How do young people. afford so many holidays?

[Waferbiscuit]

Our office includes a number of people in their 20s who are on salaries of c 23-27k. There seems to be a real culture of travelling and going abroad/on holiday amongst their set. One colleague has been on a city break weekend in Europe 3x in the last 5 weeks. The others go on multiple long haul holidays a year.

In terms of their set up, Im aware that all of them rent or have bought homes with partners so would have the usual outgoings. None have wealthy families. I’m just a bit baffled about how holidaying became so important and no idea how they can afford it. At that age I was broke and couldn’t afford a holiday despite being on a similar salary.

Now I’m 50, financially stretched and grumpy so no holidays for me!

Because they are only paying for one person and often when you're older you have to pay for the whole family.

I go abroad monthly. For me travelling is my hobby. I think they probably just have less outgoings than perhaps you do.

Well as we're talking about the child free, they'd be better off environmentally by continuing to fly here there and everywhere on holiday but not have children.

We're child free, but not young and up to now, while I've had passing guilt about flying on holiday - we go to the Med or the Canary Islands on average 4 times per year. But it seems that the environmental cost of having children is far far greater than a few flights a year:

www.independent.co.uk/environment/children-carbon-footprint-climate-change-damage-having-kids-research-a7837961.html

'One child is equivalent to an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, while one transatlantic flight is between 0.7 and 2.8 tonnes of CO2 per year'.

So we'll continue as we are guilt free, thank you very much. We're generally frugal and none wasteful/high environmental impact in other areas of life so I think we're allowed this one luxury.

A lot of people are saying credit cards but I really don't think that is the case. I think it's just being able to find really good deals, being unfussy about where you stay and having a good amount of disposable income!

There’s apps like sky scanner that find INSANELY cheap flights (i have a friend who is about 30 who posted a screenshot on her insta stories of flights to madrid she’d found for a fiver, asking for pals to go with her), then there’s air bnb etc - if you have no dependents and are not tied to school hols etc it’s not tons more than going away in this country. Young people are actually very savvy about finding good deals and having fun on a budget, most of them have no choice really since their housing costs are astronomical compared to gen xers when we were that age.

The advent of budget airlines has made a massive difference. We are paying less for flights to eg Spain than we were paying forty years ago. Not just in real terms either. Actually less.

I am 28, this year I went to Iceland (budget airline, air b&b), Orlando (nice hotel), Marbella for a hen party (again, budget airline & air b&b), Glastonbury festival and Oslo (budget airline, nice hotel). I have a mortgage and am on a 30k job so not amazing, my partner is on a little more. We have no kids and spend time searching for deals. I don't ever feel like I am stretched every month and do a lot of socialising and online shopping!

Never put anything on credit card and like people have said, we just have to pay for ourselves. Holidays are a lot cheaper when only paying for one person!

In my twenties I shared a house with four people, it was really cheap bill sharing and I was fine staying in hostels and cheaper B&B back then. Also as mentioned holidays are cheap out of term time.

Update to earlier’s post: this afternoon I got a £3k pay rise so you can now expect even more travel from me

My sister and I are off to Warsaw soon. Hotel was £116 for 3 nights total, and the flights were £75 each.

Its perfectly doable if you know where to look and have the time to do it.