Tips to Save Money In New York
We know that one of the biggest concerns for travellers when you travel to New York is that it is an expensive city. And we can corroborate this after spending 7 days there and that you can spend a lot of unexpected money if you don’t take into account some tips or ways to save money. That’s why, after our experience in the city, we want to bring you this post of tips to save money in New York.
If you have less days or you just want to know which are the must-see places of the city that never sleeps, we recommend you our post of must-see places of New York, where you will find detail of all the places you should see and adapt in your visit days.
With that being said, let’s go with our tips to save money in New York.
Where to sleep
Save in New York: Flights
We managed to find flights for €450 return at Easter from Barcelona. Basically we used two typical tricks to lower airfares:
- Book well in advance (planning is key in a travel budget). To go at Easter, we took the flight in October, so it was quite a few months earlier and the price was obviously not what it would have been if we had taken it later.
- To have a short stopover in a European city. We know that stopovers can be cumbersome, but in our case, we managed to make super short stopovers that lowered the price of the flight by €200.
On the outward journey, we flew to Munich from Barcelona, and then flew from there with Lufhtansa. On the return, we stopped in Zurich for a 45-minute stopover and flew with Swiss Air. The experience in both cases was super good and it was totally worth the small stopover to save us some money.
Food
To give you an idea of the distribution of the meals we had:
- Day 1: this day we arrived and only had dinner in the Hunters point area, a frankfurter in a street stall (10$ pp).
- Day 2: We ate at Whole Foods in Bryant park (20$ pp) and had dinner at the Shake Shack hamburger restaurant (15-20$ pp).
- Day 3: We ate at Jacob’s Pickles (30-35$ pp) and we had a frankfurter for dinner at a stall in the Broadway area.
- Day 4: We ate at Los Tacos no 1 (15 pp) and we had dinner at McDonalds (15$ pp)
- Day 5: We had lunch at Little Spain of Hudson Yards (30€ pp) and the dinner was at Ellen’s Stardust Dinner (20-30 $ pp)
- Day 6: Uncle Lou of Chinatown for the lunch (25$ pp) and dinner in a pizza slices restaurant (10$ pp)
- Day 7: Brunch at Henry’s End 25€ pp and dinner at La Nonna (25$)
- Day 8: african food at Teranga (20$)
Save in New York: Activities
Yes, there are ways to save in New York when you do activities. The city has several cards with which you can save part of the price of admission to the city’s main attractions. If you are visiting the city for several days, we recommend you list the things you want to visit, and in case there are several attractions that are
If there are several attractions included in any of the city cards, it’s worth buying them, as you’ll end up saving money.
We took the CityPass , a card that allows you to select between 3, 5 or 11 attractions. In our case, we chose the 5 attractions one that included:
- (Mandatory) Empire State Building
- (Mandatory) American Museum of Natural History
- (Choose between 3) Top of the rock
- (Choose between 3) Memorial and Museum of the 11S
- (Choose between 3) Circle line
- (Choose between 3) Intrepido Museum
- (Choose between 3) Guggenheim Museum
There are other great options of card like Go City New York o la SIghtseeing day pass with similar ways of selecting activities to the City Pass.
Save money in New York: Broadway
If you visit New York, you’ll almost certainly want to see a Broadway show. And, guys, it’s worth it. It’s amazing, a level of performance and quality of show of 10. We, not being great lovers of this kind of shows, chose Aladdin and we were delighted with what we saw. What’s the problem? It is expensive. The average price is over 100$, so get your wallet ready. There are few tricks we can share with you, but we’ll tell you how you can save some money:
- Obviously, taking places of poorer visual quality will help you save money. We took a place in the upper tier and, thinking it would look worse, we saw it quite well. It cost us $107 per head, so it’s not too bad.
- One option you can use if you want to save a lot of money is to use the last day ticket booths with discounted tickets. The only problem is that you can only choose from what is available at the time, so you don’t have much flexibility. The place where you can do this is in Times Square and it’s called TKTS.
Save Money in New York: Travel Insurance
Save Money in New York: Public Transport
