Friends in Many Places

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year.  We certainly did. 

This Christmas I decided it was time to leave this cold country again and travel to many parts of the world. Taking Tristan with me this time, we stopped in a number of destinations and managed to visit friends and family along the way. 

Firstly, we decided on the final destination, which was to be the Philippines. Both of us wanted to go there and having been told by a large number of friends how great it was, it was an easy decision for our Christmas adventure. Looking into flights, we quickly realised it was not an easy place to get to however, we kept seeing stop overs in places where we had friends and family members. Brain waves and light bulbs all round, we decided to make it even more of an adventure and stop to visit these people along the way. 

We continued with some thorough research and found that actually spending a couple of nights at each stop off meant that the flights ended up slightly cheaper. As an added bonus, we would also get to see these people that we otherwise may not have seen for a long time.

We also discovered it was cheaper to fly out of London Luton and back into Heathrow. That decided, we booked a car parking space near Heathrow using Just Park (yourparkingspace.co.uk) and then got a bus up to Luton. This was so simple and easy considering the amount of money we saved by doing this. 

Our first stop was Dubai where we visited Tristan’s Auntie and Uncle who live in Al Ain. We flew to Copenhagen with Ryanair and then from Copenhagen with Norwegian Airways to Dubai. Flying separately with each airline was the most cost-efficient way of getting over to Dubai. We had a great couple of days there and managed to really relax into our holiday (helped largely by being spoilt rotten by Michael and Martine).

Next stop was Kuala Lumpar to visit my friend Ruth. Here we got to see lots of Kuala Lumpar, sample the delicacies and experience what life is like for her as an ex pat teacher. We then made the final trip to Cebu City to start our trip in the Philippines. 

Now, obviously it was cheap for us to stay in these places, given that we had people to stay with. That said, the flights were cheaper than going as momondo and sky scanner suggested (due to our stop offs)

. If you have somewhere you would like to visit, why not make your trip more of an adventure and discover a few other places along your way? It certainly broke up our outward trip and we made some great memories along the way. We also found it helped with adjusting to time zones, as it was more gradual.

To summarise, my multi-stop adventure tips:

- When searching for your flights, check if any of the lay overs are somewhere you would like to visit

- If you know people in places of the world where lay overs are, take advantage of this and visit them

- Check whether each flight is cheaper to buy individually. Our flight to Dubai is a good example of this

- Check if it’s cheaper to fly in and out of different airports – this also helped us save in the UK

I have attached a picture of our DIY itinerary below if anyone is interested.