9 essential travel hacks for better football away days

The away day is one of football’s greatest rituals. Excitement and nerves combine for a heady mixture when you’re visiting an opposing ground. It starts the moment you put on your away kit, not unlike a warrior prepares to enter enemy territory. You meet your mates at the caff or nearest ‘spoons. There’s breakfast, and very possibly the day’s first pint. Then it’s off to the station or coach stop, ready to venture into the unknown armed with little more than a head full of questionable chants and some rowdy songs.

Being well prepared will go a long way to ensuring your away day is a memorable one. Unless you’re very special indeed, you won’t be able to affect the final scoreline—but you can easily hack your next football trip with a few tips and tricks. These are things we’ve picked up ourselves over the years, having visited grounds from the Premier League right the way down to League 2 (and even non-league). From tips on getting the cheapest train fares to why an easy-to-use VPN is an essential mate to invite along, it’s all here.

Ready to follow your team as it writes the next chapter in its history? Here’s what you should do to help everything run smoothly. As the Official Digital Privacy Partner of Tottenham Hotspur, we’ve focussed this guide on football in the UK, but the principles can be applied wherever you are.

1) Book travel in advance

It’s no great secret that train tickets in the UK cost a small fortune. Get ahead of the game by booking travel for your next away day as soon as possible. Advance tickets offer the best value on the country’s National Rail network and are usually released around 12 weeks before the departure date they relate to. If you know when you need to travel this far in advance, be sure to take advantage of these cheaper fares. Independent ticket seller Trainline offers a Price Prediction app to help give you additional insight into when fares are likely to rise and fall.

2) Splitting your fare can help you save

Missed the boat on Advance tickets? Don’t worry. Sometimes, splitting your fare is actually the cheapest way to travel. This is one the best overall UK train hacks out there and worth checking out regardless of what Network Rail’s official early bird offers are saying. In short: often, it’s cheaper to buy two tickets for a journey instead of one.

For instance, the combined price of London to York, then York to Newcastle, may be cheaper than buying a single fare for the entire London to Newcastle journey. You can do the legwork (and math) yourself, or there are a number of split-fare services that will do all the heavy lifting for you. According to November 2024 research conducted by MoneySavingExpert.com, the site that finds the cheapest fares most of the time is TrainPal.

3) Invest in a railcard

An oldie, but still a goodie. In the UK, anyone who travels by train semi-regularly can buy a railcard to enjoy regular, consistent discounts on their fares. There are special ones for students, young people, families, couples, seniors, veterans—you name it—but even the bog standard, open-to-all Network Railcard offers 1/3rd off fares for an upfront cost of just £30 a year. In our experience, you’ll break even and start entering the black on your second journey. Check out the Network Rail Railcards page for more information and to sign up.

Image credit: Jed Leicester/BPI/Shutterstock

4) Get the best deals on accommodation

Not that we’re picking on Newcastle, but if it’s next on your team’s away slate, you might well be tempted to make a weekend of it. The Quayside has plenty to recommend it after a match at iconic St James’ Park, but before we give you the full tourist board spiel, we need to talk about accommodation.

Put simply, accommodation costs usually skyrocket at weekends and when there are big events in town. This is because of dynamic pricing, whereby many hotels, booking sites, and bands called Oasis adjust their prices based on supply and demand. When lots of people want to stay somewhere, this means it’s going to be more expensive, so as with transport you need to get ahead of the game and book early before things fill up.

It’s also often worth contacting hotels and other accommodation providers directly, as sometimes they’ll offer you preferential prices compared to third-party platforms. If you’re looking for an Airbnb in particular, bear in mind that its cleaning and admin fees mean it often charges you more than you’d pay if you dealt directly with the property’s owners or a local rental agency.

If you find somewhere you like the look of on Airbnb, try to find it for less by simply cutting and pasting the listing’s headline into Google. Then use the Images tab to filter your results, adding the word “rent” or “rental” as needed to bring up only relevant results. This should then reveal if the Airbnb has its own website or is listed elsewhere.

5) Use a VPN to unlock the best deals

There’s a shortcut for finding the best deals online and it’s one we’re obviously fond of: using a VPN. Some online retailers – especially those that utilise dynamic pricing to begin with like hotel, flight and train booking sites – will show you higher prices if their data tells them you have a vested interest in booking something. This might be because you’ve returned to look at the same journey multiple times, or because location data reveals you’re already in the city you’re looking for accommodation in.

It’s pretty unfair, if you ask us, to be penalised like this—so firing up the best travel VPN comes highly recommended. Using a VPN like ExpressVPN gives you a fresh IP address and browsing history, ensuring you can’t be profiled by online retailers and advertisers. This in turn helps you unlock the best prices on things, with the added benefit of making you appear like a first-time visitor to sites and fast-tracking your access to new customer discount codes.

6) Should you drive to an away day?

There’s something magical about joining fellow away day travellers on the train or coach to an away day, but driving is also an option that may be worth considering, depending on the circumstances. For instance, if public transport prices have just hit stratospheric heights, you might be tempted to power your own journey. You own ride may also be preferable if you’re travelling with kids or someone less able. As ever, the more bums on seats the better to try and reduce your carbon footprint.

If you do drive to a match away, our biggest reminder is to consider the implications of parking. A number of popular apps will give you a birds-eye view of parking around major stadiums, and some will even let you pre-book. JustPark is probably the biggest name out there, but based on our testing, Your Parking Space looks like a better option.

Using Tottenham games as our baseline, we investigated what it would look like trying to park for the away clash against Southampton (on Sunday, December 15). At the time of testing, we had approximately 48 hours to go before our proposed arrival, and Your Parking Space brought up five more-or-less affordable options still in the vicinity of St Mary’s, compared to two from Just Park (plus one £70 chancer).

Similarly, if your car is electric, be sure to know where you’ll juice up, and it can also be well-worth researching traffic, planning rest stops, and of course checking up on the weather forecast.

7) Plan your pre-game pubs wisely

Let’s not pretend otherwise: football and drinking kind of go hand-in-hand, both in the UK and other countries where the sport is popular. If you’re looking forward to a few bevvies as part of your away day experience, make sure you know where you’ll get served once you arrive behind enemy lines. In most towns, city, and matchday areas, the majority of pubs won’t admit fans wearing away colours. And in some places, like Wembley, different sets of fans will actually be pre-allocated different drinking dens.

Separation of opposing fans is intended to prevent good natured banter from spilling over, so do yourself a favour and find out which pubs will (more) warmly welcome away fans in advance. We love the Football Ground Guide as a benchmark resource, and can confirm its general accuracy based on our knowledge of the areas around Chelsea and Fulham FC.

Image credit: ANL/Shutterstock

8) Pack connectivity essentials

Football stadiums are many things, but unless you’re in a VIP box, you might not find a host of extra amenities. If you’re putting in a full day’s shift following your team, be sure to pack everything you need to stay juiced up on your travels. This might just be a phone charger, though veteran travellers like ourselves swear by packing a power bank for back-up. This will allow you to charge your phone and other devices wherever you are, even in the stands. You’ll never miss capturing the joyous delirium of a last-minute winner again!

9) Secure public Wi-Fi access the easy way

Remember how we mentioned Network Rail? Well, in 2024 it got hacked—badly. The UK’s train overlord suffered a devastating and humiliating cyberattack targeting its public Wi-Fi systems, highlighting the risk to travellers, including football fans, who rely on these networks to stay connected.

As a starting point, download a VPN to take back control of your personal online security. A good VPN like ExpressVPN will have apps for all major platforms and device types, making it easy to stay protected on-the-go. We’re particularly easy, if we’re honest, as once installed all it takes to enable secure and private internet access is a single tap.

If you’re travelling as a group or staying overnight as part of your away day, you could also consider making the modest investment in one of our Aircove Go routers. This nifty, pocket-sized bit of kit makes connecting to secure Wi-Fi a dawdle and, like an ExpressVPN subscription, you can connect on up to up to eight devices at once—perfect for you and your (well-behaved) firm. Best of all, if you buy an Aircove Go router we’ll give you a special free 30-day trial of ExpressVPN.

Header Image Credit: Michael Zemanek/Shutterstock