I should not have been surprised just how much it can cost feeding a hungry family on holiday.
My wife, two children aged under eight and I are just back from a half-term week on the blissfully sunny Isle of Wight.
We booked months in advance to secure a great self-catering cottage close to beaches, shops and restaurants.
All perfect on all accounts….except. The big BUT is the fact that self-catering in reality means eating out most of the time despite loading the car down with enough provisions to feed a small army.
A coffee here, a snack there, lunch out, early supper. All these extras seriously mount up as children’s nagging capability knows no bounds.
So while we arrived with all good intentions of cooking and preparing meals just as we would at home, we got press-ganged into going out for a Chinese supper, lunch at a beach café, dinner at a country pub, breakfast pancakes at the nearby tapas bar, mid-morning snacks. Anyone with children will know the form.
Don’t get me wrong, all were lovely experiences but draining on the wallet.
If we had gone out for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I calculated that the very minimum we would have spent per day would have been £100 before even ordering a drink.
Times that by seven days and the cost of food alone would have more than surpassed the rental fee for our cottage for a week. Not that we could have afforded to go down that road.
This all brought into sharp focus how much food alone can add to the cost of a holiday, even before factoring in a regular diet of children’s ice creams and drinks.
And it got me to thinking how effective a cruise can be when travelling with what seems to be endlessly ravenous off-spring.
With breakfast, lunch and dinner thrown in as part of the price – not to mention 24-hour buffets, afternoon teas and complementary room service on most ships – a cruise holiday suddenly becomes a fantastically budget-friendly option.
Given the vast selection available in the buffet areas, my children on their first cruise last year, were completely spoilt for choice.
Our P&O Cruises’ ship Ventura even had little Marmite tubs available first thing to meet the cravings of my daughter Tilly.
Lunch-time on sea days was generally spent around the pool with pizzas or hot dogs – not the best of diets I freely admit, but OK as an occasional treat we reckoned.
Then in the evening, we could dine in one of the buffets, often offering themed dinners ranging from Mexican to Italian and Indian. All was of extraordinarily good quality, and with the added bonus that the children could make their own choice each night.
Alternatively, there was one of the main dining rooms, not ideal for young children, we felt, as their attention span was stretched to the limit due to the multiple courses on offer.
Having said that, we couldn’t fault the exceptional value as all the main eateries on board were included in the cruise price.
It even meant my wife and I could splash out on a couple of nights in celebrity chef Marco Pierre White’s White Room perched to the rear of Ventura with a spectacular al fresco dining area while the children were kept entertained for a few hours in their supervised clubs.
The small supplement charged for such a special opportunity seemed a tiny price to pay in comparison with our average daily eating out outlay on holiday here in the UK.
And, as I wrote in last week’s blog, with a third of cruises costing less then £1,000, it must be hard to find a better holiday bargain.
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