Accommodation is the biggest line in a long-term travel budget and the one most within your control. It typically runs 30 to 50% of total spending, which means a 20% saving on accommodation is worth more than eliminating every other optimisation on this site combined.
Our accommodation currently sits at around £1,400 a month for a family of four. It started considerably higher. These are the eight things that moved it, roughly in order of how much each one is worth.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you book through them we may receive a small commission at no cost to you. Every figure below is one we have actually paid.
Key Takeaways
- Monthly rates run 30 to 50% below the same property booked night by night. This is the single largest lever and nothing else comes close.
- Moving less is a saving, not just a preference. Every move costs you a transit day and usually a premium night.
- Free cancellation has a price built into the rate. Sometimes it is worth paying and sometimes it is not, and the point is to decide rather than default.
- A kitchen changes your food budget, not just your accommodation one. It is why we compare apartments against hotels on total cost.
- We dropped our first-month target from £50 a night to around £35 and ended up in better places.
1. Book by the Month, Not by the Night
This is the whole game. Everything else on this list is a rounding error next to it.
Nightly rates on any platform are priced for holidaymakers staying three to seven nights. Monthly rates are a different product sold to a different customer, and they run 30 to 50% below the same property booked night by night. Not 5%. Not 10%.
Our Chiang Mai apartment was £680 for the month in the Nimman district: central, walkable, reliable Wi-Fi, a small pool. Booked nightly at the going rate for that area it would have been comfortably half again as much.
The practical implication is that your trip structure and your budget are the same decision. A family moving every five days cannot access monthly rates at all, and will pay roughly double what a family moving every four to six weeks pays for equivalent quality. If your budget does not work, the first thing to change is not the destination. It is the pace.
2. Slow Down, Because Moving Costs Money
Related to the above but worth separating, because the cost of moving is larger than most people count.
Every move costs you a transit day where you are paying for accommodation but getting no benefit from being somewhere. It usually costs a premium first night, because you book the arrival stay before you know the area. It often costs a taxi at each end, and with children it costs a day of everyone being tired and eating out.
We do have one exception worth stealing. Our overnight sleeper bus from Siem Reap to Kampot was a 12 hour journey costing £50 for the family. Flying was quicker, but the bus was more cost-effective once you count that it also replaced a night's accommodation. Overnight transport that doubles as a bed is one of the few moves that does not carry the usual penalty.
3. Ask Directly Where the Property Is Independently Owned
Our Siem Reap apartment is the clearest example we have.
We found it on Airbnb. Rather than booking there, we worked out from the listing photos and description roughly where it was, found it on Google Maps, and contacted the owner from there. It took a bit of detective work. The rate we agreed was around 15% below the listing, and we paid 50% by Wise transfer up front with the balance in cash on arrival. Two bedrooms, £31.30 a night.
Two honest caveats. This works with independently-owned properties where there is an actual person to talk to, and not with managed or chain properties, where asking wastes everyone's time. And you give up your recourse: no platform, no rebooking process, no chargeback if it is not what the photos showed. We only do it where the reviews are long and consistent, and we would not do it for a short stay where the saving does not justify the risk.
Where we pay landlords or guesthouses directly, we use Wise rather than an international bank wire. The fee is transparent upfront and the money lands the same day. Our Wise review covers the setup.
4. Decide About Cancellation Instead of Defaulting
Free cancellation is not free. The flexibility is priced into the nightly rate, and on any given booking you are choosing between a cheaper committed rate and a more expensive escapable one.
The mistake is not picking either. It is picking without thinking, which usually means taking whatever the platform surfaced first.
Our rule is roughly this. For the first stay in a new country, where arrival dates move and visa timing is uncertain, take the free cancellation rate and treat the premium as insurance. For a stay you are confident about, in a place you already are, take the committed rate and keep the difference.
The planning-window article goes into when flexibility is worth paying for in more detail. The short version is that the further ahead you book, the more likely your plans are to move, and the more the cancellation option is actually worth.
5. Use a Platform for What It Is Good At
Platforms are the best research tool in travel and we use them constantly, including for properties we go on to book elsewhere. The filters, the map view, and being able to see forty family-suitable options with a kitchen on one screen do not exist if you start from a blank search.
They are also straightforwardly the right answer for short stays. Under about two weeks the percentage you might save going direct is small, the flexibility matters more, and the recourse matters most of all. Arriving at midnight after an overnight bus with two tired children is a platform booking every single time.
If you use one platform consistently, its loyalty tier is worth having. The discounts are modest, usually in the region of 10% on selected properties, but they cost nothing and they stack with rates you were going to pay anyway.
6. Never Let the Booking Site Convert Your Currency
Booking sites default to showing UK visitors prices in pounds, and that conversion carries a markup you never agreed to. On a £900 monthly booking a 5% conversion is £45, every month, on your largest expense.
Set the site's currency to the property's local currency before you search rather than after, and let your card handle the conversion. It takes ten seconds and it persists in your account settings.
We covered the full method, including how to measure what your platform is actually charging you, in why you should never pay for accommodation in pounds.
7. Count the Kitchen in Your Food Budget
An apartment with a kitchen frequently costs more per night than a hotel room, and frequently costs less in total.
Our Cambodia food bill was £850.94 for the month, higher than we expected, and a chunk of that was because Siem Reap's supermarkets are expensive by local standards since most produce is imported. But cooking breakfast at home in Chiang Mai saved us at least £150 over the month on its own.
The comparison to make is not room rate against room rate. It is room rate plus food against room rate plus food. A family of four eating three meals out a day will spend more on the difference than the kitchen ever cost.
The same logic applies to laundry facilities, which is a genuinely irritating line item in Southeast Asia if you are paying by the kilo every week for four people.
8. Look One Street Back
The cheapest structural saving available in most places is refusing to stay on the main tourist street.
In Siem Reap, tourist-facing hotels in the centre command a real premium, and quieter streets a few blocks back are noticeably cheaper for the same standard of room. In Kampot and the south, a house or bungalow runs £400 to £650 a month, against £700 to £1,100 for a two-bedroom apartment in central Phnom Penh.
With children this is often better rather than merely cheaper. Quieter streets, more local food nearby, and neighbours who are residents rather than a rotating cast of holidaymakers.
What This Adds Up To
Our first-month budget assumed £50 a night. Within a few months we had brought that down to around £35, and the places were at least as good and often better than what we had been getting at the higher rate. That is a 30% reduction on the largest line in the budget, achieved without accepting anything worse.
None of the eight above requires you to be uncomfortable. They require you to move more slowly, book by the month, decide about cancellation deliberately, and spend ten seconds on a currency selector. That is the whole list.
If you want the full picture of where the rest of the money goes, our breakdown of what long-term travel actually costs sets accommodation in context against everything else.
