Travel Deals Today

Have spending cutbacks forced you to change your family vacation plans this year? Are you looking for a family get away, but get sticker shock when you find out how much it will cost for travel, hotels, and food?

The average family of four or five people will spend at least $100 per day on restaurant meals (unless you eat all fast food, but who wants to eat fast food every meal for a week?)

After checking on hotels for the summer in West Yellowstone, just outside of Yellowstone National Park, the rates range from $119 to $185 per night, and that is for a maximum of four people. If you have five in your family, you must get two rooms, and now your nightly rates are $238 to $370. These rates are for an average room, just two beds and one bathroom.

Your daily cost just for food and lodging if you have a family of five is between $338 and $470. That makes a five night vacation cost at least $1,690. If you only have four in your family, the cost is still $1145, not including taxes and other charges from the hotel.

What are the alternatives? Well, one often overlooked way to vacation is through vacation rentals, or rental cabins.

A cabin near Yellowstone will cost you between $150 to $200 per night. Most of these cabins will have multiple bedrooms, a full kitchen (not just a timeshare style kitchen), and at least two bathrooms.

How much easier would your vacation be if two people could shower at the same time, instead of everyone waiting in line for the bathroom? What if you could get the kids a snack from the refrigerator, instead of paying five times the normal cost by getting them something out of the mini-bar refrigerator?

Vacation rentals in the Yellowstone area can range from $160 to over $200 per night, and many of these rentals can sleep ten or more people. This means that your lodging bill could drop from $470 per night to as little as $160 per night, while giving you better accommodations.

When you use a vacation rental, you can have the best of both worlds. You can either stop by a local grocery store, and buy food for you meals, or if you don’t feel like cooking you can still go to a restaurant. Instead of spending $40 or more for the family for breakfast, you could fix eggs, waffles, cereal, or whatever you want at one tenth the price of the restaurant. If you want to use the money you saved on a nicer restaurant meal for dinner you can, or you can prepare your own dinner and save even more. By preparing some of your own food, your eating expenses for the family can drop from $100+ to around $25 per day.

By choosing a vacation rental instead of a hotel, your five night vacation could go from $1690 to only $1000. Not only will you save money, but you will have a lot more room for your family to relax in. Another idea that many people do is they find another family to vacation with. Because the vacation rental property is so much larger than a hotel room, two families of five people can stay in one rental with a 10 person occupancy, thereby splitting the cost of the rental. Now your $1000 vacation is only around $600.

Be sure to check my other article about finding the right vacation rental property for you!

Posted on: February 19, 2009

Filed under: Family Vacations

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