How An Annual Membership Helps A Holiday
Travelling and holidays can get expensive, with most visitor attractions charging an entry fee. Often when you buy a ticket, the price makes you wonder whether you'd be better off with an annual membership instead.
We've picked The National Trust and English Heritage for this post, as both have properties and sites spread across the whole of the UK. Membership of one of these could give you more places to visit during a holiday, without worrying about the cost building up on every visit. The maths is the same wherever you camp: work out roughly how many properties you're likely to visit in a year, add up what the individual entry fees would have cost, and compare that total to the price of joining.
The National Trust
The National Trust has over 200 properties throughout the UK — mainly country homes with historic significance, usually with beautiful gardens and a good tea room too. Many contain artworks, furniture and other pieces on display. The Trust also owns many parklands, parts of national parks, and coastal paths. Highlights include Stourhead, Wakehurst Place, Polesden Lacey and the Giant's Causeway, though some of our own favourites are the smaller local properties that give a real insight into a piece of history.
At 2016 prices, an annual membership at the National Trust cost, at the time of writing:
- Individual — £60
- Joint (2 Adults) — £99
- Family (2 Adults) — £104
- Family (1 Adult) — £65
- Young Person (13–25) — £30
- Child (5–12) — £30
As an example, an individual visit to Stourhead cost £15.20 at the time — different properties vary in price, but as a rough guide you'd need to visit around 7 properties in a year to make membership worthwhile at those prices.
English Heritage
When you think English Heritage, you think castles. English Heritage looks after over 400 of England's historic buildings, monuments and sites, including Stonehenge, Hadrian's Wall, Battle Abbey, Dover Castle and Tintagel Castle.
At 2016 prices, an annual membership with English Heritage cost, at the time of writing:
- Individual — £50
- Joint (2 Adults) — £88
- Senior (60+) — £41
- Joint Senior (60+) — £63
- Family (2 Adults) — £88
- Family (1 Adult) — £50
- Adult & Senior — £74
- Student — £41
As you'd expect, there are significant differences in price between locations — Dover Castle cost £19.80 for an individual at the time, so it would only take 3 visits to be worthwhile at those prices, though many properties are much less.
What's changed since 2016
It's worth being upfront about this: the figures above are historic, kept here as a record of what the sums looked like when this post was first written. Both the National Trust and English Heritage have raised their membership prices and entry fees a number of times over the decade since, in line with the wider rise in the cost of living and running historic sites — so the exact break-even numbers above will no longer be accurate. We're not going to guess at today's figures here, because we'd almost certainly get them wrong.
If you're weighing up whether membership makes sense for a camping trip or holiday you've got planned now, the sensible approach is to do the same sum we did above, but with current numbers: check the National Trust's own membership page and the English Heritage joining page for their current prices, add up the entry fees for the specific properties you're likely to visit, and compare the totals yourself. The method still holds even though the numbers have moved on.
What are your favourite memberships?
Do you have a membership card you pull out each time you go camping or travelling, or one place you keep going back to? Let us know.