A Bargain Vacation to London, England

London can be a very expensive city to vacation in, especially if one does not plan out their trip in advance. Many of the good hotels carry a hefty price tag per night and eating is not an economical prospect in tourist-laden areas.

Before traveling to London, I recommend plotting out the places you want to visit and the experiences you want to have and then using a site like hotels.com to find a hotel in a location central to most of the places on your list. This will help in conserving transportation costs across the city as well as the additional lodging costs that result in staying too close to any one tourist location.

However, if you are on an exceedingly tight budget, the first thing to save is hotel costs. If you don't mind angling a couple of transportation changes (bus and then tube) to get to the heart of the city, then the Queens Hotel Crystal Palace at 122 Church Road could be the lodgings of your choice. The rooms in this hotel are quite small, and as stated, a far piece from many destinations. They range in price from $55-80 in most instances and are in London. If you don't mind a small room, the substantial savings will add up fast. In all honesty, a vacation should be spent out and about and not in a hotel room anyway so the room's size should make little difference unless you have a whole family to contend with!

If you don't mind a little sparseness, another economical alternative is the Royal Court Apartments. This hotel option would be perfect for a family with one or two small children. The rooms are very plain, but for the cost of approximately $80 for a clean set of rooms in a convenient location I can do without an extra piece or two of wall art.

When eating in London, I recommend highly finding a neighborhood restaurant, café, or deli near your hotel and familiarizing yourself with the bargains on the menu. Several places to pick up food or eat a hot meal exist near the Royal Court Apartments mentioned above. The best tip is to snack while out seeing the sites in the day and only eat a full meal when you are out of the sight-seeing areas where prices are higher on everything from a bottle of water to a piece of deli meat.

I always like to think of a vacation as a chance to get to know a new city or country, and I believe there is no better way to do this than to live like a local as much as possible. This can usually mean sparse locations (but cheap prices) and eating out a of a deli-counter or lunching on cold-cuts, but it lets me feel closer to a city and its people - the whole purpose of traveling.