What's your vacation budget?

[Pigeon]

It depends on what we are doing. We don't take a vacation away from home every year. Airfare alone for us to Disney is about $3K, so it's pretty impossible to do it for under $5K.

Last year we rented a cabin on a lake for a week and it was under $2K.

 

[preschoolmom]

Threads like this really don't give you enough information. To truly compare, you would need to know the length of vacations, family size, and income.

Disney usually runs us around $1000-$1200 per person depending on the length of the trip.

These two statements really sum it up for me. We're a single income family of five (three elementary aged children). Both of our Disney trips have come to around $5,000. I'm always amazed when I see that families go for $2-3,000. Now, we have stayed on site both times, with the regular meal plan (and a pin code or other discount) - but when I say $5,000 - I include EVERYTHING - from boarding the dog, to food on travel days, tips, every dime. Sometimes, I think people only post the package cost, and don't add in tips/spending money/gas or whatever else...

 

[preschoolmom]

Our budget is about $5,000 - and we are only able to go every other year.

 

[Marionnette]

Jaw Drop

I am a single parent, we vacation Disney every-other year and spend no more then 2k

On the *off* years I save money and take 2 mini vacations, last year we did a week in DC & a weekend in OBX... I spent around $500 total for both trips.

DC- Stayed with friends, zoo & museams are free, brought picnic lunches ETC
OBX- Tent Camped on the Beach!!! Brought our own food and things to occupy us besides the sun & sand! (it was amazing and for only 20bucks a night!)

You're not seeing the big picture. Don't compare your vacationing style to someone who is older, more established and with dual incomes (or maybe one really fantastic income). It took a lot of years with no vacation or just visiting relatives before we reached the stage where we can spend more on our leisure pastimes.

A weekend camping on the beach sounds like a lot of fun. I'll bet that your child will look back at that memory with fondness in the future. And that's what a family vacation should be all about. Not about how many dollars you spent!

 

[gillenkl]

Comparing one person's trip expenses to another person's is generally pointless (in the aspect of wow, you spend so much, or wow, yours was cheap!).

Totally agree. Considering we are a 1 income family and I'm a stay-at-home-homeschooling-mom I think we do the best we can. Keep in mind that all of our vacations involve camping in our popup so initially the cost of the popup had to be figured it - now it's paid off.

Trips this year (all camping):

April - weekend camping $61

May - weekend camping $61

June - 10 days disney and 5 days NC state park - $4700

July - weekend campng - $57

July - 5 days in Gettysburg - $200

August - 8 days camping in Western PA $207 - will be a bit more because I haven't figure in daytrips and activities yet.

So for this year: around $5200

 

[patsal]

10% of our income. As our income grew so did our vacation fund!

 

[Colleen27]

For Disney, it has ranged from 2K to 10K depending on the trip. Obviously the latter was a much bigger chunk of our overall travel budget than the former! We budget roughly 25% of our total income for travel and other frivolities (day trips, zoo/museum memberships, etc).

 

[Kay1]

As this is a travel-related site, I think it's normal that some here spend quite a bit of their disposable income on vacations. We tend to keep APs for Disney and/or Universal and only live about a 90-minute drive away. When we stay at Disney at Christmas, we stay for a week and rent a house. I'd say we spend about $2,000 all together.

When just my son and I go for a few days, we stay at a Value, eat dinner in the room a couple of nights (subs, sushi, cold fried chicken, salads, etc.) we only spend about $100 for few and always get a discount on the room.

The camping trip we take in March is about $1,000 because we eat mostly lobster and stone crabs, and eat lunch out every day.

Sanibel golf trip is about $1,200 as we eat some meals in our cottage.

Our "real" vacation is 10 days in a beachfront condo. We eat most dinners in, but eat expensive, high-cal/high-fat foods we rarely eat at home. With lunches out we spend about $3,500.

When you add it all together and add in the little trips like Mardi Gras, F & W, etc., I think we spend about !0% of our income on travel, too. I don't know if that's considered normal or not, but otherwise we're quite frugal. (And I despise shopping, which helps )

 

[yupikgal]

For our family of 4, (2 adults, and at that time, a 17 & 14 yr old) last May/June for a little under two weeks (12 days?) from Alaska to Southern California, Vegas, we spent about $5000 food & airfare included, which is amazing. We had 3 nights for free at our first hotel in Anaheim with points from our visa card, the airfare was very inexpensive, most of us used miles, but we went on two wonderful tours in the area, one was all day, we split up our stays at Disney, two nights onsite at the Paradise Pier concierge (got a good discount from the specials they were having) a 5 for 3 park ticket deal, + used a Disney Rewards card to take more off the price, and got a pretty good deal on the Embassy Suites South in Garden Grove for some of the trip...I felt like we had a GREAT trip, and that the price we paid was well worth it.

 

[Dis_Yoda]

We spend about 15% of our annual income on vacations.

 

[disneysteve]

I'm always amazed when I see that families go for $2-3,000. Now, we have stayed on site both times, with the regular meal plan (and a pin code or other discount) - but when I say $5,000 - I include EVERYTHING - from boarding the dog, to food on travel days, tips, every dime. Sometimes, I think people only post the package cost, and don't add in tips/spending money/gas or whatever else...

You do need to know what people are including and what their trips consisted of. For the 3 of us, $2,300 covers a 10-day trip including absolutely every penny spent that is in any way related to the trip. But we drive down, stay offsite and don't buy a ton of souvenirs. We could easily spend a lot more but don't care to.

 

[eliza61]

I'll start. . .

For disney vacations, I TRY to do no more than 3,000. That's with airfare. I would love to stay at BC but even if I budget and save for that, I don't know if I could spend it. Maybe. . .

Non disney vacations, 1,000 - 2,000.

Mini (weekend) budget minded vacations 500.

So, what do you plan for your vacation budget?

We generally try to pick a place first.

if we are doing Europe then the budget is usually more than a week at the beach.

For our 10 day disney trip we are planning
$1200 park hopper passes for 4
200 bucks a day on food so that 2000
900 bucks airfare from philly to Mco
200 rental car for the 10 days. found a great deal.

so we're budgeting 4300 for this vacation.

We're going to Paris in May package ran us 4500 bucks for 2 including air and then we'll allocated another 2,000 for food and museum passes.

 

[ChiCat]

I don't have a set budget but I try to stick to these guidelines. I watch airfare like a hawk and usually get the cheapest prices. I flew to Puerto Rico twice last year for around $250 each time per person. I priceline my hotels if possible. I just care about convenient location and that it's clean. One of the hotels we stayed at in Paris was around $50 or 60 a night but it was bare bones, clean, decent but the most bare bones hotel I've ever been too. Which is why I'm still considering switching my hotel from CBR to Pop. When I was in Vegas I stayed in New York, New York because it was cheap, clean and on the strip.

If I'm vacationing without my husband, I budget around $100 a day for food, transportation, activities. This however failed miserably in Europe. It was more like $200 a day.

I'm thinking of going to Dublin and London for 8 nights next summer. And I'm going to try to keep that trip around 3k, if it happens.

To me I'd rather have more spending money for fancy meals and shopping than staying at some fancy place just to sleep. We also almost never rent cars. We walked all over Pittsburgh and only took cabs to and from the airport.

 

[jacksmom]

We spend about 15% of our annual income on vacations.

Thanks! I feel so much better about my cruise now! I want my family to enjoy travel, but I don't want to feel like my spending is out of control! I am big on saving.

 

[wide awake]

As PP stated...it depends on what time of life you're at. We didn't have money for vacations till we'd been married over ten years. All of a sudden you wake up and you have disposable income...it is weird, I never thought I would have money just for fun.

 

[disneygma11]

There are 8 of us going, and we have budgeted $5,000 for our first trip to WDW. I know its going to take every bit of it, possibly a bit more. But this is our cutoff, hopefully we can keep it under 5 thousand. Time will tell.

 

[RRL38]

We are a family of 3 and we are heading to Disney in March for 4 days and then doing a 3 night Cruise on the dream for 3 days. We are driving down, staying on site in a moderate, doing the dxdp, and park hopping. When it's all said and done with tips, golfing, and other odds and ends we will have around $5,000.00 in the trip. In years past we have done times share tours and stayed off site to enable us to go to Disney. So although we have gone to Disney every year our Disney experience tends to get a little better, and a little more expensive each year. That's a result of the fact that we are at better places in our careers than we were 5 and 10 years ago.

As for vacations everywhere, we also go to the beach in the summer for at least a week. I would say we probably spend about 10% of our gross income on vacations. Just to note we never charge vacations and if we didn't have a substantial amount of money in savings above and beyond what we spend on trips, we would not take vacations like that.

 

[Princess_Emily]

It seems to be a lot cheaper visiting WDW from other places within the U.S. than from Canada (unless you live in Toronto, of course).

For us the flight alone is costing what many of you are paying for your entire stay. I found a seat sale on our flight at $1700 for a family of four (taxes in) but most flights were averaging $500-600 pp which equals $2000-2400 just to fly down and back, so we knew with everything this 12 night trip would cost us at least $6000.

We chose to stay on-site for the first time this year, and we decided to do it as cheaply as possible without sacrificing comfort, so we chose:

Moderate 9 nights with free dining = $1900
7 day magic your way + water parks = $1200

But we are staying 3 more nights or 12 nights in total (as we want to do Universal as well) and we want to do that on-site at Universal, so we expect that Universal Hotel will cost us at least another 700 (maybe more) for 3 nights plus Universal tickets for 3 days (500) - hoping to get a deal tho....plus another $500 for food the last three days that we are not on the dining plan + souvenirs $$??.

So in total we expect this trip to cost us around $6500-$7000.

But the thing about the cost of airfare, and being too far to drive is, we will only do this trip every 4-5 years or so.

 

[Altoqueenkelly]

Sometimes, I think people only post the package cost, and don't add in tips/spending money/gas or whatever else...

Actually... the 2k is EVERYTHING, however... it is only me and my 4yr old.... this year our 2k is paying for us to drive to miami, stay 3nights in a luxury hotel (friends wedding) and then pay for us to have a 7night stay, value, no park hoppers and basic dining plan. It also budgets our spending money (which will be small as our meals are paid for and i dont shop much at Disney cuz its too expensive for my taste)


2k is a lot to me, being a single parent. And we only vacation to Disney every other year.

A weekend camping on the beach sounds like a lot of fun. I'll bet that your child will look back at that memory with fondness in the future. And that's what a family vacation should be all about. Not about how many dollars you spent!

I agree, and I stretch our money as far as possible, we live very comfortable in our 2bdrm townhouse and we have everything we need, I would *almost* go as far as saying that weekend at Outer Banks NC was the best vacation EVER!! We cooked on a charcoal grill and layed on the beach for 3 days, flew kites, swim, read.... it was PERFECT lol!!!! I plan to do it every year, its so inexpensive and fun!

 

[bonjoe07]

It seems to be a lot cheaper visiting WDW from other places within the U.S. than from Canada (unless you live in Toronto, of course).

For us the flight alone is costing what many of you are paying for your entire stay. I found a seat sale on our flight at $1700 for a family of four (taxes in) but most flights were averaging $500-600 pp which equals $2000-2400 just to fly down and back, so we knew with everything this 12 night trip would cost us at least $6000.

We chose to stay on-site for the first time this year, and we decided to do it as cheaply as possible without sacrificing comfort, so we chose:

Moderate 9 nights with free dining = $1900
7 day magic your way + water parks = $1200

But we are staying 3 more nights or 12 nights in total (as we want to do Universal as well) and we want to do that on-site at Universal, so we expect that Universal Hotel will cost us at least another 700 (maybe more) for 3 nights plus Universal tickets for 3 days (500) - hoping to get a deal tho....plus another $500 for food the last three days that we are not on the dining plan + souvenirs $$??.

So in total we expect this trip to cost us around $6500-$7000.

But the thing about the cost of airfare, and being too far to drive is, we will only do this trip every 4-5 years or so.

We Drive to Minneapolis! watch for cheap flights with Airtran (one year we got cheap flights for $65pp one way for 5 people) Flights are crazy expensive from Winnipeg (around $600-$700pp round trip). If you can handle the 7 hour ride to MSP it could be worth it