Foreign Perspectives

Although the peak holiday season is almost upon us I’m sure that the majority of people have done little at this point other than booking the holiday itself.

Whilst you can obviously leave many things to the last minute that can cost you dear. Just consider what seems on first thought to be a simple matter of parking the car. Last time I tried that in our local airport the price ranged from £2.50 a day with no additional charges through to £10 a day with charges for the airport shuttle.

That was at a small local airport and it’s a lot more complex when you’re looking for gatwick parking as the people over at Essential Travel reveal on their website. I knew that Gatwick was quite a large airport facility but I’d never have dreamt of it having as many as 17 car parks and, of course, they all come with different rates and offers. Even stingy ole me wouldn’t dream of pricing around that many car parks so it’s just as well that their site does that hard work for you as there’s quite a bit of money to be saved if you get the right car parking for your holiday.

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Although we’ve quite a selection of flight options from airports locally, it’s not always so easy to manage to get from A to B when you’ve got to go through C to do it.

Our closest airport is all of 20 minutes away so is definitely our preferred departure point but it’s one that we just can’t seem to manage for a flight to Belfast next week. Flights go to the Birmingham, Stansted and Brussels but all arrive just after the last flight to Belfast from those airports would have just departed.

Next choice is Gerona which has a massive range of departures. However, that’s about 90 minutes drive from us so in practical terms departures before 10am aren’t really that viable and unfortunately the flights out leave more like 6am which would mean a 2am departure from home for us ie not really a runner.

Final choice seems to be Barcelona which has the big plus point that it’s a direct non-stop flight but the downer that it’s about two and a half hours drive to get there. Having said that, the even departure time is close to perfect.

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It really is that simple.

When you’re heading to a long-weekend destination then typically most people will leave home on Friday and return on Sunday or Monday. If you leave home on Monday and return on Friday then you’ll get substantial savings on the flight prices, sometimes sufficiently large savings to let you stay most of the week for the cost that everyone else is paying for a weekend.

Likewise, when you’re looking for a las vegas hotel then make sure that you’re not going during a conference week.

Using tactics like this you can really stretch your vacation money which is what most of us need to do in these difficult times.

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