How To Save Money In England

The Tower of London: cheaper with advance purchase; even cheaper if you refuse the charitable donation.

This post represents the halfway point of me blogging about my recent trip to England. I don't often offer travel counsel on this blog because that's not really the point of telling stories about my travels, but I thought I'd make an exception since I think I actually have some useful advice to dispense here. So here goes.

If you are heading to England for vacation, and particularly London, I'd recommend you take a lot of cash or make sure you have some money set aside in your bank account to pay the bill you are inevitably going to have to deal with when your credit card statement arrives in the mail. This place is expensive. I mean like really expensive. Just using food as an example, I found the cost of meals at restaurants approximately the same in pounds as you would expect to pay in dollars in the United States. Considering a pound is worth 60 to 70 cents more than a dollar, you are essentially paying 60 to 70 percent more for meals. Think about that when you are ordering.

Traveling is often confusing. The customs of our own country don't always apply to a foreign land and if you visit without even a little research, you could find yourself surprised and forced to think on the spot with no resources to help you. Visiting a place where you speak the language helps, but not always. When I went to Iceland last December, I neglected to check the exchange rate for Icelandic Kronas and ended up taking $800 out of the ATM when I first got there; not surprisingly I still have some Krona nine months after that trip. So for those of you out there looking at a trip to the United Kingdom, here are some money saving tips that saved me this time around.

1. Pay for Your Hotel in Advance

So this tip doesn't really just apply to traveling in England, or Europe for that matter, but if you are a chain hotel person (I generally am), you can probably save some significant money by committing early to a room. When reserving a hotel room in larger hotels, the hotel is generally able to offer a discount on your stay if you reserve early and pay in advance. Of course, the catch here is the room is completely non-refundable and non-changeable, so if you somehow find yourself unable to travel when you thought you would be able to or just simply change your mind, then you are out of luck. But if you can make an early decision and stick with it, then you could save generally 15-20% on the cost of your room.

I realize that 15-20% may seem like a small discount and maybe it's not worth it for a night or maybe even two. But for me, the cost of a hotel is the single biggest expense on a trip and saving even 10% would be worth it. The cost here adds up, especially if you are staying put for any significant time. My hotel in London cost me about $200 per night after the exchange from pounds to dollars. I booked in advance and so I saved between 15-20% on the room. That's a savings of $30-$40 per night. Over six nights, that's a couple of hundred bucks which is nothing to sneeze at. This is one of my favorite ways to save money on trips; I use this strategy all the time. I'm sure I've saved hundreds this year alone.

2. Get an Oyster Card

I love the London Underground (or Tube). It goes everywhere in the city, it's quick, it's clean, it's safe and it comes regularly, even on weekends. Whichever station you visit during reasonable hours, you can expect no more than a couple of minutes wait. Considering the alternatives, which I suppose would be walking (which takes a long time) or taking a cab (expensive!), it's the ideal way to get around which is why it tends to be always packed, even on a Sunday afternoon. I know there's no way I could have completed my typically ambitious itinerary on my London trip earlier this month without spending a lot of time in the Tube.

But if there's one thing the Tube is not, it's cheap, especially if you pay cash. The minimum cash fare on the Tube is £4.70, which is about $7.75. That's a ton of money, especially if you take multiple trips in any one day. There were some days I took five or six rides on the Underground in a single day; no way do I want to be shelling out $50 or more just to get from place to place in the day. Fortunately, there is a solution, which is to get an Oyster Card, which is an electronic pay as you go touch card that you can load money onto and which offers a significant discount over cash fares. Discounts on the Tube when using an Oyster Card can be 50% or more and the cards are available in advance loaded with money from the London Underground website. We ordered our Oyster Cards on a Sunday night and they got to Arlington, Virginia the following Thursday; just like the Tube, they came quickly. I spent about £60 on the Tube in London in six days; that's about $17 per day. If I were paying cash, I'd easily have doubled that.

3. Free Beer

This is not a typo. If you are smart, there's free beer for the taking.

Over the past few decades, pub visitorship is down in England. As societal norms and gender roles have changed (not to mention the availability of alcohol in stores), fewer men are going down to the pub after work without their wives to drink delicious cask beer heavily and then hopping in a car and driving home. This has caused closure of all but the best pubs in the country and has caused a real crisis for pub owners so they have started to entice people to come back to the pub with an offer of free beer. That's right, FREE BEER!!!

The picture above is a screen shot from a pub in London called The Dove. Notice the words in the upper right of the screen. That's right: "free beer?" Clicking on this link will ask you to sign up for The Dove's mailing list in exchange for a free drink (you can unsubscribe easily). Other pubs, including the Duke of Wellington on Portobello Road in the Notting Hill section of London, have similar offers. Now, if you are a Londoner, the offer of one free beer over the course of a lifetime at a pub you will visit frequently is not much of a bonus; but if you are on vacation, you can pretty much get a free beer a night if you are smart, and that IS worth something. A beer in London will set you back about $7. It's worth signing up and getting a free pint.

4. Don't Tip

OK, let me clarify. Don't tip 15-20% like we do in the United States. It's not expected and it's not required. If you get really excellent service, then consider a 10% tip or so. The pay structure of wait staff is totally different in Europe than it is over here in America. People serving you food are not working for less than minimum wage with the understanding that they will make more based on tips. There's a reason the food costs 60-70% more than it does at home.

The Tower Bridge seen from the top deck of the Thames River Services' boat. Two discounts at once.

5. Buy Attraction Tickets Before You Leave Home

So this is similar to paying in advance for your hotel rooms, but unlike other destinations, I found this situation to be peculiar to London. In planning my trip to London, it seemed to me that there are a number of tourist attractions that offer discounts if you are willing to book on line in advance and (mostly) commit to the date you are visiting. Unlike reserving hotel rooms and paying in advance, you will likely not save 15-20% but there is an opportunity to save a few bucks (or quid) by committing early and sticking to your plan.

Tickets to St. Paul's Cathedral are £1.50 less expensive on line in advance. Tickets to the Tower Bridge are £2 cheaper in advance. And buying ahead of time at the Tower of London saves a ton of money; you can purchase tickets on line for £1.10 cheaper than in person but decline the additional voluntary charitable donation and you can knock an extra £1.90 off the ticket price. I know this is taking little bites of the apple but these discounts add up. At the very least you might be able to save enough to have an extra beer at a pub later on in addition to the free one you have already secured. Most tickets commit you to visit on the specific day you choose; the Tower of London allows you to visit within seven days of the date you select so that's a little more flexible.

Finally, sort of in this same category, one of the most popular tourist attractions in London is a boat ride to Greenwich (or beyond) on the Thames. This tour allows you to see most of the great sites in London from the water and gives you a great lay of the land (or water, I guess) while resting your feet for a little while if you tend to walk as much as I do when I'm on vacation. Most tour boats offer on line discounts in advance; the best value to me seemed to be Thames River Services, which knocks 50% off the £17 price for the tour from Westminster all the way beyond the Thames Barrier, a two hour tour in total. They even offer a 50% off coupon on the internet which allows you the full discount without committing to a date at all. There's no question that this deal was probably the best I got in London. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I'm sure there are other ways to save money in England, but there are my two cents (pun intended). I hope others can learn from my research. I haven't steered you wrong, I promise.