Jean Mueller

I will be traveling to the Midlands and Southeast England with four women friends in April. We were considering using Holiday rentals. Are they a cheaper way to go than B&B's for 5-7 nights? Any recommendations? Do's and don't? This is my 4th trip and 1st trip for others. I can't wait to go back! Thanks.

Jc

I travel to U.K. about 2-3 times a year. There are many interesting places to go in each part of the country.For a group of 4-5, holiday rentals certainly is a cheaper way to go.Besides,you could get pretty good deals in april except around Eastern. For holiday cottage rentals, there are many comapnies around, if you are looking for some thing with historical interest, National Trust or Landmark Trust are good bid.If you like some thing morden, Blakes cottages are quite good,and there are quite a few others, it all depand on the transportation and your friends interest. Because for first timers, probably they will like to stay in London. You could send me e-mail directly if you like to discuss about it.

Linda

This may be a bit premature as I have reserved my rental accommodation but not completed the trip yet, but I thought I'd at least share the fruits of my web-searching on this topic. Self-catering (renting a cottage with kitchen, etc) by the week does seem to be much cheaper than B&Bs. The cottage I have reserved is over 100 pounds less, over the week, than what I spent for a week of B&B (in budget places) on my last trip -- plus I plan to save money by cooking rather than purchasing some meals. Obviously, the tradeoff is in mobility since you're anchored to one place for a week -- I chose a place to stay (in the midlands, incidentally) by plotting things I want to see on the map and determining what is a reasonable driving distance from most of them. Rental companies I have researched (don't know whether "Holiday rentals" in your post is a company or a generic term) include the following: Rural Retreats (pricy and posh, from the brochure); Hoseasons (some cottages look okay, some a little, uh, tacky); and the Farm Holiday Bureau, which is the one I am using. This last is a booking agency for cottages on farms (often converted stables and other farm dependencies). You can search the web by name for these, and the first 2 will mail you big booklets of their various cottages. I also had some luck doing a web search using "self catering uk [name of area]" as search terms. Hope this is helpful....

Jean Mueller

Thank you for the information!

steve

They are certainly worth it. We stayed at a excellent cottage in Scotland - 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, kitchen, Laundry, living room, dining room - for about what it would have cost for the 'family room' at the B&B's we later stayed at. We could have gotten adequate accomodations for about half what we paid if we hadn't considered this one to be our splurge! <BR> <BR>Try www.visitbritain.com <BR>it takes some navigating around, but eventually you can get to a list of all the cottages for the area you are considering