Cheap Summer holidays: how we slashed the cost of our getaway

Overnight parking apps, cooking our own food and shrewd motorhome hire saved my family more than £2,000 this Summer.

Enjoying a flexible holiday

For the past few years our approach to Summer holidays has been travelling one year followed by a beach break the next.

In 2021 we packed up our two kids and drove around the Outer Hebrides for three weeks.

Then last Summer we spent two weeks in Barbados.

This year it was time to hit the road again but in the interim two years the price of motorhome hire, camping and food had shot up.

We decided to explore Southern Ireland along the Wild Atlantic Way taking in Cork, the Ring of Kerry, the Gap of Dunlo, Dingle, Clare and Galway.

On our previous Scottish holiday, we had stopped at campsites, booked in advanced.

But we felt a little restricted by this and yearned to explore wild camping, giving us the flexibility to move on if a place wasn't that interesting or stay longer if we stumbled across a hidden gem.

So we decided to throw planning out of the window and as a result, saved ourselves a lot of time and money.

We also kept the budget down in other ways and a three-week holiday that could have spiralled to more than £6,000 came in at £4,245.

Finding a cheap motorhome

The first thing was choosing the motorhome.

We used website Goboony which enables you to hire directly from a private owner which is cheaper than going through a motorhome hire company.

Initially our searches only found vehicles costing £3,000 to £3,500 for the three weeks with some expecting you to pay insurance on top.

But by playing around with the dates and looking in areas away from tourist hotspots like the Peak District and coastal areas, we managed to find an older motorhome near Preston for £2,091.

This included a discount for a long hire period.

The vehicle had solar panels so we knew we could manage without electric hook-up which was an added bonus.

The vehicle was a three-hour drive from our home, but it was worth the distance as it saved us £1,000.

Do you want to take your pet?

The next decision was whether to take our new dog.

When we went to Barbados he stayed in kennels costing us £280.

Since Ireland was only a ferry trip away we opted to take Zippy thinking it would be much cheaper.

But it turns out that you need a dog health certificate for Ireland now Britain has left the European Union, which costs £250 (and it only lasts for three months).

On top of that, we had to pay £85 for a mandatory rabies vaccination and £43 for tapeworm tablets.

All-in-all, taking the dog cost us £378 meaning we only saved about £42 when compared to kennel fees.

However, the dog had a blast and we didn't have the guilt of a long kennel stay.

Campsite and ferry costs

The ferry cost was pretty much fixed whatever day or time of travel and came in at £562 for the vehicle, four passengers and dog.

The next big cost was where to stay overnight.

Staying in a motorhome with four people at a campsite costs around £40 a night in Ireland.

And often you have to pay additional fees for using showers and laundry services. Even basic campsites with few facilities are around this price.

If we stayed in campsites every night we would need another £800.

This seemed ridiculous since we had already forked out £2,000 on the self-sufficient motorhome.

Fortunately, a few weeks before our holiday I discovered two useful apps: Park4Night and SearchforSites.

These were a complete gamechanger.

For an annual fee of £6 each you get access to a map where people upload places they have stayed overnight as well as spots for filling up with drinking water, disposing of waste or using public toilets.

The overnight parking places include pub stopovers, quiet lay-bys, car parks with no height barriers and Aires (parking spots for motorhomes) with an honesty box which have basic facilities like water and maybe a toilet, electric hook-up or even wifi.

There are hundreds of spots all across Ireland (and also the UK and mainland Europe) and people leave reviews on a regular basis so you know if the spot is still available and how large, noisy, safe or exposed it is.

We started by playing it safe and booked a campsite south of Dublin for our arrival in Ireland.

Three nights cost us £116 plus an extra €2 per person to use the four-minute shower.

And then it was into the unknown.

Finding places to stop

We knew roughly our route for the three weeks, and the places we wanted to visit, so each day I would check the two apps for the best places to stop.

It was useful to compare the two apps because although there was some overlap they both listed different spots.

We broke ourselves in gently and started with an Aire which cost €12 for a spot in a field next to the beach.

There was water and waste disposal onsite and an incredibly clean portaloo around the corner.

Then we went fully self sufficient and found an amazing free parking area on the outskirts of Cork overlooking the estuary.

It was a spacious marina car park and was filled with motorhomes.

There were no facilities but we had our own toilet, shower, kitchen, beds and solar electricity plus a tank full of drinking water so didn't need anything else.

We were able to walk into Cork and then come back and have a quiet night's sleep at no additional cost.

For the next two and a half weeks we did the same.

We mostly found free parking spots at visitors centres, beach roadsides and next to pubs.

We sprinkled this with a few stops at Aires (prices varied from €10 to €20) so we could dispose of our waste and fill up with water.

Nearly all the stops were at stunning locations, including our two-night stay at Bray Head car park with views across the Skellig islands which featured in the latest Star Wars trilogy.

We never had trouble finding somewhere to park and we were greeted with enthusiasm by locals, who fully supported free stopovers.

On the final two nights before our ferry we stayed at a campsite again, to get a proper shower and decompress.

Altogether we paid £192 for five nights on campsites and a further £60 for five Aire stops.

This saved us around £548.

Additional costs to factor in

During the three weeks, we only ate out three times, because a one-course meal for four people not including drinks cost around £60, whether it was at a food market, restaurant or pub.

We spent £228 on eating out including two ice creams on the beach which cost the equivalent of £10!

We spent £291 on food shopping, buying our food at Lidl which are huge stores in Ireland and include lots of cheap tasty Irish produce.

Cooking our own meals saved us a fortune, because even if we had eaten out only once a day it would have amounted to more than £1,200 across the three weeks.

We used our Monzo account to avoid currency exchange charges and paid for most things on card but also took €100 out in cash to use in the Aire honesty boxes.

Our only other costs were fuel, which came in at £308 as diesel is cheaper than petrol in Ireland.

And we spent £135 on day trips including a visit around the dramatic Mizen Head signal station, a boat trip for two around Skellig Michael island, a visit to the Cliffs of Moher and paddleboard hire.

But most of our days were spent on the beach, or walking through the stunning landscape, at no cost.

It was far from a cheap holiday but considering we had a three-week break, and covered 2,000 miles, I think we had value for money.