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11 TIPS for saving money on Family Travel. Is travel TOO EXPENSIVE with kids?

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Traveling with kids doesn’t have to mean draining the family savings account.

Caz and Craig Makepeace have logged more airport lounges, rental kitchens and beach afternoons with their two daughters than most families manage in a lifetime, and they say the “kids make travel too expensive” excuse doesn’t hold up once you know where the money actually leaks. In their YouTube video “11 TIPS for saving money on Family Travel. Is travel TOO EXPENSIVE with kids?”, the founders of y Travel Blog break down exactly how they’ve kept a nomadic lifestyle running since 2013 without a corporate paycheck backing it up.

• The 9-minute, 38-second video lays out 11 distinct tactics for cutting costs on family trips, covering everything from booking timing to meal prep.
• Caz and Craig Makepeace have traveled internationally since 1997 and went fully nomadic with daughters Kalyra and Savannah starting in 2013.
• Core strategies include shoulder-season travel, slower itineraries, kitchen-equipped rentals and hostel family rooms, loyalty program rewards, and free outdoor activities like national parks and playgrounds.

Sources of Professional Advice

Caz and Craig aren’t theorizing from a spreadsheet. The Australian couple built y Travel Blog around more than two decades of real trips, and when they had Kalyra and Savannah, they didn’t put the passports away — they restructured how they traveled instead. By 2013 the family had gone full-time nomadic, which means every tip in this video came from actually paying the bills on the road across Australia and the United States, not from a one-off vacation.

That distinction matters. A lot of family travel advice comes from people who took one big trip and wrote it up. The Makepeaces are describing a sustained system they’ve had to make work month after month, which is why the tips lean practical rather than aspirational.

The Core Money-Saving Playbook

The video’s backbone is a set of 11 tactics, and several of them target the biggest line items in any family budget: flights, lodging and food. Traveling during shoulder seasons instead of school-holiday peak periods is the first lever, since airfare and accommodation rates swing hard between high and low demand windows. Stacking airline and hotel loyalty rewards is the second, turning routine bookings into future discounts or free nights.

Accommodation choice gets specific attention. Rather than defaulting to standard hotel rooms, Caz and Craig point families toward apartments, vacation rentals, and family rooms in hostels — options that come with a kitchen. That kitchen access is the quiet cost-killer of the whole strategy, because it turns three restaurant meals a day into something families can prep themselves.

Budget-friendly family travel is less about sacrifice and more about smart planning and prioritizing shared experiences over luxury amenities.

Slowing Down to Spend Less

One of the more counterintuitive points in the video is that speed costs money. Racing between destinations means more flights, more transit fees, and more one-off accommodation bookings that don’t earn any loyalty benefit. Caz and Craig instead advocate slowing the itinerary down — staying longer in fewer places — which stretches every dollar further and cuts the transit-heavy pattern that quietly inflates a trip’s total cost.

They also flag destination passes and family group ticket discounts as an easy win that a lot of parents skip simply because they don’t think to check. Attractions and transit systems that offer multi-day or group pricing can shave a real percentage off a family’s activity budget without cutting anything from the itinerary.

Free and Cheap Days Out

The final piece of the Makepeaces’ approach leans into activities that cost nothing at all. National parks, beaches, and local playgrounds fill out the itinerary without touching the wallet, and the couple frames this not as a compromise but as the actual point — kids remember the day at the beach just as much as the paid attraction, if not more. Simple home-cooked meals round out the same philosophy: less money spent on dining out means more flexibility everywhere else in the budget.

Families looking for more destination-specific budget breakdowns can find related ground covered in TRAVEL TIPS: HOW EXPENSIVE IS AUSTRALIA?, which digs into costs in the Makepeaces’ home country, or in HOW TO TRAVEL ON A SUPER TIGHT BUDGET!! for tactics that apply well beyond family trips.

Caz and Craig aren’t selling a fantasy where travel is free — they’re selling a system, built on shoulder seasons, kitchens, and loyalty points, that’s kept a family of four moving since 2013. For parents weighing whether the next trip is even possible, the actual math in this video is the argument.