How much was a family vacation in June 2007?

Answer 1

That depends on your destination. Flights are expensive, but these days driving can be as well. You can expect to pay $250 per night for hotel in any major city unless you are willing to "chance it" with a budget hotel. Insiders and traveller reviews on some of the travel search engines can provide invaluable insight into the condition, cleanliness, and service at some of these, but traveller beware. If you stick with the middle of the road Marriotts and Hiltons, it's going to cost you. So for 7 nights, this will cost $1,750 alone. Seems steep just for a place to sleep, but let's continue. Meals for a family of four will easily run you around $15 per person for lunch and upwards of $25 per person for dinner, costing another $160 per day in food. Food at any theme park or vacation tourist spot may well run a lot more. But for the sake of our tally, let's stick with $160 per day in food for 7 days which comes to $1,120. This brings our tally to $2,870 for hotel and food alone. Activities will vary too widely to add here, but each family should investigate what their vacation area has to offer and choose ahead of time what would be most important for them to do while on vacation. The costs can be estimated based on ticket prices. The cost of food at many all-day activities may cost quite a bit more than we have estimated above, and the costs of souvenirs should be added into these activities if you are looking for an honest estimate of what you can afford. Tickets to Busch Gardens, for example, cost (with coupon) $60 per day, so a family of four will spend $240 on admission. A beer at Busch Gardens costs $6.50, and a soda costs $2.99. Over the course of a day, you will consume at least four beverages each, which will cost (2 adults, 2 children) around $20 (with taxes). Food costs a lot more, and a T-shirt will cost $20 to $25 each. Ice cream is $5 a pop, so if you eat lunch and dinner there, you will easily spend $160 in addition to admission costs for a one-day activity total of $400. If you plan to be involved in activities each day, it is not (shockingly) unreasonable to estimate $100 per person per day. Let's assume three of the days on a week-long vacation are spent in this manner, and the other three are spent doing lower-budget activities such as a day on the beach (of course if you rent a Catamaran or jet skis or go parasailing, all bets are off) and spend less than $100 per day on these activities, the weekly total for activities will still be $1,700. Our tally for hotel, food, and entertainment is now up to $4,570 for a week, or roughly $650 per day for the family. This excludes the transportation to and from the vacation destination (and around town) which could add a whole lot more. I have been looking into the costs of a vacation this year, and really wanted to go to NYC, but the costs seem so prohibitive. I'm sick of reading web pages that estimate a family vacation at $100 per person per day. That may be true for a retreat to the beach with no extras or to a national park for outdoor fun, but when looking to any metropolitan center or to specialty activities, these figures are so far off. Just look at the prices for sporting events, if you can get them. Professional sports in this country has virtually endorsed the legal scalping of tickets through web "traders". If you live near a stadium, just try to take your family of four to a Baseball game! Parking is $20, the cheapest tickets are $20 each, a soda is $4, a hotdog is $5, ice cream is $5... the cost to take your family to a baseball game for the afternoon has risen to $150 - if that is the measure, then spending $6000 for a week at DisneyWorld seems like a steal.