Budget Hacks for Saving Money in London

If you are coming to London, and you want to save yourself some money, then me and Christi from the Backpacking Bananas have some tips for you on how to save that cash when you're here. Yes, we do! So a lot of you actually that live near London don't even know this, so I'm not sure if you've ever heard this before, but there's this thing called a two for one days out deal where you can actually get two tickets for the price of one for a bunch of attractions around London, including the London Eye. It's really good, and all you have to do is have a valid train ticket for the days that you want to book your tickets for the accommodation. I will leave a link down in the description box to how to get this deal.

It's a little complicated, I'm not going to lie. Actually, if you have round trip tickets to and from Gatwick airport, then this is perfect because you'll have those tickets already, and that qualifies you to get the two for one tickets. Oh, that's perfect! Yeah, it's really good! Is it a particular company? The train line is a company that just sells train tickets, so it's a deal that they have for London visitors. Really good to know! Link down the description for that one.

I don't know about you, but I love to eat and drink.

Oh! Oh yes! But eating and drinking in London can actually get quite expensive, right? mm hmm! So my favorite thing to do to save on drinks and on food is to take advantage of happy hour deals. So there are a lot of bars and some restaurants around town. Everywhere does it! Yeah, everyone always has a happy hour. Yeah! They differ the times that they go.

I guess it depends on which place you go, but one in particular that has a really good deal is a place called Bar Soho from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, they have 50% off every single drink that they serve. I mean, I've got £12 bottles of wine there and split between three people, it's nothing! That is nothing.

I mean, that's like pretty much getting from the grocery store, and that's like unheard of in London, I feel like. I think the best way to find these places and these deals is actually just to walk around and look for the signs outside of places and just pop into some place that looks pretty decent. And it's always a little bit earlier on in the night that they have those deals, so get yourself out that early.

Something that London has over many other cities in the world, I think, is that a lot of our museums here are completely free. Oh, amazing! And you have a video about free things to do in London right? Yes. There's a video of my channel, which we'll just link up here It's called Ten Free Things to do in London, and museums is a big one on there.

They're actually really interesting to visit. I'm not a museum person myself, but they're really good, and they're free! And also on a rainy day, really good rainy day museum. Yeah, that's a really good point.

So, it's a great free way to get a bunch of art and culture into your trip. So the Mayor of London introduced last year what's called the bus hopper fare. It pretty much means that if you take two different buses within 90 minutes, you're only going to pay one fare and not two.

If you're using CityMapper, which, if you watch any of my transportation videos, you know I always recommend to download CityMapper before you come, and you're trying to decide maybe between taking two buses to get somewhere or an Underground, you can actually save yourself a lot of money if you decide to take the buses. I guess it's gonna take longer isn't it? But yeah, you can kinda see all the sights along the way, right? Exactly! There's so much to see everywhere in London, down every single street, you're gonna see something that you probably recognize the name of. It's fun going around on the bus, especially if you can get a seat, like, at the front, like at the top.

Oh, that's my favorite! Yeah, perfect! Speaking of that app CityMapper, I really like it too, because if you use it when you're trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B, it also, for each option, tells you how much it's going to cost, so you might find that you'll save yourself a lot of money if you take one route option that's maybe like 10 minutes longer, but it could be a lot cheaper. There are a few apps I recommend getting for your trip to London where you can buy cheaper tickets for events and shows. You can also get tickets for different kinds of activities.

One of the ones I use a lot is called YPlan. There's also Fever, and I think there's a few others you might find as well. I've gotten in £10 tickets for comedy show, and at the end of the comedy show, Jack Whitehall came out, which is just a huge, really, like, massive comedian here in England.

Jack Whitehall is so funny! He's so posh, but so funny! Yeah! Exactly. I mean for £10 each, it was just such good value and I've gotten like movie theater tickets on there for 50% off, and there's just loads of, like, interesting things that you can buy from there, but you can also save money, too. There's also a website which I really like to use called Time Out London, and it produces articles every single week which tells you the events that are going on in London that week, and a lot of the time these events are completely free, and it's stuff that you probably wouldn't know about if you didn't have a look, but normally they're really fun events to go onto, so before you visit London or even just when you get there, just have a look at the Time Out London website and see if there's anything there that you'd be interested to go to.

That's actually where I start if I'm, like, free on a weekend and I don't have anything to do, and I'm kind of trying not to spend money, that is the first place that I go to is that free list of things to do over the weekend. I'll leave a link down in the description box so you can kind of navigate to where that is. So these are our best money saving hacks for London, and we've actually gone and filmed another video over on my channel, which is the best travel apps to stay organized on the road, and all of the apps are free as well, so perfect if you're on a budget and for organizing, saving, budgeting, really, really useful stuff.

We'll link it up here, so make sure you go and have a watch of that. Make sure while you're over there that you subscribe to Backpacking Bananas as well for lots of great budget travel tips right? Budgeting, backpacking tips, going traveling, all of the above, yeah!