Off site spend budget

[1973jk]

Planning for next summer and I was wondering what most of you budget for spending money? Not including park tickets.
We are a family of 4 ( two teenagers), staying offsite, eating out daily for evening meal.
Assuming the rate stays as it is presently- in gbp what would you budget for spending money?

[davdawnbro]

We are due to go in October. It's our first time with kids (9 and 11) we have a budget of £3500 for two weeks off site, we are not planning on any expensive meals out so that should be more than enough including a little trip to the outlets for my brand snob tweenager to get some new clobber.

[BevS97]

You need to set a daily figure in dollars as that's how you will be spending it.

Your evening meal it will totally depend on where and how you eat, it could be $40 for pizza through to $200 for a fancy restaurant with appetisers, dessert and alcoholic drinks.

In the parks, a quick service for 4 including drinks is going to be about $60-$70, but we have been sharing meals for the past fortnight and drinking water and have been spending around $30 a meal.

We eat breakfast in the room so that's quite inexpensive.
Plus budget for some snacks, ice creams etc all seem to run $5 each, so $20 for a round of ice cream.

[Galela1986]

We (2 adults 1 child) went in Feb and only spent £1850 this was with off site eating and a small amount of shopping and a helicopter ride. We ate in Denny's and IHOP places like that for breakfast, snack and light lunches in the parks and evening meals we had places like sci fi diner Hollywood studio, red lobster, Cheesecake Factory.

[mrsbenny]

We stayed onsite family of 4 and spent about $140 per day on food. We had breakfast cereal in our room a quick service meal at lunchtime then a pizza to share at tea time or sarnies/ salads. We drank water with our meals so that brought the quick service price down to about $35. Another $30 for tea.
Took our own cereal, kettle tea bags etc and bought 2 refillable mugs for the kids. As Bev said 4 ice creams was about $20.
I would say it depends where you want to eat as we don't really do expensive restaurants as the kids wouldn't eat it so not worth it for us but I can see that sending the spends up!

[holidaysaver75]

We budgeted $150 a day (2 adults, 3 kids) for food, drinks, little treats etc and stuck to it quite easily. We used diner-style places (love Perkins!) but did have a few nice meals out.

[danisleigh]

We are really feeling the difference compared to our last trip in 2014. The first week we were onsite with ddp and the free gift card covered our tips plus a bit more and we spent about $300 on top which was souvenirs and alcohol mainly! Since we have moved offsite we have been spending around $120-$140 per day on 2 adults and a teen. We have been a lot more careful than in the past and have chosen a fair few cheaper places such as Pizza Hut and steak and shake... both of these cost $30-$40. Olive Garden we had 3 adult mains, a coke, a glass of wine and a frozen cocktail and it was $80 including tip. Theme park meals are really expensive but they are shareable... we are off to blizzard beach again tomorrow and have said that now we are not on the ddp we will just get 2 chicken tender meals to share and one large drink.
We decided to pop to Ghiradhelli the other day as we didn't get a chance when onsite and wow... DH and I shared a sundae and DS had a milkshake and my credit card has converted it to £15! Never would we spend that much on ice cream at home!

[BoxOfFrogs]

I reckon it depends on how you want to live, personally I work too hard and get far too few holidays to have to drink water in restaurants, I don't think a Diet Coke is an extravagance with a meal so for me a realistic budget for 2adults 2 teens offsite is

$30 IHOP breakfast
$80 lunch in park with a small desert/ice cream
$100 millers alehouse/Bahama breeze evening meal
$50 random waters/cokes etc while walking

So $250/60 per day then double it, so $500 a day I would want to be carrying

plus shopping which has no fixed amount,

This was based on last summers prices so will be a little worse now

I totally respect folks frugality but who wants to scrimp and scrape while on holiday, maybe they do but I like to leave the extreme couponing for at home, it costs thousands to be there only to live like your on the dole in Skegness

If you have no choice then I would say take what you have and make it be enough

[DisneyNikki]

we are about to go... budget details here...

https://www.thedibb.co.uk/forums/sho... php?t=1041574

will report back )

[BevS97]

We certainly didn't live like we were on the dole at Skegness! We have had a lovely holiday, one that we simply couldn't have had if we had to take $500 a day!

We actually all agreed that we felt much better for eating less than we had in the past, where we had all eaten a huge meal and then felt overly full afterwards. We don't eat like that at home and we didn't need to eat like it on holiday.