Experimental MumScience + Children = Fun + Mess

Having just returned from our much anticipated two week holiday in Florida I thought I’d put together how we managed to plan for Florida Fun while sticking to our hard earned budget.

Package Holiday

We booked our flights and holiday accommodation with Cosmos and paid for the majority of our holiday with Tesco Clubcard Points. For every voucher you receive four times the face value in rewards. Since we booked they’ve put a £400 voucher per passenger limit on this deal but it’s still a great saving on the cost of an expensive holiday and a good use of points in my opinion.

Domestic Flight and Overnight Hotel

We flew from London and needed to travel Inverness to London the evening before to make the connecting Florida flight. By converting some more Tesco Clubcard Points to air miles, we flew down the night before and enjoyed a restful night in the very handy Hilton Gatwick (again thanks to Tesco Clubcard Deals!),  In the morning we enjoyed a yummy breakfast to set us up for the long flight ahead!

Hire Car

Our hire car was a fabulous Ford Mustang convertible hired from Hertz and booked through Expedia. It cost £264 for the 2 weeks including all insurance and I thought that was a pretty fabulous price. I’d definitely use Hertz again, the pickup and drop-off of the car was really fast without any hard sell for extra insurance. The car drove like a dream and the girls (and husband!) really wanted to keep it. They named her Orange Lightning in honour of the Sunshine State and our afternoon tropical storms.  In two weeks we drove just over 500 miles and spent $80 dollars on fuel, not too bad for a car with a 3.7 litre engine. We miss you Orange Lightning our smelly old people carrier just isn’t the same!

Theme Park Pass

Our Disney 14 Day Ultimate Florida Pass for 2 adults and 2 children cost £738 and our 2 Park Universal Ticket cost £280, both purchased during a special offer from Florida Escapes. We used these to their full advantage by doing theme parks in the morning followed by water parks most afternoons to cool down and chill out.

Universal Express Plus Pass

Knowing that Universal was going to be super busy due to the recently opened Wizarding World of Harry Potter we wanted to make the most of our time there.

We looked at purchasing the Express Plus Pass which lets you get to front of line but as you can only use it once per ride, at a cost of £43 per person it seemed a very expensive version of the free Disney Fast Pass.

Instead we paid to stay on site at the very lovely Loews Royal Pacific Resort. We paid around £135 for the night on a room only basis but this gave us unlimited front of line passes for two days, which works out at about £17 each per day, so much better value than the Express Plus Pass. Also you get the use of the hotel’s lovely facilities too, more on these later : )

Kids Eat Free Card

This card initially costs £10 per child and for each paying adult; the child’s meal is free at a wide range of restaurants. Even if you don’t use it for evening meals, we found that it easily paid for itself using it for breakfasts alone.

FairFX Currency Card

We placed our spending money on FairFX Card. The FairFX Currency Card is a prepaid MasterCard® Card that works like a debit card. You buy the currency you require on their website and load the funds onto the card. The card can be used just like any other card, even online.

Not only were the currency rates better than the High Street but by keeping an eye on the daily rate we could  try and maximise our holiday pot by adding when the rate was higher or when funds allowed! There were no charges for the features we wanted to use on the card, unlike our UK bank cards, so we saved on bank charges too. While away we found it very easy to keep track of our holiday spending by checking our balance online and as transactions are instantly debited from the account the balance was always accurate. This gave me peace of mind that we were sticking to within our daily budget and not going holiday mode credit card crazy!

Yotel

On the return journey we had a LONG wait between connecting flights. We flew into London at 5.30am and our Inverness flight home wasn’t until 7.30pm. There are earlier flights; we just didn’t book them in time.  I find airports pretty dull at the best of time but the thought of spending a whole day with two jet lagged children was not one I relished.

I had noticed the Yotel when we were last in Gatwick, on a lovely child free trip to Venice in February to celebrate Stuart’s 40^th birthday.  My initial thoughts were, “ohhh…what a brilliant idea but I bet it’s expensive”.

I was pleasantly surprised when I checked out their website.

A twin room (two large bunks) would be £56.50 for 6 hours. With access to the hotel executive lounge for only three hours costing £64 for 2 adults and 2 children, the Yotel seemed the perfect solution. It did indeed meet our needs very well and I will post a full review later.

Skype

As both my husband and I are self employed we needed to be able to call home on a daily basis. Our mobile phone rate to call the UK from the USA was £1.40 a minute, so we wanted to keep that rate for emergency use only and use a cheaper alternative for day to day calling.

Stuart had heard about the Net10 Pre-paid mobiles which cost $30 for 150 international minutes. I didn’t like the idea of having to find a Walmart and setting up a phone during our holiday time. I wanted something that was ready to use the moment we arrived.

The hotel we booked came with free Wi-Fi access in the room (and by the pool!) so we decided to opt for Skype for our daily calls. The rate to call home was only 1.2 pence per minute for landlines and 14.5 pence per minute for mobiles.  I uploaded £10 credit to my account and even though we used it almost every day we only spent £3 in the fortnight with the average call costing just 11 pence. Bargain! The system was a doddle to use, the sound quality was great and the girls thought it was very cool calling Granny on the computer  : )

Well that’s my spiel on how we managed to stretch our budget in the holiday booking stages, in my next post I’ll post our top tips on stretching the spending pot once you’ve arrived without scrimping on the holiday fun!