Group trips and family vacations can be pretty pricey. Staying in a traditional vacation hotel with a substantial family can often leave you renting multiple rooms. This can quickly increase your costs on a per night basis and possibly make your vacation never happen.
Let us suppose that the hotel runs about $100 a night and you need to rent three rooms for a group of 15 people. That would bring your bill to $300 a night just to cram 5 people in each hotel room. That doesn't sound very pleasant. If you chose to be more comfortable and got 4 rooms for a 4 night stay that would bring your total up to $1600 just to sleep at night in a hotel room.
I have experienced this first hand. So this time when we made a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to enjoy some time with family and friends we decided to pick another option other than the traditional hotel and tested out a Gatlinburg cabin rental. We had 15 people on this trip - including 4 married couples and 7 young adult children. It was a very large group and to fit us all comfortably and appropriately into a hotel we would have had to rent 7 rooms.
Seven rooms would have cost us $2,800 for our stay. That runs to about $186 per person.
Instead we stayed at a at a cabin rental and only spent $100 per person. That is $25 per person per night including everything - cleaning fees, taxes, etc. The cabin was much cheaper than a hotel would have been.
Our cabin was a well equipped three story cabin that had three bedrooms and three bathrooms. The bedrooms had three king sized beds, four pull out couches, and we brought an additional air mattress to sleep our whole party. We were all very comfortable with it and had no complaints as a group.
The savings in terms of the price to sleep comfortably was not the only benefit on getting a cabin. It also had a kitchen. This allowed us to save money on food. By buying and cooking a few of our own meals we saved a good chunk of change and ate better than we probably would have at any of the local restaurants. While you might not want to do this for every meal (you are on vacation!) it does help keep costs low and could be nice for children seeking to have one of their favorite foods.
We also could be loud and take our time eating without fear of being obnoxious or distracting. We could site and eat where we liked, socialize to our hearts content, and even enjoy the outside air in between courses if we wanted. It was all a very pleasurable.
The main meal that I think we saved on was breakfast. Even though we had some pretty large breakfasts, it was still significantly cheap to buy the food ourselves and prepare it ourselves than it would have been to go out to eat at an IHOP and be charged $15 per person for a meal and a beverage. That means we would be spending $225 a meal just on breakfast alone. Right now my wife and I eat for a whole month on less than that. You can buy a lot of food for $225.
In all, going with a cabin rental was the right decision for our party. It provided us unparalleled comfort for a much smaller price tag than a hotel while also enabling us to save additional money on food. These savings were significant and did not diminish the quality of our vacation. In fact, I think that it improved its quality noticeably. What is can be better than saving money and making your vacation better? |
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