Random: How much do you spend on vacations?

CleoKitty

We're planning a road trip next month and I'm budgeting $1,000 for it. It seems like a really large amount of money for just one week, but when I really break down our expenses (gas, food, lodging, etc.) it seems like that's not going to be much at all. We'll be driving and staying with a friend, but will still need a couple nights in a hotel while traveling. I can't even begin to imagine how much more it would cost us if we needed to fly, get a rental car, pay for hotel, etc.?

I'm just curious how our travel/vacation expenditures compare to the average family vacation. If I had to take a rough guess I'd say that we annually spend about $2,500 on vacations- that includes two one week trips such as visiting friends, family, camping, etc. and maybe one or two shorter weekend trips.

Does your family have a vacation budget and would you mind sharing? Feel free to share any money-saving, thrift family vacation tips you might have as well!

Thanks.?

rach&jay

We don't really have a vacation budget.  Although we are putting money aside for a trip to Disney in a few years.  We are going to Florida at the end of the month and our biggest cost was $650 for airline for the 4 of us.  We're going to see my mom so we won't need to spend much more than that. 

JellymanKelly

We don't take them as much anymore, but it seems like we used to spend about $2000-2500 on our yearly vacation. We didn't do a whole lot of crazy spending throughout the year, so we enjoyed staying in nice hotels and eating at great restaurants when we were on vacation. We also would use points for things like discounts on rental cars, free hotel nights if we stayed in hotels on the way to where we were going, reward tickets for our flight, etc. DH travels a lot for work and accrues a lot of reward points, so we take full advantage of that whenever we can!

We don't travel a lot anymore, though. We didn't take a vacation last year, and the year before we took a few days in Vegas at the start of one of DH's business trips. That's about it since DS has been here!

stacynikki

We haven't taken a vacation in forever.  At least not since DS was born.  But when DH and I would travel we'd spend at least $1500 or more for just the two of us! 

DevonPow

We don't have a budget...we live really far from all of our family, so most of our vacation time is spent flying to them (so we save on hotels, but pay a lot in airfare). DH and I tend to do 2-3 small weekend vacations a year that we drive to, so those are maybe $300-$500 each. Once a year we do a big trip - this year we may be going to Europe or Alaska for a week. Those obviously are a lot more, but travel is really important to us.

Jodi&Joe

About $4-5k/year (cyclical year, not calendar year)

veloelle

We love to travel, so we budget for it. I think we spent $3K for our Hawaii trip last year, I think it was like 9 days. I spent $500 for my trip to Paris that was an extension of a business trip. DH and I are going to Switzerland in two months and will probably end up around $1,500-$2,000 for that. My airfare is paid for and DH's is almost all paid for through my miles. It will be mostly train, food, and skiing costs.

When we travel, we buy snacks, eat breakfast in, share dinners, stay away from tourist destinations.

stcroixbride

it depends what you are doing.  We did a 2 week road trip through Ontario and Quebec in 2005 (our TTC trip) and budgeted @$4000 for gas, food and lodging.  We stayed at b&bs and small hotels - nice, but not highest end.  We did eat out pretty much every meal, though, and we spent money on activities here and there -museums, wine tastings, a comedy show, that kind of thing.

Last spring, we tried to stay within the $1500 we got from Uncle Sam for the road trip we took to Boston, RI and CT for a week.  We spent a little more than that, but not much, for a week.  Again, stayed in B&Bs and drove our car, doing fun things along the way and eating out most meals.

We haven't taken a "family vacation" yet - I probably would budget a little less for food because  we would likely rent a house and cook in a little or do an all-inclusive or something.

It really depends what kind of vacation you are taking and what kind of lodging you will be doing.

jnicks19

We usually do at least one "big" vacation a year that's probably between $2-4K.  There's also long weekends etc, maybe 3 or so of those a year?  We don't have a yearly budget for vacations.

hikerbeth

Not much.  Many of our vacations are camping trips that cost about $15/day for a campsite.

My DH travels so much for work, that we rarely have to pay for plane tickets, and when we do, we are the ultimate deal-finders.  He also has hotel points and car rental points, so unless we're going somewhere that doesn't have the hotel chain we need, we use points.  We also stay with friends and family when we go back to the Boston area, so we rarely pay for lodging there.

So our expenses are typically gas and food. . . and if DH can work business into the trip somehow, we can expense the gas and food when he's "on the clock."

We do go on an annual ski trip every winter (or several), so then you have to add in lift-tickets and daycare for DD.

Long story short, we are budget travelers.  We always take people up on offers to stay with them to save $$. . . so if you ever off-handedly say "come stay with me sometime," beware, because I WILL.

MarchMom06

I would say about $5,000/year. But it varies. Last year DH won a trip through work, so we gave some of our extra "travel budget" to my parents, & saved the rest for this year. And we're not sure we have anyone to watch the boys for an adult only vacation, and can't come up with anywhere we want to take the boys at the moment. We're brainstorming ideas for fun places for a 2 & 3 year old. :-)

FWIW, we also have a ton of airline & hotel points that we generally use to cover most of the trip. We spend most of the money on food & entertainment. We also count in this budget any weekend getaways (we try to do 2/year) & my parents watch the kids, etc.