How To Save On Flight And Accommodation While Travelling Canada

Planning your travel can be a time consuming and expensive even when there are hundreds of websites out there to make your job easier. Hundreds of websites, that’s the issue right there.

To ease that process, here are some hacks to find cheap flights, accommodation, and transportation while you are planning your visit to Canada. There is also a bonus section, and if you are from one of those few lucky countries, you can get your eTA Canada Visa in few hours with multiple entries allowed for five years. Travel to Canada anytime for any purpose business or trip holidays up to 6 months at a time with a valid eTA.

Here Are Some Cool Hacks To help You Save On Flight And Accommodation:

1. Flight Hacks for Travelling to Canada

It is sporadic to find airline loyalty, and committing to a single carrier is hard to come by. If you find a right carry on you can earn free flights and other assorted perks. Some of the international frequent flyer programs are Capital One Venture, Alaska Airlines MileagePlan, Air Canada Aeroplan – Star Alliance, British Airways Executive Club, Air France -KLM Flying Blue – SkyTeam, etc.

Capital One Venture is not technically a frequent flyer program, but it’s a great reward program that lets you redeem rewards for any travel from any vendor. This comes along with flexibility and zero restrictions, which means no blackout dates.

Whereas MIleagePlan offers a wide range of unique partners covering most of the globe for easy find award availability including American, British Airways, Air France, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Qantas and Emirates.

One of such programs is Aeroplan. Every time you fly with Air Canada and other state airlines, you earn miles. At Aeroplan, if you book tickets with the highest rates, you get bonus rewards from the flyer program where you can earn around 25 to 50% mileage bonus on booking executive class flexible and executive class lower seats.

Frequent Flying isn’t the only method; you can earn while Online Shopping, Hotel Booking, Grocery Shopping, and Surveys. So once you have chosen a frequent flyer program, look for how to earn miles on their website, and you will array of options available.

If you are looking to fly to Canada for business/travel purpose, you require a VISA that can cost you around 100 – 130 CAD. Rather than getting a VISA, you have an option to look out for Canadian Immigration visa, all you need is a valid Passport, a credit/ debit card, an email address, and 7 CAD only.

Although the option for eTA rather than VISA is available only for visa-exempt countries for Business/Tourism purpose only.

2. Accommodation Hacks for Canada

Next to flight tickets, accommodation is the following expensive chunk of your travel. Though you can pre-book your stay anywhere in the world, the Internet along with this has come with a monstrous pile of websites that offer different rates of same hotels. This way, you waste a lot of time and money planning your stay.

But no more. To simplify your visit to Canada, we have come up with the cheapest accommodation booking options out there.

3.Hotel Rewards Program

At first, let’s start with the Rewards Program. You may not be aware, but hotel booking websites and hotel chains have their reward programs that can be exchanged for free hotel stays or upgrades to your room. We will encourage you to earn points through a booking website so that you earn points for staying in any hotel chain and not just one.

Some popular hotel loyalty programs are Marriott Rewards, SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest), IHG Rewards (Intercontinental Hotel Group, including Holiday Inn), Best Western Rewards, etc.

4.Bidding Hotel for your stay

Websites like Priceline® / Hotwire® lets you bid for a hotel room. With Priceline, they have access to the excess hotel room inventory that hotel chains have whereas Hotwire has unsold 3-star and 4-star hotels rooms.

All you have to do is put in a destination, dates, number of rooms, number of adults and children that are staying, and amenities that you require. Once you have a place, book the rooms.

The backdrop is, you will be able to see which hotel you are staying at until the purchase is confirmed. Once you bet on the hotel from options available on Hotwire and Priceline and your booking is confirmed, pay the amount and then you will have information about your booked hotel with a good discount.

5.Booking Website Hacks

Many websites and hotel chains come with a Best Rate Guarantee. It means, if you book a hotel at a specific price and find the same booking available at the lower rate somewhere else, they will match the price by refunding back to your credit card the difference.

One of the famous best rate guarantees comes from Expedia website and Hotel chains like Hilton, Hyatt, Choice Hotels, InterContinental Hotels Group. Kimpton’s, Marriott Look No Further, Starwood, etc.

6.Transportation

One of the cheapest ways to travel across Canada is to rent a car from off-airport locations. Picking a rental service right from the airport is more expensive than local car rental companies found in the city.

You can use Priceline to bid for renting cars if you want to rent a car right from Airport location and that too round trip. Just in case your bid isn’t accepted, Priceline may come back with an offer. A quick Priceline bidding trick, look for rental rates of the same date and car type online and start bidding with a 20-25% rate lower than what is available on car rental reservation websites.