How to travel twice more with the same holiday entitlement in the UK

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If you’re reading this post, it means you’re really interested maximising your annual leave in the UK and travel even more. So how you can travel twice more with the same holiday entitlements in the UK? Read this post for all the information!

Last year, we’ve been working full-time in London/Edinburgh and still managed to visit 17 countries. Every year we were visiting at least 12-20 countries without leaving work, so yes, it’s entirely possible to travel a lot and work in an office. All you need to do is to maximise your vacation days wisely and spend some time planning your trips. You can really travel a lot even if your holiday entitlement is the standard 28 days in the UK!

How to travel twice more with the same holiday entitlement in the UK?

1. Combine multiple counties in one trip to save days

We usually check where we could fly for a decent amount of money and then see if it’s possible to make another trip inside. For example, in 11-12 days, we managed to visit Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore with just return tickets to Bangkok and back. You can read more about this trip in this post.

Alternatively, you can buy multi-city tickets (you can do it on Expedia.com, for example). If you live far away from big airports, it makes sense to make longer trips to continental Europe, where you can visit multiple countries in one trip. A couple of years ago, I went on a really great trip around Europe and visited 5 countries in 16 days. Read more about planning a trip to Europe in this post.

We did many combinations before (described in the posts below and as well as mentioned above)
Road trip around Europe in 9 days: from Italy to Germany
Balkans bus trip: 7 countries in 8 days
Eastern Europe: Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia in 5 days
Baltic Sea Cruise: Sweden, Estonia, Finland and Russia in 5 days
Central Europe: from Slovenia to Austria through Hungary and Slovakia

how to maximise annual leave 2018 uk

2. Fly after work & spend nights in the planes

Now this might be quite tiring for some of you, but if you truly want to maximise your vacation days in the U.K., you should do it. Recently (during our latest trips to India and Turkey) we were spending at least one night in the plane (sometimes even two nights) not to spend precious vacation days flying. That helps you to travel more!

3. Travel on weekends and save vacation days

Who told you that you need to take any vacation days for your trips at all? Instead of, let’s stay, spending a week in France you can split that trip into three different short weekend trips.

Hamburg Speicherstadt

4. Travel off-season

Okay, the weather might not be the best during the off-season in Europe, however, the tickets during this time are seriously cheap! We managed to buy a return flight to Marseille for two people for just £20 (I know, right!!!), Billund (Denmark) for £30 and Toulouse for £30 as well. And it wasn’t even raining that much.

4 days in Turkey - Istanbul and Cappadocia

5. Combine trips with the bank holidays wisely & maximise annual leave in the UK

Only 4 days off and travel for 10 days, which is enough for pretty much any long-haul destination (including Australia). Christmas & New Year’s bank holidays together with just 4 days of vacations can give you whopping 11 days off, so why not take advantage of the bank holidays? With the wise planning, you can really travel twice more with the same holiday entitlement in the UK! How awesome is that!

For example, you can take 4 days off and go on a 9-day trip (using two weekends, bank holiday and flying on a Friday night). 9 days would be enough for a quick trip to Australia and New Zealand.

6. Take unpaid leave or work from a different location

If you’re a lucky one and work in a pretty flexible environment where working from a different location is allowed, congrats! You can travel way more than even us! However, if it’s not the case for your company, you can inquire, whether you can take some days of unpaid leave (only if you’re fine with it and if you’re lacking a couple of days for your lifetime trip to Latin America!

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HOW TO TRAVEL TWICE MORE WITH THE SAME HOLIDAY ENTITLEMENT

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