. If you want to simply walk around, add 50 euros for a coffee and a supermarket run for two days of food. That’s technically it. If you want to visit museums, look through the ticket prices beforehand and put away that money, another 20-30 euros. So in total, you could get away with 100 euros for the entire 3-day stay, fully depending on what you plan to do and how you will spend.

I’m a firm believer that visiting a supermarket in a foreign country is an attraction in itself, so instead of going to various restaurants and cafes, I inspect their supermarkets. Obviously, streetfood and cute little food places are a weakness of mine, and I will always spend too much money on food, but we live only once, you know?

In the end, it will always come down to where you are located and when you want to travel. The January-March period is the cheapest time to travel, at least through Europe. I started creating these trips for myself years ago, and it all started with Sweden, not Stockholm, but another wonderful city I love. I never even thought about potentially liking Sweden before visiting it, and now I can’t get enough of it and the entire Scandinavian region. I’ve been to Denmark, Norway and Sweden, while Finland is the last one waiting to be crossed off my map.

I am lucky to be in the situation I’m in, with my abilities and my preferences and my circumstances. Obviously, I’m not saying that you need to book these every month or even every year, but what was stopping me before was not knowing I could do this.

For me, travelling was always something like a “10-day trip to the beach that costs 3 thousand euros and involves all-inclusive”. Then I saw the opportunity to visit Sweden for even less than what I showed here, and I’ll be forever grateful I took it.

You might not think of the available destinations as interesting or breathtaking, but you can never know what you will discover for yourself there.

So, in conclusion, I’d want to say, try the destinations you haven’t thought about before. Try new ways you haven’t tried before. The world is full of things that you can't even imagine. Look at the cheapest flight around you and ask yourself if that is something you’d want to do. If not, then why not?

Surf through flights, hotel deals, and become a member in all hotels you think of booking with. Don’t overspend on booking websites, and for the love of God, don’t use AI trip planners, do not recommend.

And if you have any questions at all, I’m always open to discussing them and sharing some more information :)

Until the next time!

P.S - I have no idea why the pictures look the way that they do, but hopefully next time they won't be taken with a calculator!

Let’s look at their website and how much it would cost us to book directly with the hotel.

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