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I just got back home from a trip to my new favorite country to visit. I am still pretty new to travel blogging and I honestly have no idea how people find the time to travel and blog at the same time. It doesn’t help that I am incredibly slow at making these posts but still I’ve got a lot of respect for full-time travel bloggers out there. I am however looking forward to continuing my traveling and keeping the blog and socials updated, but I’ve got a lot of learning to do along the way.

Anyways back to the point of this article. I wanted to show you all a full breakdown of my expenses for my twelve days in Japan. I am very passionate about helping people to see that traveling the world does not need to be as expensive as everyone makes it out to be. If you use the tricks and tips I use while traveling you can easily take trips for as cheap and probably even cheaper than I do. This Japan trip was not a strictly budget-oriented trip. I wasn’t pinching pennies all along the way. In fact, compared to how I used to travel when I was in my teens this was a pretty luxurious trip.

So enough of the preface. Let’s get started breaking down my Japan budget. Starting with the typically biggest expenses on a trip.

We stayed here at the Shiomi Prince Hotel for the first two nights we were in Tokyo and I really wish we booked more nights here. Absolutely gorgeous! And for the price, It’s absolutely a 5/5 experience.

Accommodations

I spent $483.68 on my accommodations for twelve days

For myself and I feel like most other people who like to take trips for weeks at a time, your accommodations are typically the biggest expenses on your trip. So if you can knock these prices down it can make a huge impact. But also, don’t go too cheap. I’ve stayed in broom closets before in Peru so I know that a proper place to sleep can have a big impact on how well your trip goes.

There are more ways than just these to save, but here are some of the ways I saved on accommodations on this specific trip

Invite friends
This will have the biggest impact of all on your accommodations budget. If you just invite one other friend to come with you and you split your stays, you’re already getting half priced rooms. Now invite a bunch of friends to stay in one place and your accommodations will be super cheap for all of you.
Use Credit Card Cash Back Offers
For two of the three places we ended up staying, I was able to find cashback offers through my Capital One Account. The first one was an offer for 5% back for Booking.com. The second was 6% back for Hotwire.com. If you’ve never used this feature, these offers can end up saving you a lot of money in the long run.

In my case, I just

Go to my Capital one account
Go to the bottom of the page
Click credits for shopping
Search for the website I’ll be using to book
Click continue to Merchant
And book my hotel like normal (Making sure I use my Capital One credit card to pay for the booking)
And then just wait a few weeks to get the credit on your statement

3. Sign Up For Loyalty Programs

I’ve said this before in previous articles and I’ll say it again. Loyalty programs are extremely helpful for saving money. Companies are just giving away some of their profit with the hopes you’ll keep using them every time you travel. And honestly, if they are good companies and I haven’t had issues with them, I’d keep using them every time I travel anyways. I might as well take the free money. I have a loyalty program with both Booking.com and Hotwire.com. I really love Booking.com’s tier system for their loyalty so the more you travel and use them the bigger discounts and more perks you’ll receive. Keep in mind I only had tier 1 on this trip so I was able to get 10% off my booking. That’s the starter level so if you sign up you’ll immediately get that same deal I did.

As you can tell. This travel hacking thing is very much about stacking rewards and offers on top of each other.

Here’s an example: Say a hotel room is $200 a night and you want to stay 4 nights. Instead of paying $800, use your loyalty program to save 10%, now we are down to $720. Then go ahead and use the cash-back perk from your credit card, say their promotion is another 10% rebate, and now you’re at $648. Then, invite 4 friends to join in on your trip. Finally, your now left with only needing to pay $162 for all 4 nights, and you have friends along which always makes for a fun time.

View through the front of a small train winding through the picturesque mountains of Japan.

Airplane/Train/Bus Tickets

I spent $5.60 on Flights, $8.96 on Buses, $0 on Trains, and $50 on gas getting to the airport while in the states.

This one is typically going to be the second biggest expense of your trip. In my experience, this is also the easiest one to save on. If you play your cards right you can get some crazy cheap flights.

Most people probably just read that $64.56 total and got a little upset. That absolutely makes sense. You’ve probably gone on trips and got stuck with a much much larger bill than that. But, I can show you the tricks I used on this trip so that you can just copy them and get yourself some nice cheap tickets too.

Credit Cards Points
I’m pushing credit card points and airline miles together in this section because they basically do the same thing. Taking advantage of points is the way you hear people getting flights for crazy cheap. Because often times the only “real” money that is required is to pay fees. And even then you can use points to cover the fees.
Points Transfers
So for this trip, I bought three separate airplane tickets. The main one was from Seattle, Washington to Tokyo, Japan and it was a round trip. For this one, I took advantage of a promotion that was going on with my Capital One points where I could transfer points to Virgin Atlantic Airlines and they would give you a 30% bonus on your points. I found this flight on Virgin Atlantic for 55,000 points which is already a great deal. But by using that transfer bonus, I only needed to transfer approximately 42,300 points from Capital one to buy those tickets
Cover Using Points
Capital One Venture Card also has this really cool feature where you can cover travel expenses after the fact with your points. This is cool because it allows you to use points to cover things other than just flights. That’s how I was able to get my JR RailPass for free. Which saved me a ton of money traveling to Japan. It allows you unlimited usage of the JR Rail system including bullet trains for 14 days.

You can easily get enough points to take a trip like this for yourself by just using the sign-up bonus from two cards. You can probably even do it with the points from one card. I used a mixture of the Alaska Airlines card and the Venture card. Both of which I got when their sign-up bonuses were less than they are today, so you’d have even more points to play with than I did by signing up for these today.

I got 60,000 points from the sign-up bonus on the Venture card (Today’s bonus is 75,000). I used 42,300 of these points to pay for my round-trip tickets from Seattle to Tokyo.

I got 40,000 points + a 200-dollar statement credit from the sign-up bonus on the Alaska Airlines Card (Today’s bonus is 70,000). I used 12,500 on a one-way to get back home from Seattle and $99.00 of the statement credit on a one-way getting to Seattle.

A bowl of steaming hot vegan ramen, with a rich and savory broth, filled with noodles. A large onion slice is floating in the center of the bowl

Food

I spent $285.15 on all food (Dining out, convenience stores, vending machines)

Food is one area of a trip budget you could choose to go pretty cheap on and it’d save you a bunch of money but honestly, food has a huge impact on your trip. Most people remember meals they’ve eaten as highlights of their trip. I’ve taken trips where I’ll go to local markets and get produce and just make my own food and I end up barely spending any money on food. But, I did it more so because I simply didn’t have enough money to eat out. It was still a fun trip but if you can, don’t cheap out too much on food.

This was not one of those trips. I ate out for almost every meal in Japan. There were a couple of nights when time got away from us and I ended up just getting ramen from a store or some snacks from a convenience store and bringing them back to the hotel. For the most part, though, I ate out and I ate a lot in Japan. Japan is surprisingly cheap when it comes to food, which is very nice. I can only share so many tips when it comes to food because, for the most part, you’re just going to pay what it costs to eat. But here are some ways I keep from wasting money on food.

Just Get Water

It’s really good for you, most people don’t drink enough of it, and it’s free. Getting drinks with every meal can quickly add up on your overall budget. I almost never order anything but water when I am at a restaurant. Drinks are usually quite a bit more expensive than if you just went and bought the same thing later at a grocery store. This is especially true of alcohol. Getting alcohol at restaurants is so expensive it’s ridiculous. You can still make drinks at the end of the day with your friends if you’d like, just go buy the stuff and make your own at the hotel, it’s fun, pretty easy, and way cheaper.

Avoid Tourist Restaurants

The more you travel the more you’ll be able to pick up on what places are set up to cater to the tourist crowd and they always come with inflated prices. Chances are if you’re in Japan and you see french fries on the menu, yeah you’re in a tourist restaurant. Especially the case in Japan if the menu is in English, you are definitely in a tourist restaurant.

Get outside your comfort zone and check out the restaurants with names you can’t pronounce and menus you can’t read (just use google lens to translate the menu). It’s a great experience and you’ll try foods you didn’t even know existed. And these local places have much better prices.

"A skier in a blue coat and an arcteryx backpack glides down a snowy slope in Niseko, Japan, surrounded by majestic mountains.

Experiences

I spent $46.27 on experiences

On this trip specifically I did two days of skiing including night skiing at Grand Harafu Resort in Niseko, Japan. I also went to teamLab Tokyo which is a really weirdly cool modern art museum. Here are the ways I was able to save on experiences and didn’t feel like I missed out on anything.

Free Experiences

In most places and especially in Tokyo there is plenty to do without spending a dime. I went to a bunch of parks, historical locations, and cool city overlooks and it didn’t cost me anything.

Again, Credit Cards

So the ski tickets for those two days were actually $117.69 but I just used the remaining $101 dollars in statement credit I got from my Alaska airlines sign-up to pay for the majority of them. Dropping my price for the lift tickets down to $16.69. I also brought my own ski gear along with me so I didn’t need to pay for rentals. And I didn’t have to pay any baggage fees since I have my Alaska airlines card which includes a free checked bag. And yes, ski bags can be your checked item as long as you don’t exceed 50 lbs.

Overview

To wrap up, I want to just emphasize this again, none of what I did is impossible for you to mimic. You can also get some really cheap and super amazing trips booked. Seriously, this was probably the best trip I’ve ever been on and it only cost $879.66 for 12 days.

So go ahead, plan your dream trip, and start researching how to make it super affordable for you. You can even leave a comment if you have questions down below, I’ll answer them and help you out. I really really want to get people out of the mindset that they just can’t afford to travel. Traveling is such a fantastic investment in yourself and your growth as a person. It will change your mindset about your own circumstances and helps you appreciate how beautiful life can be.

Make sure to share this article with your friends and family or anyone that doesn’t believe they can actually go on that dream vacation of theirs.