Keep these tips in mind to make sure your vacation isn’t a waste of coin:

Be prepared.

Maybe you’ve watched too many movies, but for some reason you have it in your head that everything will unfold smoothly once you arrive. All you need to do is parachute in with a rucksack and an assured outlook on life and you’ll instantly be ushered into an affordable, comfortable hostel and bump into a shy, but quirky and cute local girl who will act as your interpreter and personal guide. That may happen if you set out on your journey without a game plan, but a more likely scenario involves you, alone, in the train station, ten minutes to closing without a euro or a clue.This can be a wee bit stressful.

Instead of dropping yourself immediately into emergency mode, where you’ll be desperate enough to pay exorbitant prices for any available taxi or bed, have some of the basics mapped out and booked before you arrive. Yes, you could ask around town until you stumble upon the best deals, but, amazingly enough, most of the legwork can be done from home, seeing as you obviously have Internet access. (Or did you get someone to print this article for you? Tree-waster.) Researching hotels at sites like hotels.com or venere.com or ricksteves.com can easily be done during your lunch break at the office, weeks or months in advance – you know, when you’re not in a foreign land, jet-lagged and lugging 80 pounds of luggage.

Do as much planning as possible ahead of time. Consider yourself a military operative with a clear objective: relax, have fun. Your mission is only to execute the orders delineated at HQ, not to cook up directives on the fly. Have a plan of attack before you touch down so you can go about the business of chilling on autopilot. Find a couple good restaurants, figure out where to change your money, find a place to stay (at least for the first few nights), read a recent guide book cover-to-cover, print off a map and a bus or train schedule before you hop a plane. Take care of the basics – once you are oriented and have a place to stash your stuff and sleeping body, then you can start winging it.

Remember: You are visiting a foreign nation, not an amusement park. You aren’t guaranteed fun if you haven’t planned for it, and no one is going to go out of their way to keep you smiling except you.

Stop being a sitcom male and ask a damn stranger for help.

Even a former Boy Scout won’t be prepared for everything. When you roll into town, straight off the boat, there is likely going to be something that throws you for a loop. Maybe something has changed since your guidebook was published or perhaps you have no freaking clue how to get into the pay toilet. Don’t sit there like a tourist consulting your guidebook in a crowded train station when you can easily reach out to any number of strangers bustling about you. Someone who lives there will have far more information than the intern that was sent by Lonely Planet to scope out Gare du Nord.

I know, I know, you’re a man and you ain’t never asked for nothing from nobody. A snow leopard could rip the arm from your socket and you wouldn’t so much ask for a band aid. But here’s the thing: being lost in a foreign country is an entirely different universe than being lost on the interstate in Ohio. You need to ask for help.

Memorize key phrases such as, “Excuse me, where is the tourist information center?” and “Where is this train headed?” and “Where is [my hotel]?” Also note that most employees in Western European countries do speak English, but they’d really prefer that you at least try to speak their language, even if all you can say in their native tongue is, “Excuse me, I am a silly monolingual American, please, do you speak English?”

And for God’s sake, don’t resort to the slow, loud-talking, wildly gesticulating attempts at communication that some hapless tourists adopt. For one, the person you are trying to speak to is merely Spanish or Italian or German, not deaf, and also, even if they can’t understand your words, they can read your tone loud and clear and if you sound annoyed and condescending, they’ll feel less obliged to help you. Locals in the know are your saviors when you are in a jam, and getting on their good side requires a dose of humility and patience.

Budget like a bean counter and then spend like a jackass.

One big problem with vacations is that they are expensive. It’s expensive to get there, and, at least recently, with the dollar in the doldrums, it’s expensive to do everything else once you arrive. Knowing this can throw a wet soggy blanket on your fun factor. If you’re the fiscally responsible spendthrift that I think you are, you are likely to feel every euro or pound that passes through your fingers and wince at the thought of spending so much per day.

Budgeting on the fly leads to one of two major hang ups: either you overspend to the point that you run out of money before you get home (”C’mon, I’m on vacation” is the argument here) or you underspend for fear of breaking the bank and miss out on a one-of-a-kind experience.

Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.