A1 How To

Cheap Wicked Tickets. In January of this year I arranged a weekend break to London for my husband and myself in celebration of our twenty-five year wedding anniversary. (Wow I’m getting old!) Having not been to the capital since our honeymoon all those years ago it seemed like the perfect time to visit again. But with only a modest budget of £300 and wanting to spend the nights in a hotel rather than a hostel, I decided it was finally time to get to grips with our newly brought family laptop, and dig up the best deals I could find on the interweb.

The following article is a detailed account of my progress and what I found out so that you other technophobes might discover a few shortcuts when planning your next trip to the capital.

During the search my first stop was usually Google, plus a few sites suggested by some of my more computer geekish friends. These are the four main areas of research:

* Transport
* Accommodation
* Site seeing and Attractions
* Theatre Tickets

=>Tip 1 - Get Advice from Real TravelersFirst things first - I got onto trip advisor and made a big list of all the many things there are to do in London. (Soooooooo Many!)Trip advisor is a great site because you’re able to enter the details of your upcoming trip, and then read the opinions and marks out of five from real people who have been there and brought the t-shirt. The review to the right is typical of the site.Hopefully this list will give you some inspiration as I have also included links to some reviews, descriptions and rating for each.

Long list of London Attractions

They say if you’re going to make any great decision first you need choice, so being a little anal I used trip advisor to find every possible attractions that sounded vaguely interesting. Without further ado this is what I came up with:

Tower of London / National Gallery /London Eye / Tower Bridge Exhibition / Madame Tussauds / London Dungeons / Kensington Palace /London Zoo / Hampton Court / Shakespeare’s Globe / Dali Universe / Buckingham Palace / Cabinet War Rooms / Chinatown / Trafalgar Square / Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain / Speakers’ Corner / London Aquarium / Sherlock Holmes Museum / Nelson’s Column / Oxford Street / Natural History Museum / Science Museum / V&A / Portobello Road Market / National Gallery / St. Paul’s Cathedral / Tower of London / Westminster Abbey / Borough Markek / Apsley House / British Museum / St. Pancras Station / Covent Garden / Abbey Road / Camden Market / Houses of Parliament / Imperial War Museum.

Now obviously had we tried to get around all these attractions in one day we would have keeled over from exhaustion and spent our life savings. So the next step was to get on the internet and find the best deals and offers we could. We also needed to do some serious prioritising to get the most from the day.

=>Tip 2 - Train Travel to London

There were two aspects of traveling to plan and the first was to find a cheap return train ticket down to London. After that was traveling around whilst in London which will come later.

We decided to book the train tickets through the discount provider Train Line as we found we could save £30.00 compared with the main National Rail site. The National Express coach is cheaper again but we could not face the seven hour road journey crushed into a little seat.

* National Rail Enquiries £104 - This site is the most expensive way to travel to London.
* Trainline £70.00 - The Trainline site is very user friendly and they have a great Journey planner feature.
* National express coach £50.00 - (7hrs hour journey…..NO WAY!)

Tip 3 - Separate Booking or Package BookingSeparate Booking1) HotelWe found our hotel using the LateRooms web site. The hotel of choice was “Jury’s Inn Islington” as it gave us good access to the west end without having to travel too far at the end of the day. You can view great looking room pictures and the price proved really affordable. (See below.)

* Hotel Web site £129.00 per night
* LateRooms £99.00 per night.

2) Theatre - My husband Jeff is a massive fan of Queen so I really wanted to take him to see the musical “We Will Rock You” as part of our anniversary treat. After a bit of research I found there are two main ways of booking West End Theatre tickets:

* Booking through the main show web site £89.00 -If you click “Tickets” on the main We Will Rock You web site you’re then redirected to Tickemaster where you pay full price and a small booking fee:

* Discount Theatre web site £50.00 - After typing “London Theatre Tickets” into Google and hitting lots of web undesirable looking web sites I finally came across DiscountTheatre.com. They have a really professional feel and offer secure on-line booking for London Musicals at discounted prices. As you can see they offer big discounts on loads of London shows and I was able to book in Real-time through the West End reservation system.

* Taken at the time of writing: We Will Rock You - WAS £39.50 NOW £25.00 Billy Elliot - WAS £60.00 NOW £45.00 Sound Of Music - WAS £55.00 NOW £37.50 The Lord of the Rings - WAS £44.00 NOW £27.50 Avenue Q - WAS £35.00 NOW £28.50 Spamalot - WAS £55.00 NOW £37.50 Les Miserables - WAS £50.00 NOW £37.50 Buddy - WAS £55.00 NOW £25.00 Chicago - WAS £52.50 NOW £35.00 Grease - WAS £55.00 NOW £37.50

* West End Ticket Booth £50.00 - Another options is booking when you arrive from a ticket booth in Leicester square. But this can be risky as often the shows are sold out.

3) RestaurantDinner in London can be an expensive business with a three course meal easily costing £50.00 a head. You need to do your homework here and sniff out all the options if you want to save some pennies. I would suggest you start with a site called Top Table where once again you can easily input details of your trip and find user ratings and reviews from an extraordinary number of eateries. Using Top Table we decided to book a restaurant near the Dominion Theatre called Bertorelli. Example review below:

* Options 1: Turn up and Order £50.00 - This is the most expensive way to eat out in the capital as you will usually have to choose from the “a le cart” menu and you would be lucky to pay less than £25.00 per head.
* Options 2: Book in advance on the restaurants web site £39.00 - Many restaurants in London have their own web site where you can pre book and choose from a discounted set menu. Bertorelli offer a two course meal for £19.50 per head.Find more information about Sold Out Concert Tickets here.

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