One of the questions I get a lot if how we are able to travel so often. Both my husband and I have full time jobs with limited vacation days but travel 6-8 times a year. Here are tips on how to travel frequently with a full time job.
Use Paid Holiday’s To Your Advantage
If you are working in a FT position you most likely get at paid the 6 legal holiday’s. If you’re lucky you get more like MLK and President’s Day. As a great way to use less of those precious vacation days, I always try to include one holiday in our trips. Wait, isn’t traveling during holiday’s more expensive?
It can be but that’s typically only if you are leaving on a Friday after work and traveling back home on the Monday of the holiday for holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day. When we traveled to Cuba during Labor Day, we left the Friday morning before the holiday and came back on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, our tickets only cost us $200RT and for a 5 day vacation we only used 2 vacation days.
If you travel the week of Thanksgiving to a destination outside of the United States and you are one of the lucky people who get both Thanksgiving and the day after off you can go on a 7-8 day vacation and only use 3 vacation days. Depart Friday after work or Saturday morning and return Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving. Even so close to Thanksgiving today on October 17th I was able to find a $500RT non-stop flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Barcelona for 11/18-11/25. Use Skyscanner to search the cheapest place to travel to from your home airport during specific dates. They even have an app to make finding cheap flights easy, you can download it here.
Remember Vacations Don’t Have to Be Long
You don’t have to go somewhere extremely far or stay a really long time, especially when traveling closer to home. If you get Martin Luther King Jr., Presidents, Memorial, and/or Labor Day off those are four 3 day weekends. There are tons of cities you can explore in 3 days. We visited Bimini, Bahamas, Barbados, Grand Cayman and Chicago on 3 day weekends and had a great time. I’ve even done 48 hours in New Orleans, taking no days off and had a phenomenal time.
If 3 days isn’t long enough for you, you can take the Friday prior to or Tuesday after the holiday to have a 4 day weekend. If you get the standard two weeks vacation and you did that for all of those holidays you would have only used 4 days and still have 6 vacation days left to go on one longer vacation for the year. That’s 5 trips in one year and you still have other potential holidays like 4th of July, Columbus Day (why is this still a holiday?) Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and NYE to take advantage of!
Extend A Work Trip
Do you get to travel for work? If your job is already paying for you to fly somewhere during the week see if you are able to extend your return date to the weekend or fly in earlier. Most job are okay with this as long as switching the dates isn’t a significant cost difference in the plane ticket and you understand you will have to cover your own expenses during your extra days including hotel.
Volunteer for Extra Days Off
While this isn’t an option at every job I know it is at some. My company has a global volunteer day where every office we have does a service project on the same Saturday, if you volunteer you receive 1 extra day of PTO. I used the day I earned for our trip to Aruba so I could have the day before 4th of July off and make it a 4 day weekend.
Some companies also offer employees up to 8hrs of paid time off to volunteer for a project on their own time during normal business hours. Talk to your benefits department on the parameters of this and if your volunteer hours have to be in your home town. If not you may be able to incorporate a service day on your vacation and not have that day count against your vacation days. I’ve volunteered with Habitat for Humanity on vacation before and it was a great feeling to give back to city I was exploring.
Buy Extra Vacation Days
Some companies like American Express (jealous of my friends who work here) allow you to purchase extra vacation days. You decide on the amount of days you’d like and each pay check they will deduct a fixed amount to cover your extra week of vacation. Your job is basically creating a built in savings account for you to be able to take extra week off.
Work Remotely
I am not lucky enough to have this option but I have friends who do or can work remotely. A friend of mine recently visited and flew in early Thursday morning, she was able to work all day and then explore my city after work hours. Once Friday at 5PM hit we started our weekend and she didn’t have to be just getting on an airplane and losing precious weekend time. If you are traveling somewhere with a time difference use it to your advantage. Visiting Athens from the East Coast? Because of the 7 hour time difference when the work day is starting for you back home at 8 or 9AM it’s 3 or 4PM in Athens. You can wake up early local time and can explore a lot in the city before starting your work day in the late afternoon, early evening.
Breakdown of Our Vacation Days
My husband and I have different amounts of vacations days which means we don’t always go on every trip together. I get a total of 17 days, plus 9 paid holidays, 1 floating holiday, and if I participate in my companies volunteer day I get an extra vacation day for a total of 28 days per year to use for travel. My husband gets 13 days, 2 floating holidays, and 8 paid holidays for a total of 23 days per year to use for travel. Here is how we spent our days in 2017:
Thailand: February 3rd-12th- 8 day vacation taking 5 vacation days off of work (departed after work on the 3rd)
Copenhagen: May 24 -29th- 5 day vacation only taking 2 vacation days and using 1 paid holiday (departed after work on the 24th)
Aruba: July 1-4th- 4 day vacation, taking 1 vacation day and using 1 paid holiday
Amsterdam: August 6-13th- 7 day vacation taking 5 vacation days
Cuba: September 1-4th- 4 day vacation, taking 1 vacation day and using 1 paid holiday
Western Europe: November 4th-12th- 8 day vacation using 3 vacation days and 1 floating holiday and 1 extra day earned for volunteering.
In 2017 we were blessed to go on 6 vacations; we used 17 vacation days, 3 paid holidays, 1 floating holiday, and 1 extra day earned for volunteering.
Ah, goals! Great tips — definitely encouraging to see how doable it is to travel so often.
I would love to be able to do vacations with the family as often as you, but I can’t see how we could save for it. I get anxiety with any thought of paying for trips on credit card and only save and pay upfront for any trips. Do you have any suggestions thT would help increase our frequency of travel, budget wise?
Hi Tamara,
I definitely understand not wanting to pay for trips with your CC if you don’t have the cash to pay off your balance immediately. It took us a few years to learn how to budget so I won’t put on a front that it’s an overnight thing. The most important thing is to determine things you are willing to cut back on in your daily life. We cut the cord on cable and only have internet with Hulu and Netflix and that alone saves us $100/month. We used to eat out a lot and we started cooking 6 nights a week and bringing our lunch to work 90% of the time. If you buy coffee everyday maybe make it at home instead. Only you know what you can do without. Also we never pay “full price” for airfare- check out these posts on how we make our trips more affordable http://www.thetravelingchild.co/category/affording-travel/.
Monet
Great examples on maximizing vacation days. My job is way more flexible than my husband job.
Thank you Patrice! I get more days than my husband as well so I do go on some trips with the girls without him, I use it as mommy/daughter bonding especially since they are both daddy’s girls lol.
Thanks so much for sharing your family travels! We are a family of 5 and I finally decided this year I would stop using the excuse that’s it’s too expensive and figure out to do this. Your blog is so helpful! I do have one question, are either of your children school age? If so, how does that work? I understand taking vacation days but what about school days? If not, do you have an idea or plan of how your family travel will change or what you will do when they get older?
Hi Tyshia,
You are so welcome! So the girls are 1 and 3 so we don’t have to worry about school days but once we do I am going to be praying for more flight deals over the summer and during their breaks lol.
I am in a parent travel group on FB and that topic is brought up a lot. Some of the parents are ok woth their child missing a few days due to family vacations and have their child write a report after the trip as a project for being able to go. Some do it during holiday weeks like Thanksgiving because they say their kids already have off Thursday and Friday and Wednesday is a half day and they always see a decrease in the work required for that week anyway. Others are completely against missing school for trips and are willing to pay more to travel only when there kids are off school. About 30% home school so they make up the missed days on weekends.
Sorry I don’t have much experience in this as yet and not 100% sure what we will decide once we get there but I hope this helps a little bit.
Love these tips! We met your beautiful family on the waterfall/paddleboarding excursion in Manuel Antonio. I’m so glad I saw your website posted on Visit Costa Rica instagram. Your children are blessed to experience so many amazing locations at such a young age. Looking forward to reading more of your blog!
Brittany
Hi Brittany, I’m so happy you found my blog, such a small world! Thank you so much, we are very blessed and love exploring with them. Glad you enjoyed these tips.
Monet
I often get asked the same question as well. I utilize most of the suggestions you outlined. I love taking advantage of long weekends. Those just scream “VACAY”