Great Experience of Staying at the Hotels near Heathrow

We enjoyed a fabulous trip to London some time back. Initially I was a little doubtful regarding the whole idea of picking London as the holiday destination but in the end we all had amazing time. If you are a budget traveller, do a lot of planning in order to enjoy your trip to the fullest.

Deciding the Holiday Destination

I, my wife and our two little angels, we all sat down to decide where we should go for a vacation. We tumbled around many destinations from around the world. While the kids were still excited for another trip to the Disneyland, we wanted to explore Europe. I have been to Scotland and that was an amazing experience. But this time we wanted to go some place exciting, where we can have some family fun and the kids can also enjoy a great trip. We opted for Paris but then we finalised London since Paris is more of a romantic destination than a family destination. And thank God we finalised London because what a trip it was!

But London is Expensive

So in the starting we were really excited about London but once I saw the kind of money I will have to arrange for the flight tickets and for the accommodation, a major part of my excitement disappeared. I spent hours on the internet finding out what options do we have. I realised that London offers all kinds of hotels so it’s not necessary that I will have to shell out a lot of money in order to stay comfortably. Central London hotels were great, with fabulous locations near a number of iconic attractions but they were quite expensive. On the other hand, hotels available in the Greater London areas were also pretty decent and were available at much lesser prices. I decided that we will stay at a Non-Central London hotel in order to save some money. And regarding the flight tickets, search on the internet those days when no holidays are around the corner or no major international summit, seminar or concert is about to be held in London and I am sure you will be able to find affordable flight tickets for your family. 

The Planning Part

So now that London was officially finalized as our next holiday destination, we needed to plan a lot of things but I always keep a check that we do not end up doing over-planning because if that happens, you end up carrying some six bags with you and all the fun simply gets killed. But since London is one of the busiest and the most expensive city in the world, spend at least 4-5 hours finding out what attractions are worth visiting and how you can reach them and most importantly, where you are going to stay once you are there. I was figuring out the areas from where you can conveniently reach the city’s centre when I came across the option of hotels near Heathrow. These hotels are located at a short distance from the airport and are actually not that expensive just like any other Greater London hotel accommodations. After exploring many options of hotels near Heathrow, I finalised a hotel, not too luxurious, not too shabby either, just perfect for a weeklong vacation. 

Travelling in London

Travelling from one part of the city to any other part is not that difficult if you are comfortable with the idea of travelling in an underground or ‘the tube’. Since our accommodation was near Heathrow, we usually used to take the Heathrow Express in order to reach Central London and back. Heathrow Express takes less than 30 minutes to reach the centre of the city and is very comfortable and convenient. You can get down at the Paddington Station and from there you can walk or take a cab. A majority of attractions are located near Hyde Park which is easily accessible from Paddington Station. 

Popular Attractions

We had planned to visit more than 30 attractions in the time span of a week, but we were only able to visit around 20 of them thoroughly. This is so, because some of the attractions like Natural History Museum and Madame Tussauds Museum are so gigantic and interesting that it takes an entire day to explore them in detail. Besides these two museums we managed to visit attractions like – London Dungeon, Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Westminster Abbey, Boat Tours of River Thames, Tower of London, The Buckingham Palace, Science Museum, London Zoo, Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square, Richmond Park and The London Eye.