Traveling on a Budget (as an Observant Jew)
Written by Adara Yael Peskin-Shalem
I grew up traveling a lot with my family. Most of our trips were road trips, across many states at a time, but sometimes they were also via plane. Some of my favorite memories were these trips, and it pained me the most that, once I moved to Israel, I couldn’t offer my children the same opportunities and experiences. Not having a car (or a license, for that matter) definitely made travel more difficult but on top of that, travel in Israel is quite pricey. Hotels and attractions are priced for tourists, something that can be hard to afford on an Israeli salary. For years, I sat enviously while others traveled, until I figured out tricks to allow me to travel on a budget, in a way that also allowed me to keep halacha while I was traveling, such as Shabbat and kashrut laws.
The game changer was discovering that it is often cheaper to travel internationally than travel within Israel. This may come as a huge surprise, but with budget airlines round-trip airfare abroad can end up being cheaper than a taxi from my home to the nearest city, a 45-minute drive. The key is flexibility. Price comparison websites just search for the cheapest tickets available for the date and destination you choose. To be able to travel for as little as possible, you need special websites. Skyscanner is a popular one, but there are others.
You need to use a site that allows you to choose the option to show you flights from your home to any destination in the world. On sites that do this, you can generally have them list the destinations from cheapest to most expensive. Additionally, you can have the website show you either for specific dates, specific months, or the cheapest months. Once this happens and you get the cheapest location and cheapest months, you can see which dates have the cheapest flights and go with them, as long as they work for you. If you intend to go to a specific destination, you can choose that and then choose the cheapest month and then pick the cheapest dates, or if you are limited in times you can travel you can choose to display trips anywhere in the world that are cheapest on those specific dates.
In order for these budget airlines to work, they often fly to out-of-the-way airports, because that way they pay less to the airports and can pass the discounts on to you. So when choosing a location, it pays to check out nearby cities, as long as the additional cost of the travel from that airport to your destination city doesn’t add up to more than you’ve saved.
For example, when comparing flights from Ben Gurion airport traveling to Dubai, currently the cheapest round-trip tickets are approximately $225. However, airfare to and from Abu Dhabi currently can be found for $78. The drive
between the two cities is only an hour and a quarter. You can take a bus between the two for three-and-a-half hours that costs only $9. Car rental for a week in Abu Dhabi would cost $156, but let’s say you’d only rent a car for the way to Dubai from Abi Dhabi, that would cost you just $39 for the day. So if you’d take rentals both the days you arrive and leave, you’d still end up paying $70 less just by flying to a nearby city and traveling for a total of an extra two and a half hours. This is just one of many examples. Within Israel, often it is cheaper to fly from the Ramon airport near Eilat, but the time traveling to the further airport, plus the gas or the more expensive bus fare needs to be factored into the price of the trip, but even so it often is worth it.
One thing you should be aware of when traveling with cheap airlines is that they get you with the extra fees. These airlines are as no frills as they come, and will charge you for every extra thing. Want to choose your seat? Pay extra. Want to check in in advance? Pay extra. Luggage? Pay a lot extra.
As a Torah-Observant Jew, when I travel I need to keep kosher. That’s where there is a tradeoff. How do I keep kosher when I travel abroad? Do I travel only to places with kosher restaurants and eat there? Do I travel to places without ready-to-eat kosher food and either bring food along, or stay at a place with cooking facilities? If the latter two, you then need to be concerned about the extra luggage and seeing how much more you’ll be paying to bring things with you.
I generally choose to stay in a place with cooking facilities, and use my minimal luggage space (most of these airlines only allow you a personal bag, like a backpack, and not even a small carry-on anymore) to carry a kosher pot and serving utensil with me, leaving very little room for anything else, especially once I factor in my computer, since my trips are work trips and leaving that behind isn’t feasible. Once at my destination, I purchase a knife (since I can’t exactly bring that in my carry-on) and disposables, along with raw ingredients that
don’t need certification such as grains, whole kosher fish, and produce (being extra careful if it is a shmita year), in addition to prepared items that appear on the countries’ rabbinates’ kosher lists.
Shabbat gets tricky when traveling abroad. Many places require electronic keys or keypads to get into buildings or apartments, which makes entering and exiting a problem. These questions should be asked meticulously from the host of the place where you intend to stay. I wasn’t careful enough one time and my kids and I got locked outside of the apartment building we were staying at in Sofia, Bulgaria, and explaining to a stranger on the street that we knew the code to get into the building but couldn’t press it ourselves caused a lot of confusion (and suspicion too, I might add). If staying in a place without an eruv, you might be able to figure out an eruv to be able to carry on Shabbat near where you will be staying. When I was in Romania with my son, the apartment where we stayed had a beautiful courtyard where we wanted to be able to eat our Shabbat meals, and we figured out how to make an eruv to be able to carry the food in and out (and explained it to our very confused host).
For some people, dealing with all of these details can be daunting, which is why Jstay is a decent alternative. As the Jewish version of Airbnb, all the kitchens in their accommodations are kosher, which allows you to be able to cook food where you’re staying without needing to waste valuable luggage room on bringing kosher cooking equipment. It is ensured that these places don’t have issues with entering and exiting on Shabbat, and they also let you know about eruvim, if there are, and about locations of shuls. These places can be a bit pricier than the cheapest airbnbs, but allow you to cook all your own food without needing to shlep or spend money on eating out, and give you the convenience of having all the amenities and conveniences that make traveling as a religious Jew much more enjoyable.
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