Benefits of self-catering accommodation

Everyone wishes for a holiday after a long-time work or study. Finding an accommodation is the first task before a trip. More and more people select self-catering accommodation with the following reasons:

Privacy

Privacy is a major issue of self-catering. Family time is precious, a holiday villa or cottage provides you with the luxury of your own private space, but even if it's part of a busy resort, you can always head back to peaceful turf for some quiet meals and downtime.

Flexibility

From a practical viewpoint, self-catering with young children offers so much flexibility. If your kids are in a fussy eating phase then as convenient as all-inclusive might seem, in reality you may spend most holiday meal time coaxing your kids to try unfamiliar hotel food – we've been there! It wasn't fun.

It can be fun to eat at the buffet – but all-inclusive typically means you're at the mercy of set meal time; if you fancy exploring off-site, meal times can restrict your activities or mean you miss out of what you've already paid for.

Health

If you're hoping to stick to healthy eating habits, self catering makes this much easier to achieve.

Self-catering can restrict you to your accommodation in the evening when the children need to go to bed; but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. e.g the kids were so exhausted from swimming all day that they were tucked up in bed by early evening, leaving us free to cook at leisure and spend our evenings together as a couple in beautiful, romantic surroundings – not such a shabby option, and more flexible than being stuck all together in a hotel room.

Cost-control

When you do your own cooking, you lose the financial safety net of an all-inclusive holiday. A good way to keep food costs down is to make a shopping list in advance and research a supermarket en-route to your accommodation.

Whether you discover a restaurant in a beautiful spot during an afternoon stroll, or you want to buy a poolside lunch, or the kids are desperate to eat where their new-found friends are going, with self-catering it's still hard to resist the lure of a restaurant. But you can budget for it in advance. Generally, we factor one meal out per day into our budget – maybe just a coffee and cake one day, lunch the next, dinner the next and it still works out cheaper than all-inclusive.

Obviously

we all want something slightly different from a holiday, and every family is different too. Self-catering gives you the ability to do cater for your family's wants and needs, at your own pace, as opposed to fitting in with the one-size-fits-all experience that is all-inclusive.

When you're planning your next family holiday, don't automatically rule out self-catering as the ‘hard work' option.