Our very first out of state adventure was spring break trip to LA, California! Well a lot of our family and friends always asked us, “How do you afford a week long vacation to LA as college students?” Well its easy if you plan ahead and find affordable, yet fun things to visit and do. Today we will share how we planned the LA trip under $600 together!
This post is broken down into 4 main categories:
- Flights
- Stay
- Transportation
- Meals
Lets get to it shall we?
Flights – How to find cheap air fare?
In our case, flight tickets were the most expensive part of this trip and the reason is because we waited too long to book them! Initially we had planned to book our flights by end of January for end of March trip. The flight tickets then was $150/person round trip. However, due to few reasons we had to book the flights at later time and ended up costing us around $230/person. So we learned our lesson to say the least. But you might be wondering, where do you look for flights?
Well, let us tell you a secret… don’t use Expedia, CheapAir and all those sites that pop up on your google search. We suggest using Hopper. Here you can watch and monitor flights ahead of time, it notifies you when the prices are low or high, it also comes with cheap insurance for a guaranteed money refund (compared to air points that most airlines give) if you do have to cancel your trip for any reason. We continue to use hopper and has never failed us.
Stay – Finding the perfect home for your vacation
Like everyone else, we relied on Airbnb and Vrbo to find our perfect home for the week. The key in finding affordable place is to look a little out of the main city area. For example, we were visiting LA but homes in the heart of city are expensive to say the least. Other key factor is to make sure the listing has tons of reviews, and real photos. It is very easy to get fooled by amazing looking photos! Be careful.
As to where we exactly stayed, this is where we stayed. We spent $655 for 6 days, 5 nights stay between 4 of us, so it came to $164/person for a week long stay (which is about $28/day). This apartment was super comfortable, had all the basic amenities and was fairly equal distance from LA Downtown, Hollywood, and Santa Monica. Lots of local food trucks and restaurants around the apartment as well.
Transportation – How to get around the city?
We had couple of options when it came to traveling around the city: rental car, public transportation or Uber/Lyft. As none of us were 25yrs or older, renting a car was costing us more than our week long stay. As to public transport, in LA you can get a Metro Pass.
Once we got to LA we realized that waiting on public transport and its schedule, we would waste a lot of time idling. So we ended using Uber and Lyft to get around, and was so much cheaper as we split the ride 4 ways. The cost we individually spent on Uber/Lyft rides was around $30 for the whole week.
Take time into consideration. Because there were 4 of us, and we didn’t want to wait on public transportation, and so Uber/Lyft was the cheapest and fastest option to get around the city for us.
Meals – What to eat?
This is a very personal decision, depending on how much of a foodie you are, how much you want to spend on food and food options around you. We had looked at couple of restaurants and food trucks a head of time around the places we were going to visit. We usually ate breakfast at home (cereal, avocado toast, etc.), had lunch and dinner out or had leftovers the next day. Throughout we spent about $25-40/person each day on food depending on where we ate.
Here are the places we ate at throughout the week:
- Roscoe’s House of Chicken n Waffles
- Leo’s Tacos Truck
- Fritto Misto
- Vespaio
- The Penthouse
- Hard Rock Cafe
- The Original Farmer’s Market
Gist
While many factors impact the cost of your vacation and trip, these 4 are what impacted our trip the most!
Key points to help you have fun yet not so expesive vacation:
- Plan ahead of time!
- Book flights at least 1.5months ahead.
- Have a rough itinerary on places you would like to visit, and based on the whether you can plan your actual day.
- Do a basic grocery run when you get to the place (milk, cereal, bread, eggs, whatever you can use to snack on or have breakfast at home before you head out)
- Importantly don’t stress! The point of this trip is to enjoy, so even if you don’t check off everything on your itinerary list, its okay because you now have something to come back for!
- Keep track of expenses in excel, weather you are traveling alone, as a couple or a group. It’s important to have a sense of how much you spend, and to check if you are over spending on things that aren’t necessary.
Overall we ended up spending $300/person on our week long trip to LA as college students!
We hope this guide will help you in planning your next trip under budget! Do share your thoughts with us.
Don’t forget to check out our ‘5-Days in LA!’ blog for a detailed itinerary of your trip.
Out of Town 