Flights
Most flight-pricing folklore is wrong. Incognito mode does nothing, there is no magic booking day, and the quoted optimal booking windows are averages across millions of itineraries that describe no particular route.
What actually moves the price: flexibility on dates, flexibility on airport, the season, and how competitive the route is. Mid-week departures are usually cheaper than Friday and Sunday, and shifting by two days routinely changes a long-haul fare by a third.
The most useful tool is a flexible-date map search, which inverts the question from “how much is this trip” to “where can I go for this money”.
Budget airlines: the headline fare is not the price. Cabin bag, checked bag, seat and card fees frequently quadruple it, and the airport is often an hour from the city.
Worth paying for: a single ticket rather than two separate ones for a connection — on one ticket a missed connection is the airline’s problem, on two it is entirely yours. A proper connection buffer. A direct flight on a long journey.
Onward tickets are required by many countries and enforced by airlines at check-in. This catches one-way travellers constantly.
The flights guide has the detail, including error fares and positioning flights.
Trains
The best way to travel where the network exists — western Europe, Japan, Korea, China, India, and specific lines elsewhere.
Rail passes are not automatically cheaper. High-speed services require paid seat reservations on top of most passes, and advance point-to-point fares are frequently less. Do the arithmetic against your actual route. Regional passes are often better value than national ones.
Book early on high-speed services, where the same seat can vary by a factor of five. Regional trains are usually fixed-price and need no booking.
Buses
The transport system across much of Latin America, Africa, the Balkans and Southeast Asia, and frequently better than the railway.
South America’s premium cama services are the best long-distance buses in the world. Southeast Asian sleeper buses are cheap and are built for people around 165cm.
Overnight travel
A night in transit saves a hotel and a day, or costs you both. The rule that holds: worth it above about ten hours, when the alternative is a full day of daylight travel.
The real hazard is the arrival, not the journey. Services depositing you at 4am with nothing open are why booking the previous night’s accommodation as well is often the right call.
See night trains and overnight buses.
Driving
Necessary in Namibia, Iceland, the Faroes, much of the American west and rural Europe.
Check: which side of the road, whether an International Driving Permit is required, whether the rental may cross a border, what the insurance excludes — gravel, river crossings, wind damage, single-vehicle incidents — and whether there are urban restricted zones with camera enforcement.
Ferries
Underrated. Greece’s island network, the Adriatic crossings, the Strait of Gibraltar, Chile’s Patagonian routes and Japan’s inland sea are all cheap, atmospheric, and turn a set of countries into one region.