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Tips and Tricks to Save Time and Money While Traveling for Business
- Have a Bag Packed and Ready to Go at All Times
- Go to your local favorite retailer and look for a small travel bag. It should be durable, small enough to carry and yet big enough to hold all of your necessities. It should have a few changes of clothes, a few different pairs of shoes (if you don’t have many shoes, it’s worth it to go to Famous Footwear and get some purely to leave in the bag), your travel sized bathroom bag, etc. Packing and unpacking takes a lot of time so it’s easiest to have a bag ready to go!
- Have plenty of business cards and other promotional tools made up in advance and keep them in a side pocket of your travel bag. The last thing you need on a business trip is to run out of business cards or informational pamphlets.
- Book in Advance and Bundle to Save Money
- Check all of the most popular travel sites for deals on the regular and set up alerts for common destinations.
- If you use one of the discount sites, try and bundle your rental car, hotel, and flight all in one. By making a combo, you can usually save a good amount of money, and all your records are in one place easy to read/organize.
- Always look for long stay discounts.
- If you are staying for anytime longer than a few days, the chances are pretty good you can find a hotel with long term discounts. This especially important for trips that last a month or more. You’ll get a more comfortable space for the same or lower price.
- Look for Rewards Programs
- If you are traveling all the time, then you probably have a favorite branch of hotels, a favorite airline, favorite car rental company, etc. Look for rewards programs at these places to see what kind of potential benefits you can reap. Also, it’s usually worth it to get a special travel credit card that will give double points, or no fees, etc. There are numerous options for rewards and royalties, you just have to find them!
- Keep Detailed Records of Expenses
- If you are traveling for work then they should or will be paying for a large part of your trip. Usually you get to keep your rewards, but be sure to save all your receipts and records so that you don’t get stuck paying anything that they would normally reimburse you for.
- TripAdvisor
- When you are traveling to a completely new place, do a little research before you leave home in order to see what restaurants are good to eat at, where to potentially avoid, what taxi rates are like, etc. TripAdvisor has a great chatroom and message board where you can either search for questions previously asked, or start a new thread specific to your needs. They also have A LOT of consumer reviews and testimonies already, so even if you don’t have questions you can still find some good info and possible write a review or two in return.
