Las Vegas Honeymoon: How I Saved Money
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For many, a honeymoon is a once-in-a-lifetime trip before settling down to start a family. Ours is no different. Here’s how we’ve saved on the cost of our Las Vegas Honeymoon.
On the 16th of January 2017, my husband and I set off on our Las Vegas honeymoon. We did a mini-tour of the West Coast of the USA which included Las Vegas for a week followed by a night in San Diego and three nights in Anaheim, California to visit Disneyland.
We actually got married in September 2016 but we wanted to take time off for our wedding and as we were both working at the same place we couldn’t take three weeks off together. It was actually really nice having something to look forward to and make plans for post-wedding.
Las Vegas Honeymoon: How I Saved Money
Despite my usual money-saving ways, this trip is not a cheap one. In total, we will have spent close to £5k including our spending money and all activities. We were very lucky to have a large part of our spending money gifted to us by our wedding guests. We are so grateful to them as we’re doing lots of things we maybe wouldn’t have been able to do without their kind generosity.
Without lots of planning and my money-saving ways, our Las Vegas honeymoon could easily have ended up costing us a lot more. We did look at package tours and booking parts of our trip through a travel agent, but after pricing it up, would have cost us even more money.
I’m actually really proud of myself for booking everything separately – I was so worried we’d turn up somewhere and they wouldn’t have our booking. Everything went to plan – the biggest disaster we had was trying to drive almost 500 miles with a sat-nav that wouldn’t work!
1. We’re not flying directly to Las Vegas from the U.K
Flights to America are never cheap. Sites like Skyscanner are great for finding cheap flights and you can set up alerts for when the prices of your chosen flights rise or fall. In the end, we found the cheapest option was to fly to the USA via Canada, which saved us around £500.
It does make our travel day very long – but we decided it was worth it for the money we are saving. We flew with Westjet on the way out to Las Vegas and Norwegian on the way back home to the U.K.
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2. Booking hotels that can be cancelled
I booked all three of our hotels for our Las Vegas Honeymoon through booking.com. All of our rooms could be cancelled right up until the date of our trip. I’d been checking on and off and one night I actually found one of our rooms cheaper for the exact same dates.
So I cancelled and rebooked at the cheaper rate, saving over £50. We then found a different hotel we liked the look of which was closer to better amenities, so we cancelled again and booked that one instead. This was another £50 cheaper for the same stay. We saved £100 in the space of an hour and we are closer to where we need to be. Win-win!
3. Always go through Cashback Sites
Cashback sites are great, especially when planning a trip like this when we are spending so much money. I simply clicked through every time we booked something – including flights, hotels, car hire, and tickets to Disneyland. We have made around £150 in cashback by doing this on this trip alone. We also visited Disney World this year and made over £100 cashback on that booking too. Cashback sites are a totally legitimate way to make money on everyday purchases, including travel. If you’re not a member of a cashback site then why not? My favourite is Top Cashback and you can sign up here.
4. Finding things to do for free on our Las Vegas Honeymoon
Las Vegas isn’t the cheapest place to visit but there is so much to do there besides gambling and drinking. I’ve been carefully researching things we can do for free to make our trip that little bit more budget-friendly.
These include obvious things like the fountains and botanical gardens at the Bellagio to the less obvious like visiting the Lucky Cat at the Cosmopolitan or the free circus acts at Circus Circus. After returning from our trip I actually compiled a list of free things for couples to do in Las Vegas.
5. I plan to coupon
I love couponing here in the UK so definitely wanted to do some during our Las Vegas honeymoon. In particular, I want to save money on food as we would be eating out most of the time. I found vouchers for a free main course at Buca di Beppo, a free appetizer at TGIFs and two for one voucher for several other places. It was great to have options for money-saving eats while we’re out and about exploring everything Las Vegas has to offer. While I know we could have lived off of fast food to save money, it’s our honeymoon so we wanted
Related post – Find out all about how I coupon in the UK
We went to America 2 years ago and boy can it be expensive. The thing is, you just have to do some stuff and accept the cost!
We also took our honeymoon 6 months after we got married, and it worked really well. I love sorting the nitty gritty details of a holiday so it worked well getting the wedding out of the way, so to speak!