Depending on whom you ask, the average family of four spends $1,600-5,000 (or more) for a week’s vacation. Regardless of how much you expect to spend, one thing is certain—the trip most certainly will cost more. To help contain that overage, we’ve come up with five categories to make your vacation more wallet-friendly. 
Timing
Off-season travel can be hard when families with school-aged children are all trying to get away at the same time. But NYC families have an advantage: Our kids return to school 1-3 weeks later than those in much of the rest of the country, so we have time in August and September when the Appalachians, the beaches, and everywhere in between are less crowded, and therefore less costly. These weeks before and after peak season—called “shoulder season”—offer peak perks at off-peak pricing.
But don’t worry that you’ll be boxed out of early July. Consider locations like south of the Equator (where it’s often wet and humid, though still fascinating) or the Southwest. Plus, come summer, mountain resorts take aim at sightseers, hikers, bikers, campers, and zip-line enthusiasts.
As for timing, this could be the best time in years to visit Europe. The euro is cheaper today than it has been in almost a decade. From flash sales on deal sites like Living Social Escapes and Groupon Getaways, to bike tours and discounts via PayPal in Paris, Barcelona and Rome, and the tourist-friendly Leisure Pass for London, Paris, Berlin and Dublin—they all present ways to make the Grand Tour a little less grand.
Airfare
While there’s debate on the cheapest time to book airline tickets, Tuesday through Thursday seems to be the most economical part of the week to travel. To ensure you’re getting the best fare, Kayak.com’s fare matrix shows different pricing based on different days, and its price alert gives pretty accurate guidance on whether prices are likely to rise or fall in the next week.
When you compare prices on travel aggregator sites like Orbitz, check airlines that may not be featured there, but that do meet your parameters. Airfarewatchdog, a wonderful site in general, offers a super list of which aggregators miss which airlines. The list changes periodically, though Southwest tends to boycott them all as a matter of course.
When booking tickets for the family, don’t necessarily do it in one go-round. The reason being that, for example, there may be only three $200 tickets for a specific flight, with the others at $300 each. Since airlines aren’t set up to give you three tickets at $200 and two at another price (for a total of $1,200), they’ll charge you $300 for all tickets ($1,500).
All these tips are helpful for when you know where you want to go. Say you have a week in August, but don’t care whether you go to Nice, Panama City, Seattle or someplace else. Google Flights allows you to enter your home airport and your travel dates and see a world map with destinations and prices. ITA’s matrix allows you to search by city, explore different dates and lower fares, and focus on flights that fit your parameters.
You can save a bundle if you are willing to fly into a slightly less convenient airport and rent a car to drive a few hours to where you want to end up. Besides, life is about the journey—not just the destination.
Another tact that works particularly well for Europe—fly into the least expensive, convenient-ish airport, say, in London, and then take a regional carrier to where you actually want to go. But since you’ll be booking the tickets on different itineraries, your transatlantic airline has no obligation to make life easy should you miss your outbound flight, for whatever reason. As such, give yourself at least three hours between when your regional flight is scheduled to land and when you expect to board your flight home. Research the dependability of the regional flight—we were going to use this approach for a recent trip in Scotland, but the flight got such poor reviews, we decided not to risk it.
So we drove.
Driving
If you are driving your own car more than 500 miles, have your mechanic check it out before you cross a bridge or tunnel. You don’t want to be stranded on a highway in West Virginia with a busted water pump and mechanics you don’t know. Consider joining AAA if you’re not already a member. You get free towing as well as discounts to boot. [Editor’s note: Click here for a story about some of the discounts.]
In addition to checking the online aggregators to rent a car, look at the individual rental companies’ sites for deals. Do yourself a favor—check out Yelp for reviews. There’s a big difference between rental agencies, even those owned by the same parent company.
If you need a car for fewer than seven days, it may be less expensive to get a weekly rental and turn it in early. If you do rent a vehicle, check with your own insurance company and credit card company to see if they cover rentals. You could save $20 per day if you don’t need the supplemental insurance that the rental companies assure you that you do need. Should you rent, pack your own car seats, E-ZPass, and GPS, all of which car companies are happy to rent to you—for additional fees.
When you’re driving into a new state and will need to overnight somewhere within its borders, stop at the state welcome center and pick up a hotel guide. Name brand hotels and local establishments alike offer discounts if you cite the booklet.
Sleep Cheaper
My friend and discount travel idol, Barbara, turned me onto Redweek.com, where timeshare owners rent out their units—for deals like $28 a night at Marriott’s Ko Olina Beach Club on Oahu in Hawaii, or $128 per night at the four-star Emirates Grand Hotel in Dubai.
Another great online resource is the mega-search engine AllTheRooms.com, which offers about 5 million accommodations worldwide, pulling listings from hotel sites, secret Hotwire and Priceline Express deals, Airbnb, HomeAway, as well as Hostelworld, Groupon, GlampingHub, and the like, so you can see options you may not have considered when you first started planning.
Finally, Priceline’s Name Your Own Price tool has saved my family 50 percent on hotels. Priceline shows you an area map of your destination city, you click the areas where you’d like to stay, and then you bid on the type of hotel you’d prefer. If you’re staying more than a few days in one spot, you’ll have more options if you break your stay up into two three-day visits rather than one six-day visit—but realize you may have to relocate hotels.
Sleep Different
Camping: It’s more than just tents. You can find cabins, yurts, camper parking, and even hotel rooms and 1950s-era motels rooms, at and near many national and state parks. Hiking, campfire dinners, boating, fishing, and swimming offer active entertainment. Private campgrounds like KOA and Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts, for example, often include organized activities like crafts, movies, swimming pools, mini-golf, arcades, and wagon rides in the cost of your stay.
RVs can also stretch your vacay bucks. Depending on your needs, a night at a campground runs about the price of a fancy pizza, though the real cost comes in renting the RV and fueling up the 10-MPG beast. That said, you save on hotels and food. If you’re not thrilled about driving a house-on-wheels for hundreds of miles, call RV dealers in your destination and ask about rentals.
Houseboats are similar. A few years back, we spent about $1,000 to rent a houseboat for a week outside of Pittsburgh, PA. My boys fished, swam in the lake, and scrambled through brush to tie up the boat every night.
Activities
Getting there might be half the fun, but make sure you don’t miss out on anything once you arrive. Here are a few suggestions on how to take it all in without shelling it all out.
If possible, plan your itinerary around the free days at zoos, museums, national parks, and botanic gardens. Libraries in some cities offer free passes to certain attractions if you sign up in advance. If you’re going to a theme park, check area grocery stores to see if they sell discount tickets. Fast food chains like Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts often have coupons for local attractions like tubing or amusement parks.
If you’re only going to be in a new city for a short time and want to hit the highlights, consider CityPASS. Available in 12 North American cities, CityPASS packages together several top attractions that will save you upwards of 50 percent, compared to what you’d pay for each individual entry. The kicker is that to maximize your savings, you have to go to all the attractions. The more you skip, the less you save on a per venue basis.
And while you should check Groupon and Living Social for discounts, you may not find the top-rated attractions since the most popular venues don’t need to offer discounts. Just beware of the fine print with regard to blackout dates. It’s also worthwhile to drop by convention centers, visitors’ centers and chambers of commerce. Even better than the coupons that sometimes are on offer, staff can tell you about their favorite attractions and restaurants.
Whether you’re on a walking tour or a driving around someplace new, some of the self-guided tour apps and websites are just about as good as a local human. Some suggestions from consumer finance expert Andrea Aoroch: EveryTrail, a website with downloadable walking tours from around the world. Field Trip runs in the background of your phone and automatically alerts you when you’re close to something interesting. PBS’ History Pin identifies local historical and design landmarks based on your location.
One of our family’s favorite go-to vacation spots is Washington, DC. A walkable city with free museums and monuments, delicious food, a clean Metro, and a white house where just one family lives—it’s super easy to get there. Amtrak runs daily service, and you can take a Wi-Fi connected, lavatory-enabled bus for less than the cost of a 3D movie. (The Washington Post ran a good story comparing different bus companies.) Perhaps the only thing less expensive for a family than going by coach is renting a car at JFK and dropping it in the nation’s capital, but then you’d have to deal with DC traffic, which can turns the supposed 4-hour drive into 6+hour marathon. Just make sure you bring books on CD.
Additional Tips and Helpful Sites
Check out YouTube videos for what you think you want to do. When you read about it in a guidebook, that out-of-the-way carnival (or waterfall or quaint little town) may sound like a must-see. But check out video to make sure it’s worth the three-hour drive.
Download the free Google Translate app. It does a pretty decent (though not flawless) job of translating captions and passages. Once you’ve downloaded it, you don’t need Wi-Fi to use it.
If you’re in a foreign country and won’t have Wi-Fi on the go, before you leave your hotel (where hopefully you’ll have free Internet), download the pertinent restaurant, attraction and travel information from whatever book or online guide you prefer. (We’ve found TripAdvisor to be particularly useful.) That way, you’ll have Plan B should your planned restaurant have relocated.
Hillary Chura writes New York Family’s Le$$er Parenting blog about family finances in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @hillarychura.
