Let’s face it, when it comes to cheap travel, there’s what the 9-to-5, job-with-bennies or expense-account world considers cheap, and then there’s Singer Cheap.
When the office chatterbox is exclaiming over the five-star New York City hotel room she got for “only $300 a night,” the day-jobbing singer in the next cubicle is thinking, “I don’t care if it’s a 16-star hotel. For $300, I could get a room, a voice lesson, two coachings, and lunch!”
When you are paying for plane tickets, hotel accommodations, ground transportation, meals, warmup space, audition fees, coachings, and voice lessons on the road—not once, but several times a year—the numbers add up pretty quickly.
To further complicate matters, Singer Travel isn’t your typical budget tourist travel, because when singers travel, we’re usually doing it for business, not pleasure. We don’t have the flexibility of a vacationer or the expense account of the typical business traveler.
This lack of time and funds translates into a never-ending search for the quickest, cheapest, and most convenient travel you can arrange. The travel industry isn’t set up for Singer Travel, Singer Cheap. Follow these tips, however, and you’ll soon add yet another hat to your overpopulated Singer Hat Rack: in-house travel agent extraordinaire.
The first step in becoming a Singer Travel guru is to keep these maxims in mind:
• A bargain is only a bargain if it’s affordable.
• A bargain is affordable only when it fits your money budget and your time and energy budgets. In other words, it’s not worth it to wear yourself out on money-saving measures if you’re too tuckered out to sing well when you arrive at your destination.
Easily the two biggest travel expenses are airline tickets and lodging. The trick to finding reasonable rates for both is to know the markets you are traveling to and from.
Singer Cheap Flights
Identify the routes you most often travel, and which airlines have hubs in your region. Keep an eye on prices for your favorite trips, and soon you’ll learn what’s reasonable for different days of the week and different times of year. Next, register on airline and travel websites for e-mail notices about special fares on your favorite routes. Check your favorite airline sites frequently for travel specials and vacation packages, which may put airfare, hotel, and rental car together at an affordable price for you. Flights with multiple stops will usually be cheaper than nonstop flights.
High-season travel is always more expensive. Expect to pay more on holiday weekends, during special events, during summer, and, if your destination is a big city, between Thanksgiving and Christmas (prime shopping time, don’t you know).
Singers often need to be in the big cities, especially New York, for the big October through December audition season. If your situation allows it, consider subletting an apartment or room in the city during that time and temping between auditions and coachings. In the long run, it could be cheaper than flying back and forth several times—and you have the advantage of being in the center of the action, so if last-minute auditions come up, you’re on the spot.
If you do need to fly in, the further ahead you book, the more likely you are to get a cheaper flight. Try to book 14 to 21 days in advance when possible. You might also have luck if you book in the wee hours. Airlines often release a small number of super-cheap seats at around 3 a.m.
Midweek travel is usually cheaper than weekend travel. Typically, the cheapest days to fly are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday (though Saturday flights often fill up first). Red-eye (late night) and very early morning flights are also usually cheapest, and have the added bonus of being less likely to be delayed. (Delays are often caused by a chain reaction of planes being late for various reasons throughout the day.)
If you can be flexible about your flight date, you may be able to get cheaper flights or go standby. When you search for flights, check a few days before and after—but be sure to check any savings against what you’ll pay for an added night or two in a hotel.
Check out no-frills airlines such as Southwest, JetBlue, Air Tran, Frontier, Spirit, and various other regional airlines. Often they don’t serve the major airports, but you can get close enough to take the train the rest of the way.
Another way to save is to travel to and from nearby airports instead of the ones closest to you. For example, if you want to get to New York, it might be cheaper for you to fly a bargain airline to Baltimore/Washington International and take Amtrak to New York, which you can do for as little as $64 one way. (The train station is at the airport, with free shuttle service.)
Other accessible airports include Long Island MacArthur Airport, aka Islip (you can connect by shuttle to Long Island Railroad for a trip into Manhattan—about $9-12 depending on time of travel), or Philadelphia International Airport (as little as $45 one way to Penn Station on Amtrak from the 30th St. Station, which you can reach by local train or bus). Van services such as Super Shuttle (www.supershuttle.com) are available at many major airports, and metropolitan areas served by more than one airport will often have shuttle service from one to another. Check the airport website for the best information.
The tradeoff for traveling to a cheaper but more distant airport is, of course, more of your time and energy. Don’t underestimate how tiring and frustrating it can be to negotiate multiple connections in unfamiliar surroundings. Inexperienced travelers and those short on time or patience would do better to stick to the major airports.
If you’re willing to spend the time and perhaps fly into secondary airports, using multiple carriers is a great way to save money on flights. This is especially cost-efficient if you need a multiple city itinerary.
The easiest way to do this is to use a travel search engine, such as www.kayak.com. Kayak looks at all the travel sites and presents you with the options from each, and then you purchase directly from the site whose product you choose. When searching for flights, you can select an option to look at alternate airports. Kayak may present you with an itinerary using multiple carriers and airports. You can also do this with sites such as www.expedia.com, www.orbitz.com, and www.travelocity.com. Sites such as www.itasoftware.com and www.farecast.com allow you to search for the lowest fare within a month. Most of these sites offer an e-mail registry that delivers weekly news of specials and last-minute sales to your inbox.
Speaking of the Internet, you can also save money using “name your own price” websites such as www.priceline.com and www.hotwire.com. The trick, of course, is that you don’t get to see your itinerary or carrier until you’ve “won” the flight. You could find yourself arriving at 11 p.m. and leaving at 6 a.m. the next day if you’re not careful—so it’s best to use these services when you have a little flexibility in your schedule.
Another great site to know about for air travel is www.flyertalk.com, a bulletin board for frequent fliers with plenty of buzz about hot fares, destinations, and travel tricks. Before you select your seat, check out www.seatguru.com. Enter the type of equipment you’re flying on, and Seat Guru will show you a diagram of the plane and tell you which seats are most (and least) desirable, and why.
Enroll in frequent flier programs for any airline you happen to fly—it’s free, you can rack up the miles before you know it, and members are sometimes offered special fares or advance notice on sales.
If you travel a lot, or if you live in a small town or isolated region serviced by only one major airline, you might do better to look at the big picture. Consider loyalty to one airline that serves your favorite routes. Enroll in the airline’s frequent flier program and book all your flights via its site. (Some airlines, such as Continental, give you best fares and mileage bonuses for booking online.) Get a credit card that gives you miles on that airline and use it for all your travel expenses. (You usually get a nice mileage bonus for signing up, plus miles every time you use the card, and more miles through purchases at partners such as hotels and rental car places.)
As the miles rack up, so do your points towards Elite status—and Elite status is a beautiful thing. You may find yourself with such privileges as special, faster-moving security lines, early boarding privileges (no more jockeying for bin space or just missing the last available blanket), seating priority, free upgrades, a special members’ service desk, heavier luggage allowances, priority luggage handling, and bonus mileage for every trip. The privileges make flying much more comfortable, and as the miles rack up you can use reward travel for some of your trips. In the long run, you could find yourself traveling in much greater comfort while actually saving money.
Next month, we’ll explore how to find Singer Cheap (as well as Singer Friendly) hotels and ground transportation.
