The aim of the £50 Challenge is to book a weekend or long-weekend away using the ‘rule of 50s’.
The Rule of 50s
The rule of 50s says that everything should cost less than £50. So if you take a plane, your airfare should be under £50 per person return. If you drive to your destination, your fuel should cost less than £50. Similarly, train or bus fares must total less than £50 all-in. Accommodation must be under £50 a night for two people and food and drink should cost under £50 per person per day. Lastly, airport hotel and/or parking should be under £50 for the duration.
Why?
Obviously to keep costs down, but that’s not the only reason. We seem to be bombarded with offers of cheap flights. Ryanair seem to have promotions every other day, not to be outdone WizzAir and Easyjet offer some great offers and even the full-service airlines appear to be trying to turn themselves into budget airlines half the time.
Like a lot of people, we’ve had our share of great offers; Malaga last Christmas was a great success even if getting there took a long 13 hours due to inclement weather and a plane sliding off the runway (not ours!). It was the cheap flight that made us think about going away for Christmas for the first time. We’d wouldn’t have visited Girona or Carcasonne either without the initial lure of flights costing less than a local meal out. Put simply, we’ve been to some great places simply because the flights were cheap;, places we’d never have visted otherwise. So why not make a virtue of the more out of the way places offered by the no-frills airlines and use them to explore ‘the road less travelled’? Celebrate the slightly obscure, the hidden, the out of the way and the often overlooked.
Accommodation
Despite what some of out friends think, we’re no lovers of slumming it. However, as much as we appreciate the International hotel chains as airport hotels and when travelling for work, we’re not overly fond of holidaying in them.
We tend lo like smaller, local hotels, private rooms in posh hostels, and AirBnB type places. Especially when on a city break for one or two nights or a long weekend in the country, we’ve found that a comfortable bed and a decent bathroom are pretty much all we need from our accommodation. As long as we’re close to a few restaurants, some transport links and a little culture or some history we can be pretty happy anywhere for a weekend. This part of the challenge will undoubtably limit the cities we can visit, some are just too expensive to be able to find a decent room at less then £50, but more expensive rooms are often in more popular cities and we’re trying to visit lesser known places so maybe that will work to our advantage, maybe we’ll just have to get a bit creative; maybe YHA or couchsurfing.
So the £50 Challenge and the “rule of 50s” is born. We’ll be posting updates here as we book and take the trips. Are you up for the challenge too?