If you like to save money when you travel, you’re actually in good luck — fall is a great time to actually save a lot of money. Unless you’re going to be traveling during a major holiday, you’ll find that a lot of people just aren’t going to be traveling with you. This worries the major travel outlets, and what happens next is usually a wide variety of discounts. Again, the only exception to this is when you actually need to travel during the holidays. Since the demand is so high, you’re not as likely to find good deals. However, since the fall season is enough considered be off-peak, you actually have the chance for some good deals.

Therefore, fall is the perfect time for the budget traveler to build a vacation that’s actually going to be interesting.

If you’re going to stay for at least a week, why not switch things up when it comes to accommodation? After all, since fall is the time for great deals you might actually want to book a vacation home rather than yet another hotel. Even though it feels like you might pay a little more, the truth is that you actually get the cook your own food instead of having to go out to a restaurant every night. Even if you’ve got the budget, you’ll probably long to actually eat something that you’ve cooked. If you have any type of allergies or intolerances — or if you’re traveling with friends and family that do — you’re going to want that freedom to cook your own food. The last thing that you want to do is skip over details that will come in handy later on down the road, right?

Now that food and accommodations out of the way, you might want to actually take the time to think about what you actually want to do. The nice part about off-peak travel is that you really do get to think about the type of experience that you create on vacation. It’s hard when everything is so busy to really think about what you want to do. So if there’s something that you wanted to do during your summer trip that you didn’t get to do, you might want to just add it to your fall vacation instead. That’s really the way to go.

One thing that we really recommend is that you don’t make the fall trip a solo one. Unless your summer was already a group trip, then by all means — get a little solitude for yourself. However, we think that group vacation is a lot more fun because you really get to enjoy things as a group and there’s a built in social structure. Of course, if you’re smothered by people in your day to day life, you might go on vacation to really unplug and get away from it all.

As always, all of the details are definitely up to you, but you’ll want to start putting something into motion before the holidays come up!