travel costs within the UK??

Hi there, I am a female Canadian with British citizenship and am planning on moving to London next fall, for a year or maybe longer. My plan is to live and work in London and travel to neighboring countries as much as I possibly can. I have heard from so many people how cheap it is to travel by air or by train in the UK, but nobody has actually given me an idea of what "cheap" means. What would an average budget be for transportation and hotel for four or five days from London to anywhere like Germany or France or Ireland? I wouldn't need an expensive hotel or first class transportation. Any opinions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Yes it true that you can travel "cheap" to a lot of places (Europe) from the UK.
To give you an example I booked some flight tickets from Manchester to Cork(Ireland) for £120 (return tickets for 2 people). However the hotels are about the same prices as in England.
It also depends when you are traveling, if you travel when it is school's holidays then you will pay a lot more or when it is high season. You can get some last minute deals (a couple of days before traveling).
You can have a look at the budget airlines to see the prices:
www.easyjet.co.uk
http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/

In low season you can find return flights to Germany for about £100 (maybe a bit less depending on the day you travel...cheaper in the week than at weekends)
The Euro is now worth about the same as the pound so it costs more to spend in Europe.
Budget hotels in France/Germany can probably found for around £55-£70

The train is not "cheap" in England, however the bus is.

Hope this helps

It's often possible to get return flights to many European destinations for £150 or under.

However, you probably won't find most European countries cheap when you get there, particularly at the moment due to the fall of the pound.

Cheaper countries in Europe would be Portugal, any of the former Eastern Bloc countries - Prague in particular has been a popular destination in recent years. Turkey is also still pretty cheap, if you include it in Europe.

Even in the more expensive countries it may be still possible to get cheap accommodation of the kind that can only be obtained by turning up and knocking on the door, particularly say, in France and Italy - but don't expect the owners to speak English or take credit cards!

I guess Iceland may also be cheap these days - apparently it's about the only currency the pound has gone up against!

I don't think it's that cheap to travel by train, I always used to try working out the costs and it was nearly always cheaper to use my car. It's more convenient to use the train but I wouldn't say it's cheaper.

Airline tickets can be less simply because everything is closer, but there are plenty of websites that can give you an idea like Expedia.

This is one of the many reasons we would love to move abroad. We love the idea of cheap travel and well, there is not alot of that happening here in Canada. It costs more for us to fly within Canada than it does to any US state. Sad really.

We did a Europe road trip last summer and it cost a fortune from here...

We even considered flying to Prague to meet up with my brother and sister in law over Christmas and the costs from here (Toronto) were $4000+ pp and from Manchester is was around about $200.

Needless to say, I am sure...we will be waiting until we arrive to the UK for any of that sort of travel:)

www dot lowfareflights dot co dot uk

I wouldn't need an expensive hotel

holiday inn express has a 2-for-1 offer up to 31/03/2009 which brings down the cost of many hotels in europe to less than £60 for a 2-night stay. examples for the middle weekend in march are leeds city centre £59, london croydon £55, milan bicocca €65 and cologne troisdorf €49. prices are per room per 2 nights, for 2 adults, with continental breakfast included.

http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/exclusive

ian.