5 Tips For Long Holiday or Full Time Affordable Luxury Travel

If you are like us, you want to travel to amazing places and experience some luxury along the way: gourmet meals, good wine and soft beds in nice apartments. But you also want it to be affordable.

You’re not a gap year backpacker. Neither are we.

And you have no interest in staying in hostels or budget accomodations. Neither do we.

You simply want a long luxury travel experience that is affordable. So do we!

Back in our corporate lives we liked taking luxury holidays. But luxury vacations are expensive!

So now that we are full time travelers we focus on finding affordable luxury travel.

Click here to read about the difference between luxury travel and affordable luxury travel.

We work very hard to find affordable luxury travel so we can maintain our full time travel lifestyle in the upscale manner we enjoy.

And we have learned a lot in the process.

So we have some suggestions and ideas that we hope you will find useful when planning your affordable luxury travel…whether it’s for full time travel or just an extended vacation.

Don’t believe you can live a life of affordable luxury travel? Well read on!

You may be closer than you think!

Tip 1: Find Affordable Luxury Travel Destinations

Picking the right place to go is 80% of the battle in achieving an affordable luxury travel lifestyle!

There are places in the world where spending $2,000 – $5,000 a month makes you feel wealthy.

We have:

  • Rented luxury flats for 200 euros a month in Bulgaria.
  • Lived in a luxury hotel suite in Thailand for a month and paid less than we would have paid for one night at the same luxury suite in New York or London.
  • Visited beaches where we stayed in luxury apartments for $30 a night!

And those are just a few examples of how choosing the right places to travel mean you can live like royalty on the cheap.

And when you do go somewhere relatively expensive, go there in shoulder season (the period between peak and off-peak season)! Greek isles in late April. Dubrovnik in September. The Caribbean in November. Venice in November. You get all of the luxury of popular destinations with a fraction of the crowds and the cost!

kantary hills pool chiang mai
Affordable Luxury in Thailand

This tip about finding affordable luxury travel destinations is so critical to our lifestyle that we have dedicated an entire section of our website to it!

Tip 2: Find Cheap Business Class Fares or Other Ways to Upgrade Coach flights

We like to think that when it comes to full time or extended travel getting there is part of the fun!

So we like to find ways to make air travel more enjoyable.

Here’s how we do it.

Points and Miles

We were lucky: we both traveled a lot for our corporate jobs and so both earned lots of miles and points to use in our affordable luxury full time travel lifestyle.

But we were also smart: we constantly used credit card offers to build up our points and miles stash!

If you aren’t started collecting points and miles through credit card sign ups and spending then now is the time to start!

Finding affordable upscale Airfares

But points and miles will only get you so far.

We take basic economy flights when it makes sense. In other words, when they are short and cheap. A good example is the $32 US Vietnam Airlines Economy Lite flight we took from Hanoi to Da Nang, Vietnam.

But we prefer to find cheap business class like the $585 US business class tickets on Hong Kong Airlines we took from LA to Bangkok and back!

hong kong airlines business class seat
Affordable Upscale Flying

Wondering how we find cheap business class flights? Check out our Cheap Business Class Fare Guides:

How To Use Google Flights to Find Cheap Business Class Flights (And Cheap Economy Flights Too!)

Passive Ways to Find Cheap Business Class Flights

Or affordable upgraded economy tickets like AirAsia Premium Flex seats.

Upscale flying is another case where it’s such an important part of our affordable luxury travel experience that we’ve dedicated an entire section of Ready Jet Roam to it!

Tip 3: Earn as you Burn

When we were working corporate jobs we saved as much money as possible so we could live an affordable luxury full time travel lifestyle.

But even with our aggressive savings plan, we really only saved really only saved enough money for one to two years of upscale full time travel.

We wanted more time than that! Don’t you!?

If you are retired and have a guaranteed pension then congratulations! You can skip this step. Because even if you have an income of a few thousand dollars a month you can live a full time affordable luxury travel lifestyle!

But the rest of us need to create revenue streams while we travel if we want to keep doing it forever.

Passive Income During Full Time Travel

The best income streams for full time travel are passive income streams.

The money we saved for full time travel is invested, and that is our major source of passive income.

Another step we took was to rent out the house we own in Arlington, Virginia.

It doesn’t earn us much cash: after we pay the management company and our mortgage we end up with a couple hundred dollars in profit. And most of that seems to end up going back into repairs and maintenance on the house.

But with renters covering our mortgage our non-liquid equity in the house goes up every month.

So while that’s not a passive income, it IS a passive equity builder!

So we get a little bit of passive income and equity building each month.

Making Money as a Digital Nomad During Full Time Travel

But we knew that if affordable luxury full time travel was going to be our forever-life we needed to offset our expenses with active income.

And that’s why in 2016 Lisa started a business designing, sourcing and selling products on Amazon.

Now we run that business from all over the world doing full time travel!

Here is an article Lisa wrote with a step-by-step guide to starting a successful Amazon Private Label FBA business.

Digital nomad Working by the pool
Our Temporary Office in Koh Samui

But that’s just one way to make money while traveling the world! There are literally thousands.

Here is our complete guide on how to make money while traveling full time as a digital nomad.

Tip 4: Prepare

Lisa and I gave ourselves a full year after deciding to become full time affordable luxury digital nomads before we launched.

And we applied world class strategic planning and implementation tools to our ‘digital nomad launch’ project!

After all, failing to plan is planning to fail!

Here is our guide on How to Become a Digital Nomad 3 Simple Steps to Prepare.

And here are our 11 Brilliant Travel Accessories and Travel Hacks!

Tip 5: Get Full Time Travel Smart and Stay Smart

Knowledge is definitely power.

If you have read this far then you have already gained a lot of both.

But finding affordable luxury short-term lodging, affordable gourmet meals and affordable upscale travel experiences is an ongoing job!

We hope you will subscribe to Ready Jet Roam by filling out the sign-up form on the right hand side of the page. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We even do Instagram!

We’re thrilled to share the affordable luxury travel full time wisdom we have gained and hope you find it useful.

Affordable Luxury Travel Travel Resource Guide

5 tips for becoming a full time affordable luxury traveler