Cheap Fun in the Sun

This holiday blog comes from my trip at the end of my school summer holidays. I know you’re probably thinking “A teacher on summer holidays surely doesn’t need a holiday at the end to get over it?” However, my summer was genuinely really busy. I’m not great at doing nothing to be honest! I played league rounders all summer for Tigers in Shepton Mallet (we won the Somervale league in case you were wondering!) I played rounders for England all over the country (beating Wales twice ☺), as well as coaching Team Bath Netball’s Under 19 NPL squad every Tuesday and for 4 days at the tournament in Nottingham at the end of July I decided I definitely needed a holiday to finish off my summer”‘break”.

So - Tristan and I decided to go away for five days at the end of my school summer holidays to soak up the last bit of sun. However, a bit of research was needed to ensure to make it as cheap as possible.

The beginning of the research was to ensure we got some sun. Booking within 2 weeks of the actual holiday helped with this. After a thorough search we narrowed our trip destinations down to Spain, Portugal or Greece. Knowing Europe would provide us with the cheaper flights, we then started to research areas in each of these countries. The only stipulations we gave ourselves were to go somewhere near to an airport to keep transfer prices down, to go somewhere with a beach, that the hotel we were going to stay at must have a pool and that there must be a large town/complex to entertain us for food, drink and generally going out and about.

We looked at Faro, Alicante, Athens and Barcelona for the flight prices during the Monday-Friday holiday dates we had in mind - and we went with the cheapest. This helped us to narrow it down further to Barcelona and Alicante. I had been to both and enjoyed my visits before (Tristan had been to Barcelona too and loved it), so we were happy for either of these to be the destination.

We then used booking.com and trip advisor to search for a hotel, as well as a general google map search to look at the general areas around these airports.

We’d narrowed it down to Alicante. Having only spent one day there before I decided I would like to explore it more and Tristan was happy to go somewhere new. It also worked out cheaper to stay here and travel here rather than Barcelona, so it won the cheapest destination race too.

This research was thorough enough, but it only took us an evening. We took a job each, worked as a team and whittled it down quickly - and we were decisive. We found that staying out of the centre at Hotel Albahia (albahia.com) helped to keep costs down and Alicante has a good tram system that you can use to get down to the main beach in the city centre. This holiday in total (flights and accommodation) for 5 days cost us less than £250pp. We obviously spent money once out there, but even that wasn’t too bad, as we found Alicante not to be too expensive (eating lunch and drinking beer at 100 montadidos helped here – very cheap and tasty!).

I would like to note - a little off-topic for finding a cheap holiday – ALICANTE WAS GREAT! There is lots to do if you are looking for a beach/pool chill holiday with some good nightlife at night. We also used the leisure facilities down on the harbour – playing mini golf etc. The hotel was great too. We used the pool, gym and tennis courts! There was also a smaller beach near our hotel and small superb area with good restaurants. There was certainly enough to keep us busy and interested in our 5 days and I would recommend both Albahia Hotel and Alicante for a cheap chilled holiday.

To summarise, my cheap holiday finding tips:

- Look close to the date you’re completing your search – particularly if you are looking for guaranteed sunshine.

- Decide areas of interest and check all airports that you could fly into (we even decided we were definitely flying from our closest airport this time to save travel money too).

- Once your cheapest flights are found, find a close hotel to the airport you are flying into.

- Be clear on what you want the city/town/area/hotel to have. This will help you find the right place!

- Capital/tourist cities are often pricier once there as well, so by choosing Alicante we definitely saved money when we were out there.

Next stop is Rome - finally :)