This post is written by us but bought to you in collaboration with Southern Cross Travel Insurance.

When you’re a frequent traveller, your average costs of travel tend to go down. Let me explain how best to accomplish this, without you having to resort to staying in hostels and 1 star hotels.

1. Your passport.

The fees for getting a passport are pretty steep, especially when you include the cost of photos and postage. If you only use your passport once or twice every 5 years for a quick trip to the islands or New Zealand, the cost of your passport won’t be an insignificant amount of your overall trip cost. However if you use your passport frequently, you’re getting better value out of it. You’re also less likely to forget when it’s expiring and therefore are less likely to get caught needing to pass expedited processing fees to get a new passport in time for your next trip.

2. Rewards points.

Rewards points are usually poor value at the lowest level but become better value at higher levels. Therefore to really maximize your benefits, you need to collect enough points to get the good rewards. Companies also tend to devalue their programs, meaning they change the rules so you need more points to get the same rewards. In some cases, they massively hike up the fuel surcharges to the point where fuel surcharges and taxes might be half the cost of the ticket. You have to pay these even when using points. It’s often a case that it becomes not worth it to use points and it’s better to just pay, which of course is what they want you to do!

Some hotel booking rewards programs will give you a free night after 10 paid nights. If you can do 10 cheap paid nights, you can get get a relative splurge for your free night and get pretty good value from this. You won’t usually be about to choose a $400 hotel though, as the limit for the free night is usually something up to a $150 value or similar. The more you travel, the more you can work these types of offers to your best advantage.

3. The Multi Trip Policy.

A multi trip travel insurance policy usually works out much cheaper than buying a separate policy for each trip. Southern Cross Travel Insurance offer this option. Usually multi trip policies only cover trips up to a certain length and only cover you if you have a return ticket where you depart and arrive back in your home country.

4. Travel gear.

Like your passport, you only need to purchase your travel gear once. Buying a pack or suitcases is expensive if you only plan to use them once. When you split this cost over multiple trips, the numbers work out much better. There are also lots of other small pieces of travel gear that are useful but not strictly necessary for someone who doesn’t travel often. For example, things like a travel clothes line (supposedly they don’t need pegs but do take 6 or so pegs). The travel gear that’s right for you is going to depend on your specific needs. For example, some people will need a mifi device, some people will need a solar charger or car charger for their phone, and some people will need packing cubes to organize their stuff (in the future you might not need the solar charger). The more you travel, the better you get at deciding what types of purchases are going to make your travel life much easier, and which are extravagant or not really worth it.

Hopefully with this post we’ve given you plenty of excuses to travel more frequently ;)