How to Travel to Hong Kong on the Cheap

Hong Kong Neon

I recently went to Hong Kong and did it incredibly cheaply. Everyone talks about how expensive Hong Kong is, and to be fair, if you want to, you can spend a lot of money. But it’s also possible to do it quite cheaply. This is how I did it:

Flights

So to be fair, I got really cheap tickets. Cathay Pacific had done this wild promotion where they were giving away free tickets from select airports, and SFO was one of them. I didn’t win, but as a consolation prize, I was offered two-for-one tickets and I hopped on it. My wife couldn’t make it , so my buddy Nick came along with me. Since the tix were two-for-one, our tickets eded up being $570.75 each! And they were nonstop from SFO to Hong Kong.

Me and Nick watching the nightly light show

I know you won’t be getting two-for-one tickets, but luckily you can still get them pretty cheaply. You just have be patient. Here’s what you do:

Use Google Flights Explore: You can go to google.com/travel/explore and it will show you the best priced flights for destinations all over the world for the next six months. Pick a location you want to visit, like say Hong Kong, and check on the prices every few days. that’s because there are always new fares becoming available. Eventually you’ll find a price that works for you.

Use Kayak Explore: Kayak Explore is the exact same concept at Google Flights Explore but sometimes you can find different prices.

Going.com: Previously known as Scott’s Cheap Flights, Going.com is an incredible service that emails you awesome flight deals all the time. You sign up and enter your home airport and it will send you multiple different deals a week. IF you get the paid version, it will send you multiple deals a day. Like the previous options, you must be patient snd wait for a sweet deal that fits your budget.

You can use the above booking sites for travel anywhere you want to go in the world, not just Honk Kong.

Google Flights Explore

Hotels

As long as you’re not looking to stay in the fanciest places in Hong Kong, and there are very fancy places, you can find a solid hotel for very decent prices. I used Hotels.com and booked a room with two beds at the Garden View Hong Kong. The room was $726.44 for five nights, which was $363.22 for each of us. That breaks down to $72.64 per person, per night. One of the factors I chose it for was because it had an 8.0 rating out of 10 on Hotels.com, which is very good.

The beds in our room at the Garden View Hong Kong

Garden View Hong Kong was nice, clean, and exactly what we needed considering we didn’t spend too much time there other than sleeping and resting.

The view off Hong Kong from our room

There are certainly cheaper hotels and even hostels you can stay in if you want to minimize your budget even more.

One thing to keep in mind though is that Hong Kong isn’t just hilly, it’s mountainous. So the more you pay, the less steep your walk will be home. But it doesn’t matter too much, considering taxis are hella cheap.

The view from our hotel room at night.

Eating

Like anything in Honk Kong, eating can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be. There are tons of options for budget travelers ranging from hole in the wall noodle places to excellent street food.

An excellent street food stand.

Dim sum is everywhere and it is excellent. the more old school and traditional a place is, the more likely you are to have a cheap meal. We fell in love with a local chain called Mak’s Noodles, where delicious bowls of noodles start at like $6 USD. And you can find excellent places much cheaper than that.

This isn’t Mak’s noodles since I don’t think I took a photo there.

The photo above is from a place called Samdor Noodle. The boodle of noodles and the milk tea in from to me cost less than $10 together. And that was right in the center of Hong Kong. It gets much cheaper as you move away from the center.