Introductory Winter Mountaineering Course (February 2011) – Update on Costs
The worst part of going on holiday is planning them!
In my previous post I detailed the projected costs of the travel for the mountaineering course that I’m going on. After literally quite a few hours of fiddling on www.thetrainline.com, various hotel companies (including www.lastminute.com, www.expedia.com. etc.) and www.quidco.com I have revised my travel plans to include a weekend in Edinburgh and have found ways to save quite a bit of money (a double bonus)!
For the train journeys, I found that it will be £100 cheaper for me to get a train from London Euston instead of from Milton Keynes. The train to Euston will cost me £5. Nathan told me about this trick!
I was having some problems with The Train Line website, so I tweeted about it – and within minutes, someone from their customer support team tweeted me back. I gave him my phone number. He then phoned me and acknowledged the issue. Then he phoned me back 15 minutes later with a solution – this was fantastic!
I used Quidco to book my tickets, but that only saved me about £2.77 off of a total ticket price of £184.70 due to the measly 1.5% discount.
As Nathan and I are staying in the Ballachulish hotel for the course, it made sense for us to book into the same hotel the night before the course starts.If you book directly via their website, the price is already very good – a twin room is only £80.75 and it includes a bottle of wine and breakfast. We could also pay £20 up front to get 20% off of the food bill (plus they will give us a free starter). However, I did a quick search on Google and found it for £65.32 (still including breakfast), which sounds like a very good deal to me, so I bought that.
I booked 2 nights in the Royal British Hotel in Edinburgh via Lastminute.com, costing £176 for two nights, before cash-back of £15.84 via Quidco. The hotel hasn’t got great reviews, but it was a lot cheaper than most other hotels in the area and is in an okay location.
So now I have all of my travel and accommodation booked. This is what I have paid (before £18.61 Quidco cash-back. The Ballachulish hotel shows half the price as Nathan will pay the other half).
Scotland travel plans - costs
Everything has shown up on my TripIt account (except for Ballachulish hotel which I will have to add manually) – which is a fantastic tool, as it means I have my whole itinerary on my mobile phone.
Now the pressure of organsiing the holiday is off, I can look forward to looking forward to it! 
I am even looking forward to sleeping on the train (in a bunk) on the way to Edinburgh, especially as it will give me a chance to use the Kindle I got as a Christmas present! For the return (Edinburgh to Milton Keynes), I chose to go first class as it was only £12 more expensive than standard.
December 29th, 2010 at 19:35
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