The price of a ticket plays a primary factor in where you choose to go and when. Saving $10 on Amtrak or Greyhound is cash you can reallocate toward an AirBnB, a meal, or a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert (or at least part of a fraction of the ticket). Quite literally, it pays to be smart with your money.
Wanderu is designed to help you sift for the best deals on bus and train tickets. Our easy-to-use platform allows you to compare prices from different carriers between cities, all in one simple search. For this list, we identified some lesser-known tips and Wanderu–specific hacks to help you save 💰💰💰.
So put away that hammer — there’s no need to smash the piggy bank. Score cheaper tickets with the insider info below.
1. Book in Advance
Want to score the best deals on bus and train travel? The secret’s out: book early. You’ve probably heard this before – in any and every guide to getting cheap travel – but it bears repeating since it’s the easiest and most effective way to save!
Ticket prices are like concert seats—those front-row (or in this case, low-cost) tickets are the first to go, leaving pricier options as your departure date creeps closer. Amtrak’s Saver Fares, for example, reward those who plan ahead with the lowest prices.
But don’t worry, procrastinators! You don’t have to start planning your trip a year early. You’ll save more the earlier you book, but even buying a ticket just a few days in advance can save you a good chunk of change. We even have our mascot, Chiku, on-hand to tell you what our price prediction data says about upcoming changes.
Say you’re planning a bus trip from Boston to New York. It’s a popular route with plenty of demand, meaning prices can get pretty steep. But hey, book just one week in advance, and you could save $20—enough for a fancy coffee and a bagel at your destination. Talk about making your wallet happy!
2. Book to Nearby Stations
The shortest distance between two points is a line. But sometimes the cheapest route between two cities is through Secaucus, New Jersey.
Buses and trains between large cities in the same region are often more expensive than those between small cities. That’s because these big-time routes tend to be more popular, and higher demand drives a higher price. (Yay, capitalism! 😒)
So sometimes the best way to save money on a trip is by booking your ticket to a stop or station that’s nearby or just outside of your final destination. From there, you can use public transit the rest of the way, take a walk, or text a friend to pick you up.
To have nearby locations appear in your results on Wanderu, make sure the “Include Nearby Locations” filter is turned on when you search:
Mixed into your search results, you’ll then find options that depart from a nearby location, arrive into a nearby location, or both.
For example, tickets are often expensive from New York City to Boston because it’s such a popular route. But with “Include Nearby Locations” switched on, you’ll be able to select trips like this one from New York to Cambridge, which is cheaper than the other listed routes:
Cambridge is just north of Boston across the Charles River, and is easily accessible to downtown via the T, yet has cheaper ticket prices because it’s just slightly out of the way.
3. Take a Multi-Carrier Trip
Wanderu has the exclusive ability to combine travel options from two different bus carriers into a single trip, allowing you to a) travel to destinations for which there’s no direct service from your location, and b) find better prices on routes for which a direct bus may be more expensive.
There’s no special filter you have to enable for these combo-routes to show up in your search results. Simply keep an eye out for options that list “Multiple Carriers,” like this one from Concord, New Hampshire to New York City (clicking on ‘details’ in the bottom left-hand corner expands a full description of the itinerary):
As you can see, this particular route combines a Concord Coach Lines ride from Concord to Boston with an Amtrak ride from Boston to New York — at a price significantly cheaper than a direct bus or train from Concord to New York.
4. Combine Bus & Train
Follow in the steps of Steve Martin and John Candy in the classic comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (though, hopefully, with fewer obstacles preventing you from getting home for Thanksgiving) by combining bus and train travel for a better deal to your destination.
This capability allows us to potentially build more budget-friendly trips than if you were to take a train the entire way. Even better, it gives you the opportunity to sing both “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Conjunction Junction” on the same journey. 🎤
You can specifically opt into what type of travel you want – bus, train, or both.
5. Find More Convenient Stations
Time is money.
Money is also money.
Save both by being more strategic in which station you choose to depart from or arrive into.
Say you live in the Bronx and are planning a trip to Boston. The surge price of an Uber to Manhattan, where most buses depart from, could cost you your firstborn child. Lugging your suitcase between boroughs on the subway also sucks. The solution: Find a closer station.
And that’s where our “Stations” filter comes in handy. Located along the left-hand side of the Wanderu search page, you can narrow your results to specific “Departure” stations closer to your point of origin, or “Arrival” stations near your final destination:
To save you the extra time of looking up each individual address, simply click the “Map” pin next to each station name to see where it’s located in Google Maps:
Bonus: This feature is also super helpful if you’re flying out of a different city than the one you live in. (For instance, if you found tickets to France were way cheaper out of Boston than New York, using the “Stations” filter you could narrow your results to only show buses that go directly to the airport.)
That trick doesn’t necessarily get you a deal on bus or train tickets, but knowing how easy it is to fly out of a distant airport could potentially save you buckets of dough on airfare. (And if you do decide to go to Europe, we have you covered there as well. Like when we found 10 gorgeous cities in France you can travel to for less than $150 by bus.)
Budgeting for travel is anything but predictable. Ticket prices fluctuate. Your non-refundable tour gets canceled. Your bar tab for one round of shots ends up pushing $100.
But by applying these booking hacks on Wanderu and using the Wanderu app, you can counter at least some of that uncertainty by finding great deals on bus and train travel.
