Holiday accommodation can be expensive but the range of choice is wide. Beginning with hostels, campsites, caravan parks you can consider B&B’s, guesthouses and hotels of an increasing number of stars.
But have you ever considered university accommodation?
Obviously it has its drawbacks, not the least of which is you can’t stay there when the students are around. So you’re limited really to holiday times such as Easter, July through to the end of September and over Christmas. But those are also the times when other accommodation carries a premium price. And universities are in some of the most popular shortbreak and citybreak destinations. Take Cambridge for example. Trying to find accommodation there can be a real problem in summer when overseas tourists visit.
Hotels might have a couple of hundred rooms to rent. In certain places like Las Vegas, rooms number in the thousands in some hotels. And that is the sort of numbers that universities have available. Take University College, London for example. They have 1,300 rooms to rent at free times of the year. In London, where hotel prices and even B&B’s can be very expensive. And most of the accommodation is newer than some hotel stock or refurbished recently
In my university days, rooms were small with a sink and you went up the corridor to find the shower and toilets. It’s not necessarily like that any more. Many are en-suite, many are larger but for cheaper prices, you can still rent standard rooms without facilities.
Now universities like UCL, Aberystwyth, Stirling and Edinburgh are attending travel trade shows to make their accommodation more widely known to travel agents and tour organisers. Your local tennis, bowls or photographic club may well be your neighbours in university accommodation. They have already seen the savings and the advantages of staying in university accommodation. For that citybreak, it’s worth considering,