It's officially festival season. London saw the Camden Crawl a couple of weeks ago and everyone is scrabbling around trying to get tickets for their favourite messy weekend.

Assuming they aren't canceled amidst concerns over Swine Flu, you'll be lucky to get tickets. You'll also be considerably worse off.

Festivals are not cheap. They're actually really expensive when you've added in travel, food, drink and all of those other unexpected costs. So how do you keep costs down?

• If you're travelling by train, book your ticket in advance. You'll make a saving - especially if you live far away from your destination. You know you're going anyway - why wait to book your ticket?


• Take food with you. Of course, after five pints there's no guaranteeing you'll be sensible and eat the food you've brought instead of that nasty burger that suddenly seems very appealing. But if you have food for breakfast, you'll save money here and there.


• Only take a certain amount of cash with you. Risky, yes. But if you don't have the money, you can't spend it. Simple, huh?


• Make sure you have a little survival kit with you: Spare flip flops, mobile phone charger (one of those wind up ones), camera batteries, little first aid kit. All of those things that you know you'll need, but somehow never seem to be important when you're packing your beer drinking hat with the straws attached.


• Split the cost with friends. Jump in a car and take off!

You're meant to be having fun, that's the whole point of going. But you don't want to get a whole weekend of buyers-remorse on the way home. Spend what you need to, and a little bit of what you feel like and you should be fine.

Then you won't somehow spend £200 in four days like I did last year. Have fun!