NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
How to Budget for Trips: When to Book and How to Avoid Hidden Fees
Mon, 17 Mar 2025
Learn how to budget for travel, save on flights, and maximize credit card rewards for your next trip. How can you budget and save money for travel? How can you maximize credit card rewards and travel points to help lower trip costs? Hosts Meghan Coyle and Sally French discuss budgeting strategies and travel rewards to help you plan smarter for your trips. They begin by sharing new data that might impact your budget for spring break travel, give some highlights of new airport lounges that opened in Las Vegas and Philadelphia, and discuss a change coming to the Uber app that could affect you if you’re traveling abroad. Then, they dig into some options for setting a travel budget, with tips on estimating costs using Google Flights, creating a dedicated travel savings fund, and planning ahead for rising airfare prices. Meghan and Sally also explore some of the ways you can leverage credit card perks and travel rewards to stretch your budget even further. Resources discussed in this episode: LAS Centurion Lounge Review Capital One Lounge Las Vegas: Hits the Jackpot with Food and Drinks What Credit Cards Can Get Me Into Chase Lounges, And Where Are They Located? Best No Foreign Transaction Fee Credit Cards The Best Days to Book a Flight and When to Fly Best High-Yield Savings Accounts The Best Travel Credit Card Welcome Bonus Offers Right Now In their conversation, the Nerds discuss: travel budget, how to save money for travel, best travel credit cards, travel points and miles, airline rewards, Google Flights price alerts, budgeting for flights, cheap flights, best time to book flights, credit card travel perks, Southwest Companion Pass, travel savings account, airfare inflation, high-yield savings for travel, vacation budget, flexible travel dates, how to maximize travel rewards, best hotel rewards programs, credit card sign-up bonuses, when to use travel points, credit cards with no foreign transaction fees, airline lounge access, how to get cheap last-minute flights, and unexpected travel expenses.
Chapter 1: What is the introduction to this special travel episode?
Hey, Smart Money listeners, Sean Piles here. My co-host Elizabeth Aola and I are both traveling this week, so we thought it would be appropriate to share some travel tips with you. Only, we won't be the ones sharing them. Instead, we're going to share an episode from NerdWallet's brand new podcast, Smart Travel.
Longtime Smart Money listeners will recognize the hosts, travel nerds Megan Coyle and Sally French, from previous episodes of our show. And in this episode of Smart Travel, they cover new travel data that could impact your budget, highlight some fresh airport lounges, and break down how to save on flights and maximize credit card rewards.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy this special presentation of Smart Travel. And don't worry, we'll be back with a brand new episode of Smart Money in your feed on Thursday. No connections or layovers required. Enjoy.
Sally, it was so good to see you over the weekend. This is why I love Find My Friends.
Okay, I'm glad you said that you love Find My Friends because when I saw you on Find My Friends at Disneyland and I happened to be in Orange County this weekend, I was like, do I hit you up? Should I tell you that I'm here? Should we meet up?
Yes, of course. Always. I love when our little bubbles just like end up in the same place. Like this is why I love travel.
And of course, you live so far away from me, but it is fate that we both happen to be at Disneyland at the same time. Of course, listeners know that we love Disney, so maybe it's not completely surprising.
And we did it the budget-friendly way. We met up in the free zone at a Disney hotel. Do you want to tell people how much you spent on our little meetup? Yes, that's right.
I was just at Downtown Disney for a little bit of time, so I got to see you for just the low cost of $10 parking, which gets you four hours. We were able to go hang out at the Grand Californian Hotel Lobby, which we love, and And I ended up getting to go walk around and see all the shops. But most importantly, I got to see you.
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Chapter 2: How can you enjoy Disney on a budget?
Yes, and this is usually just a few clicks. Typically, something in your payroll system will make this pretty easy.
Yeah, and if you don't have like an online system, just ask your HR team. They can definitely get this done for you.
Sometimes you have this funky payroll system. It's done in a way that you can't actually split your direct deposits. Of course, you can always just set up an automatic transfer from your bank account to shift some of that income into a separate actual vacation fund bank account.
Either way, just automate it so you don't have to think about it. For example, if you have a travel credit card, you could set up auto pay so that you could pay off that credit card directly from your travel account. It just makes it so much easier to budget correctly when you're not moving money around all the time.
AutoPay definitely is a great tip. NerdWallet generally does recommend getting AutoPay set up, and we will talk more about why we recommend that, why we also recommend using travel credit cards in a later episode.
Generally speaking, though, if you are not able to pay off your travel credit card in full every month, it might be something to avoid just because any sort of late fees or interest on your credit card won't be worth the level of rewards you're actually getting. We will dive into that later, though.
Exactly. These travel rewards are only valuable if you can pay off your credit card every month. But again, we'll talk about it more in another episode.
Look forward to that. So we did kind of allude to this earlier, but in terms of actually estimating the cost of your flight, how accurate do you feel like you usually get?
I think I'm pretty close. I am actually terrified of overspending. So I remember in college, like I had worked in high school and I'd worked two jobs all the way through college, but it was so expensive to pay for all those textbooks and the food and the flights home. It was just like scary to see all of your savings dwindle.
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Chapter 3: What are the latest travel trends and data for spring break?
Yes. Okay. Well, so here's the real part where people start throwing tomatoes at me. My real hot take is that if you don't have to get up and go to the bathroom at least once during a flight, unless it's like a 45-minute flight, you are not hydrated enough. Oh gosh, you are literally that person. Okay, I cannot say you've convinced me. Let's just wrap this thing up. Okay, okay.
TLDR is that first off, use tools like Google Flights to get a rough estimate of your travel costs. Make a separate travel fund to budget for your trips. This can make it easier to stay on track. And of course, always leave wiggle room for those unexpected expenses. And of course, you do not necessarily need to pay cash.
There are a bunch of ways to save money using credit card benefits and travel rewards.
And since you've already set aside money for travel, you can put any extra into your next trip. And listeners, do you have any questions? Send them to us. Email us at travel at nerdwallet.com or, you know, for extra credit, email us a voice memo. You might even hear your voice on the show.
I want to know what you think about either my middle seat hot take or any other aspect of what we talked about by leaving a review or sending us an email with feedback for the show.
And if you're not already doing it, you can follow the show on your favorite podcast app, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and iHeart Radio to automatically download new episodes.
This episode was produced by Hilary Georgie and Tess Vigeland. Claire Sose helped with fact-checking and a big thank you to NerdWild's editors for all their help.
And here's our brief disclaimer. We are not financial or investment advisors. This info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances.
Thanks for listening. We hope you're inspired to keep your passport full and your wallet even fuller. See you next episode.
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