Last Minute Travel Tips for Spontaneous Travellers – Tips from the Experts

You didn’t know it was high season and now you can’t find a hotel room. You arrived at the airport without a visa and they won’t let you board the plane. You didn’t realise only crisp dollar notes were accepted and credit cards aren’t used. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Other travellers make the same mistakes. Here are our last minute travel tips for spontaneous travellers so you don’t have to.

Forget about local travel, experiential travel and spontaneous travel, the fastest growing trend appears to be bad travel. There’s no doubt last minute travel is on the rise, particularly here in Southeast Asia where it’s never been easier to bounce over to Bangkok or pop up down to Phnom Penh. People are increasingly jetting off on the spur of the moment for a weekend away.

However, many spontaneous travellers are leaving it so late to go they’re allowing little or no time to make travel plans. It doesn’t need to take long to organise a short jaunt. As I write, my husband Terence is in Vietnam shooting a magazine story. Three days before Terence was due to leave, I created his 12-day itinerary, booked seven flights and five Vietnam hotels, organised his Vietnam visa, and arranged airport transfers.

It can be done. You can travel spontaneously. And increasingly there are new trip planning tools to help you do just that. I, for one, am intrigued about a new trip planning app called Hackglobe, which will sync your social bookmarks and likes on friends’ socials and influencer feeds across platforms to compile social media-inspired itineraries in minutes. How cool is that?!

Whether you use cool new tech tools or your spouse or partner to plan your trips, you just need to make sure you don’t skip some important things (like visas!) so you actually get into the country you’re heading to. To help you, we’ve compiled this list of last minute travel tips for spontaneous travellers. Terence and I have been travelling professionally for decades, so consider this advice from travel experts.

LAST MINUTE TRAVEL TIPS FOR SPONTANEOUS TRAVELLERS

These are our expert travel tips for spontaneous travellers who like to travel at the last minute.

Consider a Last Minute Holiday Package

Holiday packages don’t sound cool, do they? They don’t fit the perception of the spontaneous traveller rocking up to an airport, looking at the flight board and deciding where to go. Think packages and you probably think families and retirees. But holiday packages make planning short spontaneous trips a breeze.

When we lived in the Middle East we used to get lots of time off for annual leave, religious holidays, national holidays, and even days of mourning following the deaths of regional leaders. That last category meant lots of spur-of-the-moment long weekends.

Often not announced until the day before, we would wait for the promotional emails from the local travel agencies to arrive in our in box, get online to see what airlines and travel companies were offering special packages, or simply searched ‘last-minute holidays’.

Travel packages are popular because they can include flights, accommodation, transfers, and even short tours, so you don’t need to organise a thing, and many can be bought online. Some travel companies offer last minute holiday packages that include a ticket delivery service to the airport if you really leave things until the last minute. (And, yes, some countries still require you to travel with proper printed tickets; e-tickets aren’t always enough.)

Packages can sometimes work out to be the same price as an air ticket, so even if you don’t intend to do the tours, it can be worth getting a package for the flight, transfers and accommodation, even if you skip the Big Red Bus Tour. The only thing you might have to arrange is your visa, although these days many travel agencies can organise those. (See below).

Search for Last Minute Flight Deals and Promotional Fares

If you can’t bring yourself to book a holiday package, you could decide where to go based on special promotional fares. Scan the sites of airlines that depart from your city, sign up to flight booking sites and online travel agents to receive notifications of promotional fares and to watch fares and receive notifications when they drop.

We recommend booking flights with CheapOair and Kiwi.com. Two of our favourite airlines, from many years living in the UAE are Etihad and Emirates, as they flight absolutely everywhere. Along with flights, you can book transfers, hotels, apartments, holiday rentals, and car rentals on Agoda, Expedia, Wotif, lastminute.com, ebookers, or Trip.com.

Search for ‘last minute flights to x’ or ‘last minute flight deals to x’ to the destination you’re dreaming of going or contact your favourite travel agent to find out where the bargain flights are. When you find an offer that’s too good to be true, there’s usually a reason. Perhaps it’s low season and most of the place is shut down or it’s peak monsoon period when it rains every day.

When you find a flight which appeals, before you book, check the embassy site for that destination to see if you need a visa, how long it will take to process, and how much it will cost before clicking ‘purchase’.

Don’t get your heart set on any one destination before researching visas or you could be disappointed. (More on visas below).

Consider Flying with a Low Cost Airline

Budget airlines, no-frills carriers or peanut airlines, whatever you call them, are great. The media may like to call Millennials or Gen Y ‘generation last-minute’, but the baby-boomers and Gen X have been travelling spontaneously for decades, thanks to the advent of low-cost airlines in 1971 with Southwest Airlines in the USA – although no-frills airlines didn’t really take off around the world until the re-launch of Ryanair as a low-cost in the early 1990s and easyJet soon after.

When we lived in the Middle East we used low-cost carriers a lot during our two-month summer holidays. We would plan our arrival and departure cities and then I would check the budget airline sites for deals and just buy whatever looked good, leaving the rest to figure out later. With two months to play with, we could go anywhere.

Two of the best bargains were 99p tickets to Brussels from London and from Brussels to Venice. Those deals are harder to find these days of course, but I’m researching Myanmar at the moment and seeing absolute bargain flights for their low-cost carrier.

Find Out If You Need Visas

As soon as you’ve found a fantastic last minute package or great deal on a flight, check that country’s embassy website to find out if you need a visa. To the complete amazement of many travellers I meet, visas are required for many nationalities for a lot of countries.

Yet I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked someone who was about to travel if they had their visa and they looked at me dumbfounded, chin on their chest, astonished that they would need one. “But I’m American (or Australian, or British, or Canadian),” they’d say.

Because citizens of these lucky countries – unlike many of our friends from Asia, the Middle East and Africa – don’t need visas for a lot of countries, but they still need visas for many countries.

Some visas are easy to obtain. Many can be organised through travel agencies or online. The latter are usually called e-visas. However, some visas still have to be obtained the old-fashioned way – by physically going to an embassy, filling out an application form, handing over some passport photos, your passport, and some money, and returning a few days later to collect it.

Some visas can take a week or longer, others can be obtained in a few days. Some can be done within 24 hours if you pay a higher price. People are often astounded when I tell them they need a visa for Cambodia.

Fortunately Cambodian visas, like some visas are easy to get upon arrival at the airport or border – although people do need to know to bring two passport photos and the fee in US$ bills.

Check If You Need Vaccinations or Medications

If you need to get vaccinations for the destination you’re considering travelling to, then you probably won’t be getting there this trip and better save it for another break when you have much more time to plan, because some vaccinations have to be given six weeks before you leave.

When doing research, do use authoritative sources of information, however, such as the World Health Organisation site, because many are overly cautious and a lot of private specialist traveller medical clinics recommend shots because that’s how they make money.

I have met a lot of people here in Siem Reap who have had a handful of vaccinations and have been taking antimalarials on the recommendation of their doctor even though they’re not often necessary unless you’re visiting very remote places in Cambodia, and the same goes for much of Southeast Asia.

Having said that, it’s always a good idea to keep your routine childhood vaccinations up to date, including MMR (measles-mumps-rubella), diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, varicella (chicken pox) and polio.

If you’re an adventurous eater and like to sample street food, then Hepatitis A and typhoid shots are a good idea for countries like Cambodia, no matter where you’re going, as they can be transferred through contaminated food and water.

If your preferred souvenir is a tattoo or piercing then a Hepatitis B shot is probably a good idea too. Rabies is another shot worth getting if you’re going to be spending a lot of time in the countryside and villages or are prone to patting stray dogs.

Research Money and Currency

Money and currency is another factor to consider if you’re travelling at the last minute. Keep in mind there are some places that don’t have ATMs on every corner nor widely accept credit cards. Myanmar is one example, and when we went to Cuba many years ago it was the same.

So you may have to take cash and you may have to take a lot of it. However, you might also have to take cash in a specific currency that you might not be able to purchase in your home city or even at the airport, and if you’re flying in late on a Friday night when there might not be any money-changers open.

Again, do some quick research online before you buy those flights if you’re leaving very close to your departure date.

Book Hotels and Holiday Rentals Before You Go

I usually leave our hotel and holiday rental bookings until the last minute. I have also been known to book the day of travel or late the night before. But I always book accommodation in advance and will never leave it until we arrive in a place. However, I can’t tell you how many people still wing it when it comes to accommodation.

Day after day, from our apartment balcony, we see travellers dragging suitcases and lugging backpacks up our dusty street, going from one guesthouse to another, asking prices and looking at rooms. Young Asian hipsters in elephant pants and designer glasses, dreadlocked backpackers with one-litre water bottles and fake Lonely Planets in their hands, late middle-aged couples in khakis and Birkenstocks, they all do it, and I don’t get it.

These days, there are countless accommodation websites with loads of photos and more than enough reviews that they could be researching from the comfort of an air-conditioned café. Don’t waste time or exhaust yourself trudging along a dusty Siem Reap street in the searing heat.

Even if you’re travelling at the last minute, most accommodation sites will still allow you to book a hotel the night before, on the day of departure, or from the airport, so just do it. For booking hotels and other accommodation try Agoda, Expedia, Wotif, lastminute.com, ebookers, or Trip.com. You can also book flights, transfers, hotels, apartments, holiday rentals, and car rentals on some of those sites. We love PLUM for renting beautiful apartments and homes.

If you have to check out of your accommodation, have a late night flight and can’t store your bags, look into luggage storage, especially in big cities such as Barcelona, London, Paris and New York, so you can explore without carting your bags around. Radical Storage enables you to book luggage storage in cities and towns all over the world.

You’ll find the usual storage places, such as train stations and hotels on the site, as well as more ‘radical’ options that you probably wouldn’t have thought of, such as restaurants and shops, many of which are often close to or within major transport hubs, such as train and bus stations.

Don’t Go Anywhere Without Travel Insurance

Travel insurance is a must, even for a short last minute trip, and it can easily be bought with your air tickets for a little extra or bought online in a few steps from one of the many online travel insurance sites out there. We recommend buy SafetyWing.

See this post on why you need travel insurance. However, if you’re a last minute traveller then I’m guessing you’re not the kind of person who turns up to airports several hours before departure, but the possibility of missing a flight is one good reason!

Book Transfers, Local Transport and Tours

If your last-minute trip is a quick one, it’s also best to book airport transfers, rental cars and tours in advance, as well as buy tickets to museums and attractions on Get Your Guide and similar sites so that you’re not wasting precious time in your destination.

Fo buying train and bus tickets 12Go is great, and for buying train tickets RailEurope is excellent, while we love EatWith for booking cooking classes and meals with locals around the world.

Planning a trip? Also see our posts on how much planning you should do before you travel, when happiness is squinting up at the sun through palm trees, sunny escapes and reflections on ‘winter sun’, lessons on the road and educational travel, spiritual travel and transcendental travel experiences, global parcel forwarding service for global nomads, tips for how to decide which airline to fly, and why you should consider ferries when you travel.  

For more travel tips tune into our Local Travel Twitter Chat. Do you have any last minute travel tips? We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share them in the comments below.