An ongoing discussion I’ve had with a like-minded travel buddy (who is likely to be a guest writer on TMT soon, stay tuned) has been around the philosophy of balance between saving money and maximizing your time while traveling.
Time versus money when traveling – which is more important?
On one hand, you may be traveling with a limited number of vacation days from work and feel like you really need to squeeze as much experience as you can into a finite chunk of time. On the other hand, traveling is expensive (especially when you’re not traveling alone) and you definitely want to save money wherever you’re able.
The back and forth between time and money when traveling boils down to a simple question:
What is the dollar value of an hour of vacation to you?
An extra hour on the ground, site seeing and experiencing everything you left home to see. Or, conversely an hour less sitting on a plane eating a prison meal with your seat kicked by Timmy with the clueless parents behind you.
My travel buddy and I arrived at different dollar amounts, which is totally ok. Depending on where you are lifestage-wise, your number could change. When you’re younger you’re likely more willing to sacrifice some time for a cheaper adventure, in effect having a lower dollar value of an hour. If you’re a recent empty nester, the opposite may be true.
While any personal argument for any figure is legitimate for any traveler, I will highlight my two-pronged argument as to why I believe time wins in the “time versus money when traveling” debate.
1: This could be the only time you visit this place.
Unless you travel multiple times a year or regularly for work, you likely won’t find yourself visiting the same overseas location twice. This is the clearest reason to be maximizing your time and splurging a bit to get the full experience.
Would you really want to spend your only visit to Paris eating packaged ramen every night at the hostel? (The answer obviously could be yes to this, but again this is my argument).
It’s great to be frugal and I’m as frugal as they come, but stripping cost out of a once-in-a-lifetime vacation has its limits. Don’t deprive yourself of joy on your trip to save a few bucks here and there. Excessive saving is something to think about at home, not on vacation.
2: Sometimes the simpler way is the more expensive way.
Hypothetically, which of these options would you choose: a flight from MSP to Paris with a five-hour delay in New York for $600, or a nonstop flight from MSP to Paris for $800? This type of scenario is the essence of what I’m proposing you think about.
If five hours of your time on vacation is worth more than $200 to you, you would select the nonstop option.
Let me further illustrate with a less-than-ideal situation my wife, Sunshine, and I ran into during a recent trip to Peru and the Galapagos Islands.
I consider myself a savvy trip planner (thus this blog) but before this trip, I had less experience but somehow more confidence in my abilities. This was the trip where I had customized an existing Groupon deal to save some money and was feeling pretty good about how much I was saving.
On top of the Groupon savings, I had elected to not have the associated travel company purchase flights on our behalf, since genius old me knew I could beat the price by searching for deals on my own. Spoiler alert: this was a humbling experience.
What I had done to save on flights was to book each leg of the trip’s itinerary separately. This effort was to save money. All in all, there were three round trip itineraries: Minneapolis to Lima round trip, Lima to Cusco round trip and Lima to Galapagos round trip. Thinking I could beat the system, I booked a round trip ticket from Minneapolis to Lima for Sunshine and myself. Then, I booked the Peruvian domestic and Peru/Galapagos flights separately on my own.
After weeks of research and tracking of these flight prices (which is yet another time cost to consider), I was pretty smug after booking these flights with this approach. I saved over $200, as compared the travel agency’s quoted price. I spend the next several weeks bragging to my wife and family about how much I saved. They didn’t care, but whatever.
Rain on our parade
Everything went well until our move from Cusco to Lima. We had just finished an amazing stop to Machu Picchu. We were excited to start the second half of our trip to the Galapagos Islands. However, we had traveled to Peru during the peak rainy season in March.
Cusco airport is small and mostly occupied by small, domestic airlines, with one of which I booked our flights. This airport has a policy of grounding flights when there is rain because of safety. The exception to this rule was Latam Airlines, which use larger planes. But, Latam is more expensive so we went with a small domestic airline. What we didn’t realize was that it rains every. Single. Day in the rainy season.
So, our flight from Cusco back to Lima was delayed five hours due to weather. Annoying and stressful, but no big deal.
However, upon arriving to Lima, we also had just missed our flights to the Galapagos. And here comes the near vacation-ruiner. Since I booked all these flights separately with different airlines, we were considered no-shows and had to rebuy our tickets. We bought the same seats on that flight, twice.
This was roughly $1,000 in total for the two tickets. So, I had spent all that time researching flights to save $200, in order to waste $1,000. Don’t have to be an MBA to recognize that this is a trash ROI.
On top of that, there was only one daily flight to Galapagos. So, we had to book a last-minute hotel in Lima and wait until the following day to leave. This would have happened regardless of my horrible planning approach, but it added to the misery of the day.
Wrapping Up
This was still one of our favorite vacations we’ve taken, but we could have done without this part!
All this drama is to say: think about how valuable time is when you’re on a vacation.
I would have been better served by letting the travel agency book my flights. The research would have been taken off my plate. Had the Cusco flight cancellation happened again, I wouldn’t have had to rebuy anything. We may have still lost the time, but not the money. It also would have been 100x less stressful.
After this humbling experience, I started seriously thinking about the question I posed at the beginning of this post. What is the dollar value of an hour of vacation to me?
The more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward the two-part argument above as to why time is more important than money, especially on vacation. It’s great to score an awesome deal; I created this blog to celebrate these skills and the rewards they bring.
But, it’s important not to forget why we travel. To relax, to experience a completely new place, to explore, etc.. Not simply to brag about savings realized in the process. Just something to think about as you plan your future trips.
I’d love to hear your stories and takes on the dollar value of your vacation hour! Which matters more in the time versus money while traveling debate? Feel free to reach out to me on the contact page.
And finally, I have to give a shoutout to Condor Travel. This company was our tour group in Cusco and was very helpful with our rain delay. The airport was very frustrating but several guides were willing to help us as much as they could. It didn’t pan out ideally, but I want to recognize their effort and kindness.
