When you take a vacation, what are the things on which you’ll splurge, and where do you try to cut corners?
For me, a vacation is all about the food and the accommodations, so that’s where I’m totally willing to splurge. Now, don’t get me wrong - I’ll sleep in a tent and eat beans out of a can on a vacation, if camping is the purpose of the trip. But if it’s a “Hey, I’ve always wanted to go to [insert locale where camping is not de rigeur]” kind of vacation, then I want the Room With A View and all the concomitant fanciness.
Of course, I’m not much of a sightseer, so I’d much rather have a luxurious hotel room and pay out the wazoo for lovely meals than shell out a bunch of cash to get into a museum, amusement/theme park, or get schlepped all over town in a tour bus with a bunch of people wearing matching sun visors, especially if the shelling out of said funds means I’m sleeping at the Skanky-Snooze Inn and eating at Burger King (or, as mentioned in the linked post, getting a burger on the run and then hitting the fancy restaurant for a cup of coffee and a mint, just to say I went to the fancy place).
Likewise, I don’t really need to walk away with a suitcase full of souvenirs, so I can skip the snowglobes and tee shirts altogether. And lastly, I don’t like to fly (in fact I usually try to sleep through the experience), so I’m completely willing to fly Cramped-n-Crappy airline to get the cheapest fare possible or, better yet, DRIVE to wherever I’m going, if time is not a huge issue.
So, what about you? Where do you splurge / penny-pinch when it comes to vacation costs?
While we don’t need four star accomodations, I certainly don’t mind paying more for convenience, for a place comfortably near whatever it is that drew us there in the first place. Be it Disney or skiing or the beach, it’s nice to be “right there”.
I’m with you on the meals too. It’s time to splurge.
We also though do like to take in a lot of the local flavor. We’ll opt for an evening sleigh ride, horse drawn carriage, ball game, Richard Petty Experience, whatever it is that exemplifies the character of the place.
Where we’ll scrimp is in maybe going during off-season, which has the added benefit of reducing the crowds. On the way there I’m fine with just a clean hotel, nothing fancy, and I really like just picknicking along the way.
And yeah, loading up on souveneirs just ain’t gonna happen.
Food and gambling, mainly. Our usual vacation spots are either visiting family or heading to Vegas. Our rooms are comped either way. So the cash is there to splurge on good food.
I’m with auntie em - give me a nice hotel in a central location and good food, and I’m happy. Central location is key for me. I was brought up spending vacations at the Holiday Inn at the edge of town and driving to where the family wanted to go; Mr. Athena introduced me to the joys of walking out your hotel door and being in the center of things.
My favorite activity while vacationing is usually walking around the place where I am and getting a feel for the town/city/whatever. We tend to walk for hours every day - so much that I when we came back from our 3 week vacation to France where it seemed like we did nothing but eat and drink I’d found I’d lost 3 pounds instead of gaining. Nothing like 6 hours of walking every day to counterbalance 3-croissant breakfasts!
And yes, food is key. Good restaurants are a must. They don’t have to be fancy or expensive, but I’m not eating at a McDonald’s.
Good food is much more important than accommodations–when I was in my teens, we took several trips where we would camp for 3-4 nights in various National Parks, then spend a night in a motel (for the shower, and so we had a little more free time then taking down the tent, driving for a couple hours, and setting up the tent allowed). But, even if we were camping, we’d often eat breakfast in camp, pack a lunch to eat while hiking, and eat out someplace --especially if the Lodge at the National Park was available. Not super expensive food, but not chain restaurants either. Only if I am in a foreign country do souveniers become important–and even then I don’t tend to go overboard.
Well, yes, I suppose I should make that amendment. Mostly I just want something good and, er, “off the chain”, as it were. Trouble is, it’s getting harder and harder to find non-chain restaurants in major cities. And tho’ I must admit that I myself have taken out of town guests to chain restaurants at their request, it’s still hard for me to imagine taking a vacation to a new place and being like, “Oh, good! A Houlihan’s! Let’s go there!”
(It’s a whole 'nother thing, though, if I’m going out of town to, say, help someone move or help watch someone’s kids while they’re in the hospital for surgery. Then, even if it’s somewhere I’ve never been before, I’m not treating it as a vacation so I’m likely to go for convenience over novelty.)
My Cheap Gene takes over when it comes to hotels–I want nice, but I won’t pay for nice. I like to eat well, but now that we’re parents we have to keep an eye to a place where the offspring will be decently accommodated.
I will spend money on museums – and shopping (museum gift shops especially). I like to have unique things to remember my trip by, and I often find good things for holiday gifts as well.
I grew up in a family without a lot of money to spend on vacation, so even little splurges feel special to me. You know, like going ahead and getting the $5.95 soda at the zoo without cringing or making myself walk around thirsty because I can get one so much cheaper on the way home. That’s like living the high life, when you’re me.
I get this a lot, as the town we live in doesn’t have a lot of the standard chain restaurants (no Olive Garden, no Ruby Tuesday, etc). My parents go out of town for the weekend and when they com back all I hear about is how good the Outback was. I guess it’s somewhat understandable, but I lived too long in places where there was chain food, and I don’t think I can ever get excited over it.
But what’s worse is that we do have a few chains here, and I have relatives who go to the same ones when they go on vacation. I just want to kick them in the teeth when they come back and tell me they spent their trip eating at at Red Lobster and Applebee’s, both of which we have locally. What? You think the Red Lobster a hundred miles south is noticeably different than the one here? Let me tell you, it’s still crappy.
And the very, very worst part is that quite often, the chain restaurants are better than the locally-owned restaurants in my town. But that’s an entirely different thread.
It’s where you don’t go to work so that you can spend several days holed up in a tiny space with only one loo, which you get to share with several of your family members, all while wearing yourself down to a bloody pulp so that by the time you get back to work you realize that work wasn’t so bad after all.
Location, location, location. The hotel doesn’t have to be all that fancy, just clean, comfortable, and in the right spot. I’ll pay extra for having a room by the beach, but not for robes and slippers and turn-down services.
I like to have a nice meal on occasion, like once or twice during a vacation, but most of the time the food doesn’t matter. I’ll cut corners by going to the grocery store for bread and cold cuts if that means I can stay longer and do more things.
When I lived in the Bay Area, CA, I used to get up to Seattle at least once a year to see my favorite uncle. And as my “special treat” on the last night of each visit, he and my aunt would take me to Red Lobster.
IN SEATTLE.
What’s worse is that it was, like, a 45-minute drive from their house.
On one of the last days of a three week trip to Israel, a group of us ate cheese pizza at Pizza Hut.
Annoyed me for several reasons:
I liked hummus and pita! Yes, we’d eaten that a lot, but still, they are much harder to find in the States.
I’m not a big fan of cheese pizza. Give me a pizza with a bunch of toppings, or at least pepperoni.
It’s Pizza Hut. Not horrible pizza, but not memorable pizza either.
But, several of my companions were into the “eat American food while in foreign country” thing, so that’s where we ended up.
The Hard Rock Cafe annoyed me a lot less–I’d never been to one before, and have never been to one since, either. Plus, while silly, it was a faddish enough place to be worth getting souvenirs at.
Now, see, I could see doing that as a joke, and taking lots of pictures, just to invite people over for the slide show once I got back home, and see their reactions:
Click!
And here we are at Pizza Hut in Israel . . .
Click!
This is us at Burger King in Spain . . .
Click!
Chick-Fil-A in Japan . . .
But really, as a general philosophy, I don’t see it. And I feel for you.
I’ll spend money on attractions - especially unique ones, with local flavor, or anything that will occupy my family for the whole day, like a theme park.
If our camera breaks, I’ll overspend to get a replacement immediately rather than not have pictures of my vacation.
Since my family and I keep Kosher, we will usually spend most of our vacation eating sandwiches made of stuff that we brought from home, or hot dogs cooked in a convenience-store microwave. If we’re in a city with a Kosher restaurant, we’ll pay for the treat.
(Aside to Eureka - the Pizza Hut in Israel probably didn’t offer pepperoni for Kashrut reasons. One big attraction for Kosher-observant Jews in Israel is eating at a chain restaurant that is always non-Kosher in the USA but has a Kosher version in Israel. Kosher KFC - yum!)
I’m very cheap on hotels, I’ll drive an extra 1/2 hour for a hotel that’s $5 a night cheaper. And souveniers? Forget it…we limit the kids to one per trip, almost never more than $15, and unless something blows our minds, we don’t get stuff for ourselves.
As a family of 5, eating 3 meals a day in restaurants could be quite expensive. So one thing that seems to work well for us is to get on a modified two meal a day schedule. Perhaps the optimum would be to load up at some kind of breakfast buffet at 10 or so, and then having a nice sit down meal at maybe 3-4 or so - generally before the evening rush. In between we’ll supplement with cereal bars, fruit, etc from a local grocery store.
One thing that is nice about that is it also gets you slightly off the schedule of a lot of other people - you are out and about while they are eating. Often the kids want to sleep later than mom and dad, so either we’d go out by ourselves at the crack of dawn, or drag them out of bed for a quick stop or two before breakfast.
Of course, any money we save by forgoing one meal per day is usually spent on desserts (a family weakness!)
Another small thing that adds up is we generally carry and drink water - refilling the bottles instead of buying new.
When we drive, we are pretty good about long hauls in the car, which may save an extra day here or there in transit.
But in general, I HATE being on vacation and feeling like I am cheaping out on stuff! We’ll usually try to stay in the location where we want, instead of saving a few bucks by staying somewhere at a distance.
An area where we splurge is we tend to get 2 rooms or a suite or something - generally 1 for the 3 girls and 1 for the 2 boys, instead of getting a cot and cramming us all into one room.
Airfare or other transit, unless taking public transit is genuinely dangerous, or unless the cheap transit is truly miserable.
The hotel (I usually stay in hostels, which has been a great experience. I’m not planning to give up student-style travelling, ever. I’ll be one of those 50-year-olds in the youth hostel bunks.)
Some food, some of the time. I want to be able to eat well, but I don’t have to eat out for every meal. I’m happy enough to stay at a hostel with a stove and make pasta some nights, if that means I can have some pretty delicious meals at other times. Besides, grocery shopping can be interesting in its own right when you’re travelling. (Well, if you’re staying within the same country, maybe it wouldn’t be. But, if you’re overseas, it often is. I like to spend at least a day or two in the central market, learning about weird fruits and veggies, asking people how to cook things, etc. ) And I love tasting street food or market food from all over! Good food doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg! If you get addicted to some delicious dish or another that costs you a whole of US$1.50, or something, why not eat lots of it while you’re in town?
Things I don’t skimp on while travelling:
Medications, immunizations, etc. I don’t leave home without them, and I never skimp on them. If I think there’s a possibility that I might be somewhere with malaria, I’m taking as much of the most recent anti-malarial on the market as possible, no matter how much it costs. And I don’t go light on the amount of cipro I carry, either. If I’m going somewhere where I know it’s going to be hard to get ibuprofen, or where it’s impossible to get pseudoephedrine without a knock-you-right-out antihistamine, I carry those things.
Sturdy travel clothing. It’s worth the money. Really, it is. What it saves you on laundry bills, and on having to pick up new clothing when the stuff you brought is stained, or ripped to shreds, is wonderful. Not to mention that you can travel much lighter if the clothing you have is multi-purpose, easy to hand-wash, and durable.
Comfortable, durable shoes.
A really good backpack. Buy it well once, and it’ll last you for years.
Anything that, if I didn’t do it or buy it while I was there, I might not get to do it or buy it again, and I’d really regret not having done or bought it. I’m willing to pay for museums, park admissions, tours, performances, etc. I’m also willing to spend money on things that I think are truly beautiful and unique, or useful and hard or very expensive to get at home.
I’d say accommodations and meals are the big factors, usually, even when the distance to be traveled is significant.
The hotel doesn’t have to be fancy, but we do like room service, especially for breakfast. Other meals we tend to have while we’re out sightseeing or whatever.
I was tempted at first to agree wholeheartedly with WVMom about not needing the slippers, robes, and turndown service. But if it’s winter and you think you’re going to need a heavy robe, it is very nice to have one provided by the hotel since this frees up a lot of luggage space.
My family did that, only it still always seemed unfair, because we had FOUR girls and two boys, so each of the boys got a bed to himself, whereas the girls all had to double up.
Plus I have distinct memories of being forced to use the bathmat as a towel, since I was the smallest one in the family - by far (my next oldest sibling is 9 years older than I am). Now that I’m an adult, I wonder why there weren’t enough towels to go around (I mean, surely my dad and brother had an extra in their room), and why nobody just called down for one more!
Anyway. I should also state that SkipMagic and I tend to take a lot of little trips, rather than one long lavish one per year, and we like to take a lot of little impromptu car excursions from our original destination city, so although I say I like the foofy hotels, we usually operate on the “Wing It” plan, which means when we get where we’re going and get tired, we just find a place to stay, and it’s usually low on frills. (We don’t need no stinkin’ reservations!) But it makes us feel adventurous (especially that one time when there turned out to be a ham convention in our city of choice, and so it took us almost 3 hours to find a place to sleep).
