Thursday, 20 December 2012

Brit holidaymakers: shameful money wasters…?


This week we find ourselves enlightened on yet another holiday-related survey; this time from sunshine.co.uk which reports that on average, Brits waste a cool £150 on unnecessary holiday purchases simply because they don’t want to take the extra cash back home with them at the end of their holiday.

More than half said they couldn’t be bothered to change their money back to sterling upon return to the UK and the rest said they frittered it away because they’d already budgeted for it so thought they might as well spend it.

Now, fair’s fair, we’ve probably all made an impulse holiday purchase that we didn’t really need at some point in our lives (a tacky souvenir, a large sombrero, a bottle of strange-looking local liqueur that we have no intention of ever opening (let alone drinking); and we’ve probably all come back from our hols, dumped a pile of odd foreign coins into a box or drawer and forgotten about them (in fact, there’s a good chance they’ll never see the light of day again) – but £150 of wasted purchases? That is a lot of money.

The sad thing is, much of this comes down to laziness and the ‘I can’t be bothered syndrome’ but how many of us can honestly say we’d have the courage to set-alight £150 worth of bank notes and comfortably watch them go up in smoke?  Probably not many; but in essence, that’s exactly what is happening here.

You’ve probably gathered that wasting money is not really a language we understand here at i-interpret4u – probably because we hear so many frustrating stories recounting situations where the language barrier has ended up costing holidaymakers dearly.  Whether it’s getting on the wrong train having already paid your fare, jumping in a taxi having miscommunicated the directions or location to the driver, or ordering the wrong thing on a restaurant menu; scenarios like this usually end up costing more money than we’d bargained for – all the more reason to watch the pennies, but if you really must make an unplanned purchase, at least make it a useful one!   

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