After two years of travel disruption, hundreds and thousands of people are looking forward to enjoying a long overdue holiday in the sun this year.
But while the question marks around travel since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have all been about lockdowns, restrictions and positive tests, now another doubt has reared its head. Can we afford a big blowout holiday with day-to-day living costs rising so sharply?
With inflation hitting a 30-year high of 7% in the UK, consumers are being warned to tighten their purse strings ahead of further expected hikes in food, fuel and energy costs. As household essentials continue to take a bigger and bigger bite out of our budgets, the ready cash people have available for luxuries like a holiday abroad will get less and less.
That will naturally lead people to ask serious questions about whether it’s sensible to splash out on a big holiday this summer. Then again, so many people chose not to take the risk of going on holiday abroad while travel restrictions were in place that there is understandably now huge pent up demand.
And what if you have already booked your holiday like thousands did as soon as travel restrictions started to be eased earlier in the year? Are you now concerned about whether you can afford your trip after all? What can you do to keep the costs manageable?
There’s now doubt that foreign holidays are expensive. A family of four can expect to pay anywhere between £1,600 and £3,000 on average for flights and accommodation for a 10-night break in Europe.
Of course, costs multiply rapidly when you start to add in things like food and drink, trips and entertainment, car hire and other travel expenses, and all the other things you end up buying when you go on holiday.
So what can you do to keep both core holiday costs and all the extras under control and manageable even while the cost of living crisis bites? Here are some top tips for how to holiday for less.
Go abroad
Yes, that’s right. If you want a cheap holiday this year, you have a better chance of sticking to your budget if you go abroad rather than choosing to holiday in the UK. The staycation trend that blew up during the pandemic has pushed prices in the UK sky high. During the Easter holidays, research showed that average prices in popular European destinations were as much as 40% lower than in the UK.
Book your own flights
There is a lot of debate over whether it is cheaper to book holidays independently by purchasing flights and accommodation separately online or go for a package holiday. There is no doubt that you can grab some amazing bargains with package holidays, especially if you leave it to the last minute.
But there’s an element of chance to this. A much more certain way to grab a bargain is to use comparison sites like Kayak or Skyscanner to book your own flights. The best approach is to be flexible about dates and search for the cheapest flights to a destination within a range. Or, search for all flights within a range of dates and choose where to go based on the best prices.
Keep tabs on accommodation prices
If you do decide to book everything yourself, it’s best to buy flights first and then look at accommodation. Once you have cheap flights, it’s usually easier to then find a good deal on accommodation to match.
Again, use comparison sites. It’s also worth noting that hotel prices can fluctuate a lot. So choose an option with free cancellation and keep checking prices even after you have booked. If you see the same hotel listed for cheaper, simply cancel and rebook.
Buy holiday insurance straight away
A lot of people question the value of buying holiday insurance, and will no doubt view it as an optional expense when budgets are tight. But this is a dangerous move, especially when the risk of your holiday being cancelled remains high. Can you afford to lose money on your holiday if someone in your party tests positive for COVID just before you go? Or if staff shortages at your airline mean your flight gets cancelled (as happened to thousands of holidaymakers at Easter)?
Saving money also means taking sensible precautions to protect your money. By buying travel insurance as soon as you book your trip, you will be covered if anything goes wrong in the build-up to your trip, like falling seriously ill and having to change your plans.
Get an overseas payment card
Contactless payments have revolutionised how we pay. But if you’d fallen into the habit of using your standard debit or credit card wherever you went before the pandemic struck, we have some bad news for you – your card provider was probably charging you for every transaction you made.
This can make your holiday spending a lot more expensive than they need to be. If you still want the ease and convenience of contactless payments, the answer is to get a dedicated overseas card instead. They are available in credit and debit forms, you link them to your normal cards, but the difference is that transaction fees are drastically lowered or else waived completely. You also get excellent exchange rates.
