Frugal Travel

When it came to planning our travel for the funeral we needed to do it as economically as possible. Although we had money saved, it was in the emergency fund, we still wanted to spend as little as possible.

First of all we worked out whether or not it was possible to do the trip in one day. This saves a lot of money as you don't have to find overnight accommodation. The early timing of the funeral meant that this was not possible so then we looked for cheap options for an overnight stay. The cheapest choice is to stay with family of friends who are usually delighted to see you, we tend not to do this as our dietary needs are a bit complicated to ask people to deal with so we usually camp or use an AirBnB. AirBnB is our new favourite as we can usually find a whole flat or house for the price of one night's camping stay.

Next we investigated the cheapest way to travel and whether that is the cheapest for 1 person or 2. We looked at all options as although we try not to fly, recently flying has proven to be much cheaper than taking the train. Train travel is cheaper than taking the car for long distances if you can book around 3 months in advance, after that it gets super expensive. The tickets we needed would have cost over £600 each, which is just outrageous ! Air travel would have been the cheapest if I had just been going on my own as we would have saved the cost of airport parking. However, in the end we worked out that driving was the cheapest option of all. Often we don't do this as the 7 hour trip is very tiring, but sharing it between us would not be so bad.

Next thing to plan was food. Since our dietary needs are quite specific we wanted to make sure that we had enough with us to have 2 days food each. Planning this and putting it in the cool box at the start of the journey meant we didn't have to worry about not finding something to eat on the road and also knew that it was much cheaper than paying service station prices. We also took a travel kettle to have hot water for cups of tea and coffee.

Being organised is the key to saving money when travelling and we also used the petrol prices app on the way to find the cheapest places to fill up with fuel. Motorway service stations are for buying fuel only in emergencies since they can be up to 10p a litre for expensive than local stations.

Have you got anymore tips for frugal travel ?