Beat half-term holiday rip-offs

Save £200 on your annual petrol bill

With clever use of websites and cards, you could save hundreds of pounds on your annual fuel bill. First find the cheapest petrol in your area, using petrolprices.com. This website will give you the rates on all forecourts within your area. Asda is consistently the cheapest. An Asda in Gateshead was charging 107.9p a litre, but a mile and a half down the road, the rates were 114.9p. With a 50-litre tank, you would save £3.50 at Asda.

You could make further savings by using an Asda credit card which offers an additional 2p off each litre, bringing your total saving to £4.50. Over the course of a year, you would save £234 assuming the difference between the stations remained the same and you filled up once a week.

Meanwhile, Tesco offers one Clubcard point for each £1 spent at a Tesco forecourt. These points are worth 1p so if you bought £50 worth of petrol you could save 50p.

Go to Manchester for £1

Virgin Trains is offering £1 singles between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly until the end of June. It is part of a trial of online printable tickets. You have to visit virgintrains.co.uk and go to the tickets@home section on the left-hand side. You then select which times you want to travel. Prices range from £1 to £7 each way so you could book a return over the half-term holidays for £2. In contrast, a standard open return costs £230 — allowing you to save £228. Tickets are only available for travel on weekdays because of maintenance work


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