Your COVID-19 Bulletin

There’s no let-up on the queues at Manchester and Birmingham airports, unfortunately, which have now been struggling for weeks with a lack of staff and a swell of travellers.

Passengers have ended up in long lines trailing back into the airport car park, complaining of hours-long waits and continued missed flights.

Good Morning Britain’s travel expert Simon Calder has spoken out, advising fliers to ditch their hold luggage wherever possible to avoid any risk of missing their plane or losing their possessions at the other end.

All of this is gloomy stuff for UK travellers, so let’s at least celebrate the news that Laos has reopened after two long years.

November to April is the country’s dry season, so start planning your Christmas break now: Laos boasts gorgeous limestone mountains, awesomely sustainable eco-tourism initiatives, and it’s well worth your time for your next adventure.

Travelling When You Really Can't Afford To: Katy's Tips

Meet Katy - one of our amazing Flight Finders (you’ll have seen a lot of her cheap flights popping up in your inbox, and she’ll have saved a lot of you a lot of money).

In 2017, Katy set out to visit every country in the EU before the Brexit deadline. And even more impressively, she did it without breaking her bank.

Here’s how she did it, in her own words:

Katy, trying oysters on a boat trip near Cap D’Agde. She doesn’t recommend them.

In 2017, I set myself a mission: I was going to visit every EU country before Brexit.

I pulled up the Wikipedia list of member states and started listing the ones I’d already visited. Spain - loads of times, Sweden - check, Germany - lived there! Out of 27, I only had 13 left to go.

If I were into numbers, I’d have known that I had to visit a new country every 42 days to meet my target - easy-peasy, right?

The catch was I’d just gone freelance after moving home to Scotland from Germany. Cash wasn’t exactly flowing at the time!

So I came up with a few smart tricks - and learnt a few others the hard way - to help me save money on my travels. Starting with…

Start with the flights - and be flexible about when you go

Unsurprisingly, it was around that time, in October 2017, when I first became a JFC member! Then I just had to wait for those deals to slide into my inbox.

With weekend flights typically coming up more pricey than mid-week, it quickly became clear that looking for lots of little weekend trips to individual places wasn’t going to be the best use of my limited time and money.

Pricier countries like Finland seemed a bit challenging - that is, until my Finnish friend told me that the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia, only takes two hours.

That got me thinking. I knew there were no low-cost flights there from Scotland, so I decided to do it the other way around. A quiet Sunday afternoon exploring Helsinki’s markets rounded off a few days in Tallinn perfectly.

And thankfully, the ferry bar had Estonian prices!

Jack’s tips: Tallinn is an incredible city to visit in the wintertime - its old medieval town gets covered by snow and turns into a genuinely magical sight! Just remember that in December, you’ll get only about six hours of daylight, so you’ll want to act quick to get those dreamy photos.

Trick yourself into saving cash before you go.

My old flatmate introduced me to a multi-currency bank years ago, and I seriously haven’t looked back. In fact, it’s thanks to my Revolut account that I had a spare £20 lying around for a Ryanair flight to the south of France!

You can use them like any other bank account - pay for groceries using your card, make transfers, etc. But you can also set up different savings pots to round up your change and put it away after every transaction.

There are loads of similar banks on the market these days, so I suggest checking out their perks to see what works for you. Some offer discounts on hotels, cheap airport lounge access, cashback on transactions you make abroad, or even free travel insurance.

Other plus-sides of a borderless account include free currency exchange, no more foreign transaction fees, and easy-peasy daily budgeting. It’s all a little grown-up, but at least you’ll have extra cash for another ice cream by the beach each day.

Of course, there’s also the question of how to avoid paying for all those pesky extras on top of your £20 flight…

The carrier bag technique

I felt pretty conned when the budget airlines introduced a fee for taking two items of hand luggage on board. But then I learnt that if you buy something in the airport (looking at you, Boots Meal Deal), you are allowed to take it with you in its carrier bag.

Even on Ryanair.

I also found out that nobody checks what’s inside your airport carrier bag, so why not put the stuff you actually need in there?

Personally, I hate squeezing my handbag inside my rucksack. I like having my money and passport to hand, and I’d rather have that space for extra underwear!

So it’s a good thing my handbag fits nicely inside a Boots carrier bag once I’ve eaten the contents in the departure lounge...

Experience over expense

Even the best laid plans for a cheap trip can easily get derailed. Like the time my friend got pickpocketed as soon as we arrived in Barcelona!

We ended up with only €150 between us to last 4 days in Barcelona, but we decided we would do our best to make the most of the experience!

Each morning we went to the local supermarket and bought a fresh baguette, a packet of ham and a couple of pieces of fruit. We made up our packed lunches in the hostel kitchen, bought 50c beers from corner shops, and splurged only to visit the places we wanted to see most.

It’s an extreme example, but it taught me how nice it can be to just walk around and soak up the atmosphere for a few days instead of trying to see and do everything.

I didn’t know about free walking tours back then. Nowadays, you’ll find them in pretty much every major city - general city tours, historical tours, street art tours, pub crawls, you name it.

My favourite so far took us round the wooden houses of Old Vilnius before heading up the skyscrapers overlooking them.

We did miss out on one big thing that time in Barcelona, though - all the great food! So, we definitely could have done with knowing about The Fork back then, too.

It works like the sites I’d usually use for restaurant deals at home, except it has spots in cities all over the world. You can get as much as 40% off your meal just by reserving a table through the site.

It also gets serious brownie points from me for taking the fear out of trying to navigate that whole situation in a foreign language!

The end to Katy’s odyssey

In case you’re wondering whether I ever made it to every EU country by my deadline, I did. Slovenia was my last one on 15th March 2019, and it did not disappoint.

Jack’s tips: Lake Bled and its island church are one of Slovenia’s most visited spots (because just look at it) but there’s a lot to see besides. I’d recommend its three charming towns on the Adriatic coast - Piran, Koper, and Izola - which offer trendy Venetian vibes and cuisine without the associated price tag.

That’s just over three years ago now, and I recently joked that maybe I should try and do them all again in the next 3 years - but only visiting parts of each country that I’ve never been to before.

Maybe not, but I’ll certainly still be taking those cheap flights and adding in a cheeky neighbouring country wherever possible.

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this, it’s that a Boots meal deal is worth far more than the sum of what goes in your tummy. Oh, and that travelling is always worth it, even if you don’t have the money to splurge on a luxury resort.

If you have to eat a cheap supermarket baguette, you may as well do it in Spain.

A huge thank-you to Katy for sharing her story! Read more about her adventures - and her tips for cheap travel - on the JFC website.

Our Pick of the Clicks

All the important (or silly, or strange) travel news from across the web this week.

• The Guardian has some great tips for saving money abroad this summer, besides finding yourself an awesomely cheap flight (in short, watch out for currency conversion and your mobile data!).
• “What would happen if our holiday rated us? It’s an important question,” Prince Harry muses, as he launches a new eco-travel campaign in New Zealand.
• The Mail reports that EasyJet has been stripping seats out of their summer flights (removing the back row) so that they can operate with fewer cabin staff.
• Spare a sympathetic thought for the Virgin Atlantic co-pilot who was shoved into the cockpit of a New York flight last week before they’d completed their flying exams.
• One joker appears sadly to have used their Bluetooth powers for evil, by Airdropping photos of a crashing plane to their fellow passengers boarding a flight to Turkey.

Nifty New Zealand Discounts

We didn't see a huge number of reader recommendations for newly-reopened New Zealand (in fairness, most of you won't have been there in two years) but we did get one incredible set of tips from one amazing member who's been living out there during the pandemic:

• "Book Me is NZ-owned and offers up to 50% discounts on activities and some food options too. I've taken helicopter rides over Franz Josef for less than $120!"
• "Everything Queenstown is a local website set up in Queenstown that offers super cheap activities, sometimes the onsen pools are $50! (They've also extended their page to Everything New Zealand too but the main activities are down south.)"
• "For cheap food head to First Table; this site lets you book restaurants and get 50% off your meals (drinks not included). It costs $10 to pre-book through the website and if you write a good review you could receive a $50 voucher."
• "Grab A Seat is an Air New Zealand site that offers discounted flights and sometimes packages - this is where us locals head to find $49 flights!"

Awesome and very useful stuff! Thank you very much for the tips, reader.

Everyone in South Korea is about to become a year younger - although sadly, it’s not a trick that can be passed on to the rest of the world.

Thanks for reading!