Holiday Travel Hacks: 5 Secrets to Scoring the Best Deals

I'll be home for Christmas this year, but for more than a decade, I spent the holidays in sunny Florida with my extended family. The break from normalcy was great, but it sometimes came with a pretty hefty price tag -- and all I had to pay for was air travel. If you need to book hotels or rental cars too, you could easily spend a few thousand dollars.

Unless you're a multi-millionaire, holiday travel is probably pretty hard on your budget. But with the right strategy, you can make sure you pay as little as possible. Here are five of my best tips for saving on your holiday travel this year.

1. Be flexible

Flexibility is the most important thing when it comes to finding great travel deals. If you need to leave from a certain airport on a certain day on a specific airline, your options are going to be very limited and you'll probably pay a lot. But when you can be flexible with your plans, you give yourself a lot more choices. Some of those are bound to be more affordable than others.

I don't live near any major airports, so when I would travel to Florida, I would often check all the airports within a few hours' drive to see what rates they offered. Then, I'd go with the one that had the best deal. Same with airlines.

I also traveled on Christmas Day many times. You'll often find fewer people flying on this day because they want to be with their families. If you don't mind celebrating a day late, you could save quite a bit compared to those traveling right before or right after the holiday.

2. Look into vacation packages

For those who need to book a place to stay as well, a vacation package could be a more affordable option for you than booking a flight and hotel separately. Sites like Costco Travel enable you to search vacation packages in popular destinations that could help you save on purchases you were going to make anyway.

For example, a quick search for vacation packages in Orlando turns up several results including flights, hotels, and theme park tickets. If you find something you like, you can book it all at once and save yourself a bunch of time filling out online forms too.

3. Steer clear of those cookies

A lot of airlines and hotels track your search history online using cookies. If they see you eyeing a flight or a hotel for a specific day, they might never show you a more affordable price than what you saw the first time you looked, even if they're showing a cheaper price to someone else for that same flight or hotel.

You can get around this by deleting your cookies or using an incognito browser when searching for travel deals. This takes cookies out of the equation, so you always see the current best price.

4. Use travel rewards cards

If you've been saving travel rewards all year, now is a great time to use them. You can put unused miles towards flights or hotels, but be wary of blackout dates. You could run into these around the holidays since they're popular travel times. It's still worth checking, though.

And if you have an airline credit card, don't forget to check out its other perks. You might get to check bags for free, for example. Even if this only saves you $50, it's still extra money you'll have in your pocket when you reach your destination.

5. Think outside the box

Flying might seem like your best option if you're going somewhere far away this holiday, but that's not always the case. You might prefer to drive or you could look into buses, trains, or taxis too. I know, that's a lot of options to consider, but you don't have to compare them all yourself.

Rome2Rio is a site that does all the mapping for you. All you have to do is enter your starting destination and your ending destination, even if they're on different continents. The site will then tell you all the various ways you could get there, along with estimated times and costs. Once you find one you like, you just follow the links to book everything.

The winter holidays are only a few weeks away, so it's probably best to start looking at your options right now if you want to score a great deal. You don't have to try all the tips above. Just pick out a few you think could work for you and see what kind of savings they add up to.