Don tells all

New York, New York Here it is: the cost of 25 nights (26 days) of our trip in the U.K.

Our nearly one-month trip to the UK – from London to Edinburgh – was a particularly good trip. The weather was great and we got to revisit some places we hadn’t been in fifty years and some places new to us. (Plus, we got to visit dear friends. I’m careful not to say OLD friends, because that might be interpreted incorrectly.)

When people report on their trips, I’m always curious: “How much did that cost?”

So, in the spirit of complete full disclosure, here is a breakdown of the precise costs of those 26 days. I was able to account for every penny (and pence) with the use of a great app on my phone called TravelSpend. You enter the amount of each transaction in the local currency and it immediately converts it to your home currency based on that day’s exchange rate. In this case, of course, it was pounds to dollars – with some expenses in dollars (like getting to the airport). Then the app categorizes all the spending in different groups — transportation, restaurants, shopping, accommodation, etc.

A bit of background on what prompted us to take this trip. Back in June, American
Airlines had a “flash sale” on using points for a flight to the UK. The offer was 15,000
points one way for one person, economy. Or, 30,000 points for the both of us.
Sometimes that one-way can be as high as 40,000 points. A deal! We wanted to come
back from Edinburgh to NYC because I’ll do about anything to avoid the departure taxes at Heathrow.

But American Airlines does not fly non-stop from Edinburgh to NYC. We would have had to fly back to Heathrow and change planes. But, amazingly, Delta, which does fly non-stop to NYC, was also having a flash sale at 14,000 points each, in economy. Therefore, we used a total of 58,000 points for our two round-trip flights.

Not bad. That was a savings of about $1500, although you could fly on a different
airline (Norse) for a cheaper rate.

We also had a ton of loyalty points with IHG Hotels. (IHG hotels include
Intercontinental, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Kimpton, Crowne Plaza, etc.) Using points, we were able to get 14 nights of the 25 nights of the trip via points redemption. Because I have a high level IHG loyalty status, we get some perks. These perks include room upgrades.

Our best room upgrade was at the Intercontinental in Edinburgh. We actually got a double upgrade. One upgrade because of my loyalty status and a second upgrade because we had reached a “milestone” of so many qualifying nights to get five-nights of an upgrade.

As a result, the original room, which was booked with points but would normally be priced at $350 a night, got us to a junior suite with a rack rate of $1200 a night.

It was a VERY nice room. Jo has remarked that that is the new “standard” for her. (She’ll have to go back to work to keep traveling at such a luxurious standard.)

In total, therefore, we “saved” some $10,860 by redeeming points for those nights at
IHG properties, which included the Intercontinental and a Holiday Inn in London. We also stayed at a Holiday Inn (York and Portsmouth) and Holiday Inn Express
(Newcastle) that we paid for, to gather more points. (We’re not going to consider the
thousands we spent to accumulate those points for the “free” stays, but we would have spent that anyway. The points give us a little payback.)

If we had not been upgraded to that expensive room in Edinburgh, the amount saved would have been $5760.

With that in mind, here’s the total out-of-pocket spend for the both of us: $7,844 or $301 a day. (Without the savings on airfare and hotel rooms, the total would have been $20,204 or $777 a day. And without the $1200 upgrade at the Edinburgh
Intercontinental, it would have been $15,124 or $581 a day, which is the reality for a
mid-range budget of a Rick Steves-type trip. But not a luxury trip.)

The breakdown is:
Accommodation: $1,551. Averaging $62 a night. This was the biggest savings from
the loyalty points redemption.

Transportation: $1,448 or about $55 a day. This includes airfare, train, taxi, tube, buses, Uber. We did everything via public transportation. We saved on train travel because we have Senior Railcards for traveling in the UK. The railcards, which can be bought by anyone including non UK citizens, cost about $65 for a one-year pass or about $85 for three years. Because we go to the UK often, we have three-year passes. The Railcards get us about a 1/3 discount on train travel. Plus, we booked the train trips months in advance, which also delivers deep discounts. We took 8 train trips that totaled $443 for the two of us. Because I knew we were getting deep discounts, I booked us into First Class on each trip. First Class is not usually as luxurious as you would hope, but it’s a step up from the crowded (and LOUD) standard class.

In contrast to the $443 we spent, if you bought a BritRail Pass for 8 train trips in one month, the cost for First Class for two senior people would be $1318 or for standard (they don’t call it second class) it would be $854. This would be a fairly accurate cost if you waited until the last minute and just hopped on a train.

Also, we didn’t take extremely long train rides, like London to Inverness. We found the Uber service to be (mostly) efficient and convenient. I think the total transportation cost was much lower than if we had rented a car. And the aggravation was certainly lower. The biggest transportation cost was the taxi to and from JFK and our apartment: $218!

And the biggest expense savings was from the flights, which would have cost about an additional $1500.

Food: Our restaurant/cafe expense was $2,303 or about $88 a day. Restaurants and
pubs have become very expensive throughout the UK. (Those scones were not cheap. A typical cost for one scone and two cups of tea was $15 a pop!) They were a little less expensive when we got out of London, but not much. We do not drink much except for an occasional beer or glass of wine. Drinkers could be expected to spend much, much more.

We normally only had one major meal a day and we didn’t search out fancy Michelin star restaurants. The fanciest we went to were the Ivy restaurants, which are very pleasant and nicely priced. We supplemented that with sandwiches or other things
we got at a grocery store or Pret. We also stockpiled drinks, which we stored in the
refrigerators that were in most rooms. (Our $1200 a night room in Edinburgh had a fully stocked refrigerator with “complimentary” drinks.) Our grocery store cost was $289. So, our total food/drink cost was $2592 or $99 a day. Actually, that was not much more than what we spend on restaurants and groceries when we’re home.

Sightseeing: $1122, or $43 a day. Entrance fees to many of the places we went to
seemed high, although some, like the national museums, were free. For example, the cost of going to Westminster Abbey, with the added expense of a tour, was $50 each. It’s so crowded there that you have to book a reserved entrance time far in advance. There were a lot of disappointed tourists who just walked up to Westminster and found they couldn’t get in. All of the sights, however, were great and that, of course, was why we were traveling.

Shopping: $922. Someone I was traveling with has a bloodhound’s sense of the
location of gift shops. Did we miss any gift shop in any of the places we visited? I think not. I tried to hold her back, but I was only partly successful.

Entertainment: $115. I went to one play (at the Old Vic) and one opera. Otherwise, we did not pursue evening entertainment.

Laundry: $88. I would trudge to a laundromat once a week. The laundromats – or
launderettes — in the UK are mostly pretty grim experiences. But I refuse to pay the
outrageous laundry prices at hotels. (The best laundromats I’ve ever been to are in
Japan. They were clean, fast and cheap. The washing machine drums were sterilized
before each new person’s use.)

Summary: The UK has become one of the most expensive places to travel to in
Europe, except for Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. During my first trip to Europe in 1969, I used Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day. It was easy to keep to under $5 a day. Knowing the expenses today in the UK, that’s why we maximized our use of points, both for airfare and hotels. Our beloved Vienna is about one-third less than the UK, especially if you travel off-season. This last trip to the UK was during “shoulder season,” and while that means there are fewer crowds, I didn’t have a sense that anything was particularly less expensive.

So, was it worth it? I wouldn’t have wanted to spend $20,000 for the trip, which is what it would have cost without the points redemption. I would have preferred to put in a new bathroom. But the trip was a great experience and compared to an escorted trip for the same duration, it was less than half the expense.

Any questions?