With the changes in the Market, I've found that I've had to travel a lot.  I have had other jobs where I had to travel, but someone else was always footing the bill.  I had constraints in my travel budget, but the money still didn't come out of my pocket.  Today with travel costs directly affecting my bottom line, I look at things differently.

A Basic Truth..
The faster and more comfortable you want to get someplace, the more it will cost you.  The President goes from his house by helicopter to Andrews AFB, and boards a special 747 that flies him in luxury to wherever he wants to go.  He doesn't have to take the DC Metro to Reagan National and stand in his stocking feet waiting to go through the metal detector.  Needless to say, his travel is expensive.  You probably can't afford that.  On the other hand, you see people hitchiking from city to city, sleeping in rest stops or under bridges.  Their travel is cheap, and probably pretty slow.  I doubt you want to travel that way.

Most of us have accomodations somewhere in the middle, and you have a bit of wiggle room in the budget for the type of traveling you want to do.

Driving
Driving is very cheap, especially for a group of people.  However, it sucks up time.  It can be a decision based on how busy or slow you are.  If spending 10 hours driving won't cost you other business, that may be an acceptable alternative.  Generally for trips 5 hours and under, it is probably better to drive anyway, since security at airports is so hellish anymore.  If you are in a city like Atlanta, even driving to the airport and parking there is a voyage in itself. 

I've found that renting a car isn't very expensive if you get one from a car dealership, and it helps you avoid putting miles on your own vehicle.  Also, if you are anything like me, your personal vehicle may not be suitable for interstate driving.  My little Ford Ranger truck is great for getting around the city and jobsites, but on the Interstate it is a torture machine.

Flying
Those of us over 50 remember when flying was actually fun.  In my first plane flight my father wore a suit, I had to wear a tie, and Mom wore a dress with gloves.  The meals were served with real silverware.  Of course they were starting to hijack planes to Cuba at the time (I was secretly hoping for a trip to Havana on that flight, it would have been more fun than spending the week with Grandma and Grandpop watching Lawrence Welk), so that era was coming to a fast end.  As we all know air travel today can be as much fun as a root canal, but on the other hand airline tickets are much cheaper in real dollars than they were back in 1968, so it is a trade off.  There are so many tips on flying it can really make your head spin.  You can do so many tricks to save money.  Some aren't very practical if you are trying to save time (why else would you fly?).  For example, you can sometimes save if you go to Birmingham, Alabama from here in Atlanta to catch a flight.  I did it once, it was a three hour drive.  My return flight got in at 2 AM, and I got to drive through the fog fighting sleep to get to Atlanta just in time for morning rush hour.  It wasn't worth it. 

You can also get "special" deals for cheap flights that route you through remote places.  I am going to Washington, DC next week and I could have saved $30 to take a flight routed through Miami.  The trip would have taken 10 hours not counting the trek to the Airport in Atlanta, or the torture time in airport security.  I could drive faster. 

Generally, I found you can get tickets the cheapest by checking out the sites for all the major discount airlines (such as Air Tran, Spirit, or Southwest).  Spirit offers very good deals and a $9 fare club.  They charge you for sodas and chips, but if you are saving a lot of money, who cares?  I also will check out Orbitz or other discount sites to verify I am getting a good deal.  By the way, I found Orbitz to have extremely good service.  I accidentally bought two tickets to Tampa when I meant to buy one down there and one back (different airlines to save money).  I discovered my mistake at Tampa Airport one hour before my flight the flight that I thought would take me home was ready to leave in the opposite direction.  Orbitz canceled my ticket and refunded me all of my money. 

Car Rental
Car rental rates are extremely varied.  Generally, the cheapest rates are found at car dealerships, I learned that when I was in the Air National Guard.  We found that renting a vehicle to make a trip was cheap, saved us mileage on our personal vehicle, and we didn't have to drive a government owned clunker (plus we tried to keep mileage down on our own fleet since we knew we would have those vehicles for a long while).  It still is a good way to travel now.

If you are flying to a city, unless you are staying for a long time renting from an auto dealership is not practical.  There are a number of discount car rental agencies at airports, and I've gotten good deals with Orbitz.  However, I made a mistake in my last trip by being too cheap, I rented from an "offsite" car rental company.

I got into the airport at about midnight, and I had to call the rental company from a courtesy phone.  No live person answered, I got a recorded message telling me the bus would be at the pickup area in 15 minutes.  I got to the pickup area and waited about 40 minutes.  The rental lot was in a seedy area of town, and I spent 45 minutes getting the car (I was the only person there).  The agent tried to high pressure me into buying insurance that was more expensive than the rental, and told me how by not getting it that my children would be sold into slavery if I got into any kind of fender bender.  Well, I needed to save money, so I figured my sons would understand if they had to spend the rest of their lives in involuntary servitude.  After all I did for them, they owe me something. 

The return was worse.  It took about a half hour to return the car, I couldn't hear the clerk over the loud noise from their shuttle (the exhaust had a bad leak).  The ride to the airport was loud with the exhaust, and the driver was playing the radio at full blast to compete with the exhaust system.  The shocks were nonexistent.  I had discovered on the bus my reservation error (see earlier paragraph), and tried to correct things on the trip to the airport over the noise and while being bounced around.  It didn't work.  I also left my prescription sunglasses on the vehicle.  The moral - super cheap is no bargain.  Go with the major companies like Budget, Dollar, Thrifty...

Train
From here in Atlanta, train travel isn't too practical.  The only train is the Crescent and it goes from Washington D.C. to New Orleans.  You don't have any variety of departure times,and the one time I took the train I found there was no long term parking.  The Masonic Lodge near the station here in Atlanta allows you to park for a minor fee, but my car was broken into and ransacked while I was gone.

However, in the Northeast, the schedules are hourly for the most part, the trains are fast, and the stations are converiently located in downtown areas.  If traveling cities between Washington DC and Boston, I would go by train.  No security hassles, very comfortable, and very fast.  Also, the trains feed into the various commuter trains and subway systems in those cities.

Hotels
Of course you have to stay somewhere.  Cheap is not good with hotels and motels.  My grandparents used to like motels that cost $5 a night (in 1974), and I was always creeped out by the mold, filth, and bugs in those rooms.  In 1979 I stayed in a similar place off of Stewart Avenue here in Atlanta when I was working on the Intrenchment Creek Tunnel project because I didn't know any better.   It took about two or three days for me to figure out what was being sold on Stewart Avenue and why people were coming in and out of the motel all night.  I went from being mildly annoyed to very amused (I was 23).  There was a 12 year old boy who hung out in the lobby in the evening and changed sheets for a dollar every time a room turned over.  One prostitute made extra money babysitting for children of tourists from places like Iowa (so many seem rather clueless why a woman wears layers of makeup and cheap scanty clothing).  I don't recommend you stay in the same kind of place even if you can get a cheap babysitter during daylight hours.

Generally, you should look for hotels/motels that have an entrance through a lobby, no direct entrance to the rooms from the outside.  That helps you stay away from drug dealers and prostitutes and all the trouble they bring with them.  Avoid hotels with bullet holes (I was put up once in one in Wyoming by the Air National Guard that had a window blown out by what clearly was a shotgun blast, I did not find that amusing at all).  If the desk clerk is behind a bullet resistant glass window, that's a bad sign too.   Generally chains like Hampton Inn or Marriott are pretty good.  At the lower end the Choice Hotels are nice and inexpensive. 

I have found often while traveling that I do not get the best deal on hotels through places like Orbitz.  The problem often with hotel reservations through Internet travel sites is that once you make the reservation, you can't change it.   I found calling them direct and negotiating a discount works much better.  Also, if you get into an area late at night you can get a cheap room in a good hotel without a reservation.  Early in the morning (like 1 or 2 AM) they will start to discount the room.  Hotels also give all sorts of discounts, so ask.  There are AAA discounts, military discounts, senior citizen discounts, US Government discounts... the list goes on and on.  The important thing is to ask.

Meals
If you are driving, forget about anyplace exotic like Applebee's or TGIFriday's on the Interstate.  You are stuck with fast food or stuff that tastes like it belongs in a high school cafeteria because the restaurants between major cities aim towards the lowest common denominator.  There are exceptions of course, but generally highway food is really bland.  I generally brown bag it when I travel by car now.  I don't want to wait an hour for a meal of chicken fingers and mashed potatoes, and the greasy food in the fast food places doesn't go too well with me while I drive.

In major metropolitan areas you have much more choice of meals.  When I traveled with the military, we always looked for local type stuff (Mexican food in the Southwest, Barbeque in the Southeast and so on...).  Generally those places aren't any more expensive than the bland chains, and it makes the trip less agonizing.  Do not eat in hotel restaurants, they are generally expensive and the food quality is often poor.  Be careful of exotic restaurants with foreign food, often they will be ridiculously expensive.   In major cities like New York you can surprisingly good food from sidewalk vendors and it is pretty inexpensive.  Here in Atlanta... well, stick to the restaurants. 

Of course there is a lot of information to cover for cheap and effective travel, but this article is a compilation of my experiences. I hope you will find my experience helpful.