How we make our holiday budget work for us….

We love going on holiday and it’s something we’re very happy to spend money on. In fact, one of the reasons we try to save money throughout the year is so we can afford to travel and have more holidays, so when we do go away we want to make the most of every minute.

That’s a big part of why saving money on holidays, for us, isn’t about finding the absolute cheapest deal or spending as little as possible once we’re there. There’s not much point spending all year saving towards a holiday and then refusing to spend money on the things that would make that holiday better.

Instead, we try to save on the things that don’t matter to us so we’re happy to spend on the things that do. Sometimes that means booking a cheaper hotel or not paying to choose our seats, and sometimes it means deliberately paying more for better flight times, early access or an experience we know we’ll love.

Over the years, we’ve worked out what’s worth paying extra for and what’s really not, and I think that’s made us much better at getting good value from our holidays without feeling like we’re having a cheap holiday.

We decide what’s important to us

I think this is probably the biggest thing we’ve learned. There’s no point paying extra for something just because everyone else seems to think it’s an essential part of a holiday, but equally, there’s no point choosing the cheapest option if it’s going to make the holiday worse for us.

Flight times are a perfect example. They’re really important to me and I’ll happily pay a bit more for good flights, especially on a short break. I don’t want to fly through the night and I don’t want to lose half a day of our holiday because a cheaper flight doesn’t get us there until late in the evening.

Someone else might happily take the cheaper flight and spend the difference on a nice meal when they get there. Neither choice is wrong. It’s just about knowing what matters to you and spending accordingly.

We don’t pay to sit together on a plane

Seat selection, on the other hand, is something we generally don’t bother paying for when it’s just the two of us.

Most of the time we’ve ended up sitting together anyway, but we’re really not bothered if we don’t – in fact, I think my partner would generally prefer it as I am not the ideal seat buddy on a plane as I’m always pretty restless and need at least three trips to the toilet for a wee on even a short flight. 😁

Despite my need to fidget and move about, I usually put my headphones in and try to listen to something I’ve downloaded on YouTube in the airport, so paying extra to guarantee that we’re sitting next to each other doesn’t add anything to the holiday for us.

It’s one of the easiest holiday extras for us to skip because we don’t feel like we’re missing out on anything at all. I’d much rather keep that money for something we’ll actually enjoy when we get there.

We compare what we’re actually getting for the price

It’s really easy to look at two holiday prices and assume the cheaper one is the better deal, but the headline price doesn’t always tell the whole story.

We recently booked a last-minute holiday to Ibiza with TUI and one of the reasons we chose them was because our luggage was included in the package price. With some budget airlines and holiday companies, things like checked baggage can be extra, so we’d always add everything we actually need before comparing prices properly.

A £50 saving isn’t really a £50 saving if you then need to spend £80 adding something that’s included with the supposedly more expensive option. We try to look at the final price we’ll actually pay rather than getting too excited about the number we see first.

We use cashback when it’s available

Cashback is one of my favourite ways to save on something we’re going to buy anyway because there’s no compromise involved.

We recently booked our airport parking at Manchester Airport through TopCashback. We’d already decided which car park we wanted to use, so going through a cashback site first meant we got some money back without changing our plans or choosing something purely because it paid more cashback.

It’s not always a huge amount, but those little savings add up across a holiday. If I’m booking parking, hotels or anything else online, it’s always worth taking a minute to check whether there’s cashback available before I pay.

We don’t automatically choose the highest star rating

Hotel star ratings aren’t hugely important to us. I’d much rather stay in a three-star hotel with consistently good recent reviews than pay more for an extra star just because it sounds nicer.

I always spend time reading the most recent reviews before we book. I want somewhere clean, comfortable and in a location that works for us, and there are certain things like decent air conditioning in a hot country that matter far more to me than whether the hotel has three, four or five stars next to its name.

Our hotel in Ibiza wasn’t the best hotel we’ve ever stayed in and the food was definitely interesting at times. 😂 But it was clean, the air conditioning was spot on, there were plenty of drinks to choose from, enough sunbeds for everyone and brilliant pools. It was so hot that the pool water felt more like a bath at times, but I’m not sure we can blame the hotel for that one. 😂

It gave us what we needed from that particular holiday without us paying more for things that weren’t important to us.

Sometimes we’ll spend more upfront to make the holiday cheaper overall

We don’t always book all-inclusive because we really enjoy eating out and trying different places when we’re away. Sometimes, though, it makes sense for the kind of holiday we’re having.

Ibiza was booked at the last minute and we hadn’t had months to put spending money aside, so all-inclusive gave us the reassurance of knowing that pretty much everything we needed was already paid for.

We still went out when we wanted to. We had drinks at a beach bar, went to a local pub to watch a band and spent our last evening exploring Ibiza Town and the hippy market. But we didn’t need money for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks and snacks every day.

Paying more upfront gave us much more control over what we’d spend once we arrived, which was worth it for that particular trip.

Sometimes paying for the extras is absolutely worth it

We’re definitely not against holiday extras just because they cost more. If paying extra is going to make a real difference to our holiday, then we’ll happily do it.

Our recent Butlins holiday is a really good example of this. We paid extra for early access because we knew we wanted to see the shows and getting in earlier meant we had a better chance of getting good seats. That’s something that genuinely makes a difference to us, so it was worth paying for.

We also paid for early check-in. We could have saved that money and arrived later, but we’d already travelled all the way there and wanted to start enjoying the holiday as soon as possible. Paying a little extra to get into our accommodation earlier gave us more time to enjoy a holiday we’d already paid for.

We booked our meals and added the all-inclusive drinks option too, which meant that once we were there, everything was easy. We weren’t constantly thinking about how much meals and drinks were costing because most of it had already been sorted and paid for.

We also pre-booked the activities we knew everyone would want to do. That meant we could space them out across the week rather than trying to fit everything in at the last minute or finding that something we’d really wanted to do was fully booked.

None of those extras were essential. We could have gone to Butlins without paying for them and still had a holiday, but for us they made the holiday better and easier. If we’ve saved for a holiday, we want to actually enjoy it rather than spend the whole time thinking about how we could have shaved another few pounds off the cost.

We don’t save money just for the sake of saving money

This is probably the part of holiday budgeting that’s most important to us. If there’s something we really want to do, we’ll generally do it if we can afford it.

I’d rather save money on seat selection, get cashback on the airport parking and choose a perfectly good three-star hotel, then use some of what we’ve saved to do something we’ll actually remember.

That’s exactly why we save money on the things that don’t matter to us. It means we’re much happier spending it on the things that do.

We still spend money even when we’ve already paid for all-inclusive

There’s also a danger with all-inclusive holidays of feeling like you have to stay in the hotel because you’ve already paid for the food and drinks. We don’t look at it that way.

The all-inclusive gives us a base where we know everything is covered, but if we want to go somewhere else then we will. In Ibiza we paid for drinks in a beach bar even though we could have walked back to the hotel and had them for free. We went to the pub down the road because there was a band playing, and we paid for a taxi back from Ibiza Town because that was how we wanted to spend our last evening.

Technically we could have spent almost nothing while we were there, but that wasn’t the goal. We’d rather spend a little extra and do the things we want to do than miss out simply because we’ve already paid for something back at the hotel.

Cheap and good value aren’t always the same thing

I think this is the biggest difference between the way we look at holidays now and simply trying to find the cheapest possible trip.

The cheapest flight isn’t good value to us if the flight times mean losing half a day of our holiday. A more expensive hotel isn’t necessarily better value if we’re paying for facilities we won’t use, and paying to choose our seats isn’t worth it when we genuinely don’t care where we sit.

But paying for early access so we get better seats at shows we really want to see can be worth it. Paying for early check-in so we get more time out of our holiday can be worth it. And an experience we really want to do can absolutely be worth spending money on, even when it’s completely unnecessary.

We save money throughout the year partly because we want to travel, so once we’re actually on holiday, we want to make the most of it. That doesn’t mean throwing money around or paying for every possible extra. It means knowing what will make a difference to us and being happy to spend our money on those things.

For us, saving money on holidays isn’t about making the holiday as cheap as possible. It’s about spending less on the things we don’t care about so we’ve got more money for the things we do.

And that’s exactly how we want to spend our money.

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