Days out- how do people afford them?

[lovelydaffodils]

Went to a local attraction.
Coffee was £2.90
Pizza was £12
Entry was £30 for the three of us.
Activity was approx a two hour max

Might not be for everybody, Cineworld have unlimited. Where I live it’s £9,99 a month. Myself and my daughter go every week. Very rare we buy anything because it’s expensive. We get bud tickets in advance which dorks out slightly cheaper. She wanted to go to Harry Potter world, no way I can stretch too this sadly

bus

I often take everything we need (picnic snacks, drinks etc). I have an insulated coffee cup which fits a very large cup of coffee and keeps hot all day. I have 2 actually and use the other to take ice lollys in.

I used to take DD for lots of days out on the cheap, but was lucky as I was living in London, so lots of free things to do, like museums, petting farms, picnics in the park with rowing (rowing extra cost), going to the south bank and seeing the street performers and to the big play park there (in summer there used to be a free sand pit), taking the riverboat (not free, but not really expensive) and a picnic in one of the big parks.

Depends really. Some people have that money to spare.

Guess it also depends where you live. Someone one on here said their local farm is £27 per head. Ours is £6.50 for an adult. Maybe their farm has more bells and whistles or it’s just outside of London. Our local is just as lovely tho and you can cuddle lambs in the spring. The food is where they get you tho. It will cost more to eat there when it does to get in.

We have zoo memberships, we go regularly so we get more than our moneys worth, in the summer I'll often take the kids on my days off just to have a play in the play areas/water play.
I appreciate how lucky we are with the area we live in, we have plenty of woodland, beaches, museums & art galleries (which regularly have children's events on) a number of farms which are donation or very cheap entry fees. DC are still young so we don't really have the need for the 'big' days out yet, though MIL bought us a family ticket for a theme park aimed at younger children for Christmas which was a lovely idea. Every so often we will splash out on an event (we are taking the DC to an outdoor Jurassic event in a couple of months) but we always take flask and a picnic to keep the cost down (we budget for ice cream or occasionally trip to the gift shop)

We have NT membership. We've two big very child friendly (big playareas) within 25 miles so alternate our visits to these. On holidays we try to use the membership on one of our days (or more if we can).

I follow local days out sites on social media for information about cheap or free days out or activities.

Plan ahead and book ahead to make use of offers and time to save/budget.

I have CSSC membership for free EH membership and whilst we have no real local venues we try to use when we go away for weekends or holidays. I also use this for discounted tickets to venues and have a work discount scheme for cinema. We then go to wilko or similar for pick n mix rather than buy cinema food.

I can't bear the thought of buying The Sun or Daily Mail just to get a discount - but that's just me.

Free museums.

Take picnic/snacks/drinks. We sometimes buy a £3 supermarket meal deal on the way to a day out if we've not had time to get picnic stuff/stayed overnight beforehand.

2for1 train days out, Tesco vouchers, cereal vouchers, Groupon, Wowcher

Parks - we often visit parks in villages out of our local area as such - the different setting and equipment can be exciting.

The beach - we choose a more remote beach village rather than the big town beach with arcades etc. If you cant see them you can't be pestered for stuff that costs money.

Some places do repeat visits for the price of entry - magna in Sheffield do this - check websites before you go incase you need photos etc on the day

I have low expectations for hotels - we use Travelodge mainly. It's just a bed and a shower and as long as it's clean I don't care if it's not fancy or instagrammable. We don't usually have breakfast in hotel either - will take cartons of juice and croissants to tide us over until we can get a proper good cooked one (usually something like wetherspoons - this can fill us up all day sometimes).

We also got an electric coolbox a few years ago - can use car adapter to charge it electric socket in Hotel room - it's meant we can pack some fresh items and keep them cool.

Again like previous posters people probably wonder how we afford it. But it's a real combo of the above plus like others we are extremely lucky to have an incredibly small mortgage - haven't overstretched and only run 1 smaller 2014 age car which is economical. We therefore have a larger disposable income - but i still refuse to overspend. I also think the charges for some places are extortional and out of reach for many even with discounts.

Just to add I think it's important to be organised to get things a bit cheaper.

So know in advance you are going to book ahead - train tickets etc which can be cheaper if bought in advance, as can hotels.

Then you can plan picnic food by going to local supermarket the evening before you go.

I do know people who just decide on a whim on a day or evening before to do an activity and spend £100s more for the privilege.

All of that @ReginaFilange001. Plus booking tickets online and also possibly deciding what you do depending on who has a deal on. If there's a few places you could go, but one is doing 2 for 1 or whatever, that's the one you pick. Then you go to the other place when they have a deal on.

If you plan each aspect to get the best price and take your own food, you can probably do it for about a quarter of the cost of paying standard price on the day and buy food when you're there.

So if you're looking at the 'how do people afford it' question because you think the full theme park day out experience costs hundreds of pounds, a lot of the people there won't have paid anywhere near that amount.

Yes @BarbaraofSeville I also think this attitude of questioning how others afford things isn't always helpful.

For some at the venues it could be their one blow out day of the year and why shouldn't they treat themselves, there will be people like me managing my budget and forgoing some things to enjoy others, and there will be for which money is no object and others there on credit and so on and so on.

Like all aspects of life if you plan, prepare and budget you can prioritize your preferences - a coffee, meal out, nice hotel.
Just like meal planning or the household budget decide what is important to you.

I realise this only really applies to those of us lucky enough to have money in our budgets for this type of thing - I feel for families where even the local soft play is unaffordable.

If you regularly use the train for days out as a family, you can get a family Railcard to save 1/3 off fares. If you purchase it with Tesco Clubcard vouchers I think you only need £10 of vouchers to pay for it.

Slight derail (😉) you can also buy young persons railcard with club card vouchers. Our youngest is 19 still enjoys family days out.

You need a second mortgage for some of these places like TPark just for the entry even using a special offer voucher, but it’s the food and drink that really wracks up the price of a day out. As other people have suggested, taking a picnic saves s lot of money but even getting everyone ice creams can mount up.

We use to have Merlin passes so did a big day out using them about 30 times a year. I used to take my DC bowling or to the cinema or coast etc every weekend. Some people have lots of disposable income.

We went to a wildlife park yesterday. Booking online saved £5 per ticket, it was almost £90 for 4 adults

We took flasks and snacks having had a huge fry up just before we left. It’s an hour from our house and we spent 5.5 hours there. We did buy a couple of portions of French fries.

We have often used club card points for entry plus due to DH air miles with work we have used them to book hotels such as the night before we went to Legoland.

It’s like fast passes you can shell out for so you don’t have to queue. When at Disneyworld some marketing team was coming round. We were about to leave the place we were in but the ride worker said no wait and we got given a fast no queue pass for a couple of days.

Overall some people just have more money than others, it’s as simple as that and another reason why life is unfair.

@CrazyTimes123

I was saying this today - friends went to Cheltenham for a couple of days plus air bnb, drinks, outfits, etc, etc. All on social media, and last week was Zip World, soon it will be Alton Towers again and then the horse trials.

Even if you take a picnic and a flask, you still need to pay the petrol and the entry. I don’t know how they do it tbh.

This is a basically a list of what's included in the National Lottery free £25 offer. Pretty sure they won't have paid for any of those.

If we know we are going for a day out we go "all out" as it were. We make sure we have plenty of money saved for entrance, food at the venue any separate paid for games and of course the obligatory haul at the gift shop. It works for us.

Honestly. The way the cost of fuel is rising we will be cutting right back on days out this year as simply getting anywhere will be expensive enough.

We're not short of money but always take a picnic on days out. Food is usually terrible and expensive.

We just set a budget for days out each month. Some months we barely touch it, which means other months we have more available. We don't do many big days out and if we do we'll look for offers to make it fit our budget.

Generally on a monthly basis we will swim twice as a family and do one other small outing (cost less than £30).

@NoWayRose

Presuming they knew about it
I’d never heard about it until… I read your post!

And now kicking myself!

@NoWayRose

The lottery offer is one single £25 voucher, that will barely touch the sides of family entry to those places.

Well there's people talking about paying over £700 for the Lapland UK experience, after queuing all day with hundreds of thousands of other people, so there's certainly plenty of money available somewhere and, in reply to a PP, people certainly do think that big Christmas events are worth the money.

I don't have access to a car now but years ago we would go to places like a local-ish (10-15 miles?) lake / fun place, with a sandy 'beach', didn't take the kids to the rides because they had a great time in the water. For lunch, I'd nip in a supermarket on the way, big bag of fresh breadcakes & some sliced ham, large pack of kit kats, cheap drinks, food sorted! (I too hate making packed lunches, takes all the fun away for me!) All it cost was a small parking charge & an ice cream for the kids, wonderful!
Or a garden centre / farm with acres to explore, river, geese, again just a small parking charge. Kids adored it.

Nowadays, I get the £1 train tickets once a year & take myself & (grown up) dd off to the seaside. Or walk through the woods with my dd's & dangle my feet in a stream. :-) As someone else mentioned too, Heritage days are awesome, I've been to some great places for nothing.
Oh, and my latest 'thing' is to find lovely outings on local facebook groups & keep them in an online folder labelled 'outings' - for instance going to find waterfalls in our area. I walked along (in!) a river in the city centre, with a river Trust, that was awesome!
Lots of things to do if you just research them, I HATE the Alton Towers type places so I probably put a bit more work into it!

One of my favourite places is Beamish, though, expensive but worth every penny. I guess those further south would go to the Black Country museum, haven't been but it looks great.
Oh, and another place I'd love to do is go to the National Mining museum for a trip underground, DD is claustrophobic though so I need to find a way to get there on my own. :-)