Posts Tagged ‘reservations’
3 Ways To Save On Your Next Family Holiday:
How to fly, stay, and eat for less…
The weather’s still bad and the news is gloomy; time to escape with the family for a week and decompress on a beach – right? Unfortunately, the economy is just as nasty as the weather and the news, and many are opting for “staycations” or canceling their travel plans altogether. For me, neither are appealing options… If I stayed close to home I’d never relax or let go of the chores that need tending to. If I cancelled our trip, I’d be even more miserable.
Back pre-baby, I was the cheapest traveler around. I flew on rickety airlines at awful times, I stayed at hostels and tiny b&bs, and I’d live for days on end on nothing but bread, cheese, and wine. But now that travel involves more than a backpack on my back and time on my hands, I’ve found it a challenge to travel on the cheap while still maintaining a certain level of comfort and safety for my daughter. However, I’ve now got a number of trips with her under my belt, and I’ve leaned some money-saving tricks along the way.
The economic crisis has affected the travel industry as well, so if you’ve already socked away your travel money, you may find it goes further than you were expecting it to with reduced prices on different types of packages. However, if you’re building a trip from scratch, here are some ways to fly, stay, and eat for less…
Avoiding A “Staycation”
The term ‘staycation’ has yet to make it into Webster’s dictionary, but Wikipedia describes it as “a period of time in which an individual or family stays at home and relaxes at home or takes day trips from their home to area attractions”. The reason for a staycation? Money, or lack thereof…
Now I’m all for mini-breaks of weekends away somewhere close, but “relaxing at home”? Not so much. I’d never stop thinking of all those things I ‘should’ be doing, and then feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing them since I was “relaxing at home”. Because travel has become such a big part of my life, I no longer look at it as a luxury. For me, going to new places with my family has given us all uninterrupted quality time together, and dreaming of new places to visit has become a welcome distraction when the busy-ness of work and home gets to be too much. Those first trips when our daughter was a baby gave me the confidence to do more of it, and also the experience to feel confident doing it for less. Safety and comfort are priorities when traveling with small children, and you can still maintain maybe Prosecco taste on a beer budget.
