Family Days Out On A Budget > Reviews (5)

I don't know how many people have this problem, but I always find it a problem to plan a family day out within budget. Occaisionally you might have some spare money, say £50, and you want to do something fairly impulsive on the spare of the moment to treat the family, but don't want to spend ages on the internet researching what is affordable to do and what is not.

From experience £50 is not really enough money to stay in a travel lodge somewhere and go and visit distant relatives (and eat breakfast the following day). You would probably be hard pushed if you have a family the size of mine to afford entrance to the local zoo, and also the decision do you picnic or treat the children to food out. What starts out as an exercise to spend a spare £50, suddenly becomes an issue, because you realise even if you found anything to do for £50, you have got to find your petrol, possible car parking charges and food out. Instead of enjoying a bit of spare cash, I can find myself reaching for the credit card to top up the costs of the adventure.

If you ever set out to try and budget a family day out, you will find out a couple of things, attractions have different definitions of childrens ages, and some attractions define childrens tariffs by height rather than by age, so it is very difficult to do a quick like for like cost comparison between attractions.

Quite often like many people, as a family we think of the things that we would like to do, and then my wife and I will try and research on the internet suitable places to go. Even agreeing on something suitable that we would like to do can be hard with the different age ranges of our family.

Often to our disapointment we find out that we cannot afford to do the things that we have been thinking we would like to do, by then the expecations of the children are raised and everything else we suggest seems like a stingy consolation prize. We are left with two options, to either get out the credit card and spend money that we can't afford going out, or have not so happy family day out.

Thinking that we cannot be the only family alone in this dilemma, we set about to design a website which turns the issue on its head. Of course we did not have the programming skills to do such an undertaking ourselves, but my view is never let lack of ones own skills get in the way of a good idea. We set about to find a programmer, we used a website called vworker and posted a project, and Milos Novakovic came forward. Milos has his own company Master Media in Serbia and does many web projects http://www.mastermedia.info/.

Family Days Out On A Budget is a website is designed to give key information about affordability and location of attractions quickly taking into account factors such as your starting budget that you are prepared to spend on an attraction for everybody, ages of family members and distances people are prepared to travel to locations. When you have the list of what you can afford to do, you can take the next step of researching with your friends and family what people want to do.

We have had a feature built into the website so that you can email to yourself a list of all the attractions that meet your budget criteria.

We started by adding most of the woods from the woodlands trust website, as these are free to visit, and found a lot of other free museum ideas from other websites, but we are also building a list of attractions that you have to pay to go to and adding those into the database, so that you can get like for like comparisons between the local attractions that charge. I apologise that some counties are very deficient in attraction sugestions, but a feature will be added in the coming months where you will be able to login to the website and submit attraction sugestions.

We have also tried to make understanding budget easier for people visiting the country for the first time by providing google translation aps and currency conversion tool. We aim to continually to add to the information available on this website and hope that people will make recommendations and visit us time and time again to find new attractions added to our database.

I also discovered when this website was being designed that google directions also has an estimated petrol cost at the bottom of the directions.

Hope you will visit the website and make some comments

http://www.familydaysoutonabudget.com/