The Perfect Family Vacation
As many of you know, our family just competed our summer vacation using most of the ideas and techniques we talk about. We really want you to know we live what we talk about so that you can be assured it is possible.
If you want details of the trip you can go to our blog at Have Kids - Will Travel. There you will see a few of our incredible pictures and read about the fun time we had. Our trip took us first to Prague for four days three nights. We stayed in a wonderful apartment, which fit all six of us perfectly and had a kitchen that we used to cut down on the food cost. ($89.00/night) Keep in mind the hostel down the street was $18/night which is fine if you are traveling by yourself but as you can see the apartment was much less. Keep this in mind when you are looking at Bed & Breakfasts, Hostels and other accommodations, which charge per person.
We then rented a car and drove to Vienna, Austria to stay again for three nights. We found a new place for car rentals in Europe that had incredible prices. ($120 for the rental and we spent nearly that for gas (a little over $8/gal), $105) The company we went through was Argus Car Rentals and the price included the insurance which is important. We stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott, which was just a block away from the Shonbrunn Palace and the best part, it was free. We used our Marriott reward points as we talk about in chapter three of our book.
From Vienna we drove back to Prague and stayed again free at the Courtyard by Marriott at the Prague airport and the next day flew to Milan Italy. We thought about driving from Vienna down through Italy but the drop off fee for the car was over $1000 and our flights to Italy were only $34. We also rented a car in Italy from Argus for $407 for the two weeks.
We stayed two nights in Venice, $90/night at the Hotel Piave. This was a quad room in Mestre just outside of Venice. We then stayed at our favorite place in Italy, Capezzana at the farm house for three nights at $53 a night finally 2 nights in Florence itself at an apartment found on our website HomespunHospitality.com at $55/night.
We then stayed the remainder of our time in Sorrento along the Amalfi Coast at no cost with a hospitality exchange. Our last night was also free at the Marriott in Milan before we flew home.
So, a breakdown of the cost. We spent more than the last time we were here mainly because of the exchange rate and gas prices. We also stayed in more "pay" places because we moved around so much, and we wanted to try out a few places listed in the rental section of our Homespun Hospitality site. This we chose instead of finding a home or hospitality exchange which would have ruduced the cost even more.
Item Our cost Regular price
Airfare (all flights) $656 $10,600
Accommodation $716 $2,040
Rental Car & Gas $1,032 $2,360
Food $1,260 $2,340
Misc/Souvenirs $865 $865
Total $4,529 $18,205
We saved $13,676 on this trip using the ideas in Have Kids - Will Travel.
RSS Feed