Do you fancy a nice holiday, but the finances just won’t stretch? What about “caravanning” instead? If your only experience of this is a wet week in the family touring caravan when you were a kid, forget those bad memories right now. Holiday companies now quite rightly describe their caravans as “mobile homes”. Sites too have changed – we’ve finally caught up with the rest of the continent!
So a caravan holiday might not be such a bad thing – but is it really cheaper than a holiday in a hotel?
Accommodation
A night in a reasonable hotel can cost £50 to £80 a room. A family might need more than one room. In contrast you can easily find a caravan on a good site out of school holidays for under £40 a night. So for a family of 4 or 5, that’s a saving of up to £120 a night! Or to put it another way, that’s 4 nights for the price of 1 – not a bad deal! Obviously prices will go up during school holidays, but in tourist areas so will the hotel prices.
Eating
Eating out can eat up a big chunk of your holiday money. In your caravan you can cook for yourself, buying from the campsite shop, or even more cheaply from the local supermarkets and markets – which is a great way to absorb some of the local life. If you’ve got children, self catering also means there will be something on the menu that they’ll actually eat! It doesn’t mean you have to spend your holiday chained to the kitchen – you can still have meals in local restaurants, it just means it doesn’t HAVE to be every meal. And because you’re only doing it occasionally, you can splurge a bit on those meals.
Fun
You go on holiday to have fun, right? Constant fun can be expensive, and the free “fun” in a hotel can be limited – even a pool loses its charm eventually. But a good caravan site can have a play area, games rooms, even tennis courts and sports pitches. Which means you don’t want to leave the site as much. Which means you don’t have to spend as much money. Many sites have children’s clubs (sometimes even for free) so the children can be kept busy all day – allowing you time off to do YOUR thing!
Buy Your Own
One more option, if you can afford the outlay, is to buy your own little caravan on a site. A new van might cost you more than (sometimes a lot more than) £25000, but you could find a “preloved” one for £10000, or less. However on top of that many sites have annual fees of £1000 to £3000. You could recoup this by renting out your caravan, or paying someone a fee to do that for you, but this means it wouldn’t be available whenever you wanted to use it. School holidays are busiest times for rental, so if you’re able to use your van outside these, this might be a possibility for you. This is something we did for a couple of years when Jack was really little.
The question was “Is it cheaper”? You’ll see the answer is “Yes”, especially if you have children, and most especially if these are preschoolers, so you’re not tied to the expensive holiday times. Don’t forget it’s not just about price – caravan holidays are fun too!
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