Winter Sun Holidays Under £600 in 2026: Why Madeira Costs 48% More Than Tenerife Once You Land
A filter coffee, a local beer, a soft drink, a glass of wine, a bottle of water, sun cream, insect repellent and a three-course dinner for two. In Tenerife that basket costs £87.46. In Madeira it costs £129.63. That’s 48% more for exactly the same shopping list, and Madeira is the island half of Britain still thinks of as the sensible, cheap choice for winter sun.
In This Article
- The headline price is only half the bill
- What the 2026 basket says about where to go
- Madeira is the one I'd skip
- A fairer sum than seven baskets
- Which winter sun holidays under £600 actually exist
- Antalya looks cheap and feels cold
- The all-inclusive exception
- Cape Town is the cheapest basket and the wrong answer
- Your departure airport moves the number too
- The costs that sit outside both numbers
- Before Christmas or after it?
- How I'd spend £600
The figures come from the Post Office’s 2026 winter sun costs barometer, published in late September, and they change how I’d go about winter sun holidays under £600. Because the £600 isn’t really the budget. It’s the bit you pay before you’ve bought anything.
The headline price is only half the bill
Package deals are advertised per person, per week, flights included. They look clean. And then you land, and a half-litre of beer at the airport bar costs what a week’s worth of milk costs at home.
The Post Office compared 24 winter sun destinations using that eight-item basket, converted at its September 2026 exchange rates. The gap between the cheapest place (Cape Town, £58.24) and the dearest (Scarborough in Tobago, £144.15) is more than £85. Per basket. Not per trip.
I’d be guessing if I told you the exact weekly spend for a couple, because nobody eats and drinks precisely that basket every day. But here’s a crude version. Take the £42.17 difference between Madeira and Tenerife, repeat it seven days running, and you’ve got roughly £295 – about half of a £600 package, quietly sitting in the wrong island’s bar tab. It’s deliberately extreme. It still makes the point.
What the 2026 basket says about where to go
Here are the Post Office’s top ten for value, plus the one that sits in the middle of everyone’s search results:
| Rank | Destination | Basket cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cape Town | £58.24 |
| 2 | Mombasa | £63.66 |
| 3 | Tokyo | £66.76 |
| 4 | Colombo | £74.79 |
| 5 | Phuket | £76.39 |
| 6 | Algarve | £82.35 |
| 7 | Costa del Sol | £83.58 |
| 8 | Tenerife | £87.46 |
| 9 | Punta Cana | £89.72 |
| 10 | Penang | £89.79 |
| 22 | Madeira (Funchal) | £129.63 |
Only three of those are realistic for a UK week-away on a tight budget: the Algarve, the Costa del Sol and Tenerife, all within about £5 of each other. The top five are long-haul, and a long-haul fare blows a £600 total apart before you’ve ordered a coffee. Madeira’s rank is 22 out of 24, which means only two places in the whole survey cost more on the ground.
The Time Out write-up of the same research adds that prices fell in about a third of the 24 destinations over six months, with Cape Town down 9.7% since March. A further nine rose by less than 5%. So it’s not a year of runaway costs. It’s a year where the gaps between places matter more than the drift in any one of them.
Madeira is the one I’d skip
Here’s my contrarian view, and I’ll stand by it: Madeira is overrated as a winter sun holiday. It’s a lovely island. The gardens in Funchal in January are properly lovely. But it’s a walking-and-levadas place with a pebbly coast and Atlantic water that doesn’t invite swimming in December, and only Tobago and Grenada cost more on the ground in the Post Office’s list.
If what you want is to lie down in warmth, you’re paying a 48% basket premium for scenery that’s better at being looked at than lain on. If you want to walk and eat fish and look at flowers, go – and then it’s a fair price. Just don’t book it because someone told you it’s the cheap one.
A fairer sum than seven baskets
Nobody eats out for two every night of a week-long break. So take a gentler version: three dinners out with drinks across the week, which is roughly three baskets. Algarve comes to £247.05. Tenerife comes to £262.38. Madeira comes to £388.89. That’s a £141.84 gap between the Algarve and Madeira, for a couple, on three evenings.
Which means the cheap-looking island can quietly cost you the price of a second week’s flights. Run this sum yourself on any destination before you book. Package price, plus bags, plus transfers, plus three baskets. If that total is still under £600 for each of you, it’s a £600 holiday. If it isn’t, it’s a £700 one wearing a £550 label.
Which winter sun holidays under £600 actually exist
Now the awkward bit. I don’t have verified 2026 package prices for each resort, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I do have is TravelSupermarket’s guide, which compared 7-night packages for departures between November 2024 and February 2025. That’s last winter’s benchmark, not this one’s, so use it as a shortlist and check live prices before you get excited.
On those 2024 numbers, the under-£600 club was: Algarve (£413.71), Costa del Sol (£415.50), Antalya (£501.08), Egypt (£552.54), Marrakech (£565.61) and Cyprus (£576.51). The Canaries sat above the line: Fuerteventura at £669.04, Lanzarote at £699.25 and Gran Canaria at £754.52. Tenerife wasn’t in that list at all.
So the cheapest packages and the cheapest baskets don’t line up perfectly. The Algarve passes both tests, which is why it keeps winning. But it’s also the coolest of the bunch. TravelSupermarket’s own temperature figures give the Algarve 19°C and Costa del Sol 17°C, against 22°C for Egypt and 20°C for Fuerteventura. That’s a real gap if your plan is a sunlounger rather than a coastal walk.
Antalya looks cheap and feels cold
Turkey is the one that catches people out. At £501.08 in TravelSupermarket’s 2024 comparison, Antalya looks like a sensible mid-priced option, and the all-inclusive deals are real. But the same guide gives it 15°C as its winter figure, which is four degrees below the Algarve and seven below Egypt.
Fifteen is jumper weather. It’s fine for a week of Roman ruins and strong tea, and I’d happily do that. It isn’t the thing most people mean when they type “winter sun” into a search bar at nine o’clock on a wet Tuesday night.
So if the sunlounger is the point, my ranking on the 2024 numbers would be Egypt first, Fuerteventura second if you can stretch past £600, the Algarve third for the price, and Antalya last. Marrakech and Cyprus sit in the middle. They’re fine, they’re just not the obvious pick for anyone chasing heat on a budget.
The all-inclusive exception
Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia change the sums. If the package is all-inclusive, the Post Office basket mostly stops mattering, because the beer and the dinner are already paid for. That’s why Egypt at £552.54 is a better £600 holiday than the Algarve at £413.71, even though the Algarve is cheaper on paper: the Algarve leaves you about £185 of headroom for meals, and a week of dinners for two out there will eat that headroom quickly.
The catch is obvious but worth saying. All-inclusive means you eat at the hotel. And the quality of the buffet is a lottery that no price comparison site can score for you. Read the last three months of reviews, not the star rating.
Check the Foreign Office’s travel advice for the exact resort area before booking Egypt, Turkey or Morocco. It’s the one boring page that can change a booking decision, and it’s free on gov.uk.
Cape Town is the cheapest basket and the wrong answer
It’s tempting to look at £58.24 and start pricing flights. Don’t. Cape Town is an overnight long-haul trip of about 11 to 12 hours each way – I’m going from memory on that – and I’d be guessing if I gave you a flight price, but it won’t sit inside a £600 total for a week. The savings on the ground can’t repay a fare that size unless you stay far longer than seven nights.
That’s the real lesson of the barometer. Value on the ground matters most when the flight is short and the package is already cheap. Past about six hours in the air, you’ve changed the sum.
Your departure airport moves the number too
Most comparison sites default to London. If you live in Leeds or Glasgow, that default is quietly wrong, and it’s worth flipping the departure airport before you trust any headline price. A Manchester or Birmingham departure often brings the package nearer £600 than a Gatwick one does. I can’t give you a clean saving, because it swings by week, but I’d always check three airports before settling.
Train fares to the airport count as well. A £35 off-peak ticket to Gatwick for each of you is £70 you didn’t budget for, and it’s the sort of thing that never appears in the package breakdown. The same goes for airport parking, which can run past £100 for a week at the bigger sites. Add it to your sum.
And don’t book the transfer through the package without looking at the alternative. In the Algarve and on Tenerife’s south coast, a pre-booked shared shuttle or a local bus is often cheaper than the coach add-on. Ask the hotel what the taxi from the airport costs. They’ll know to the euro.
The costs that sit outside both numbers
Cheap flights come with cheap-flight rules. Ryanair and easyJet still charge for anything bigger than a small underseat bag, and I’ve covered what actually fits in our underseat cabin bag guide. Add a 20kg hold bag for two and the £600 headline can lose £60 to £100 before you’ve left the house. That’s my estimate, not a quote, so price your own flight.
Then there’s the phone. If you’re flying with a battery pack, the rules have shifted, and the power bank for flights piece explains the 100Wh limit in plain English.
Health cover is the other one. The UK’s GHIC card is valid in Spain, Portugal and Cyprus (including Tenerife and Madeira, which are part of Spain and Portugal), but not in Egypt, Turkey or Morocco. And a GHIC is never a replacement for travel insurance. If you’re heading to one of the non-EU options, insurance isn’t optional. And if you’re booking a package, check it carries ATOL protection, because that’s what gets you home if the operator collapses.
Before Christmas or after it?
The clocks go back on 25 October, and by late December sunset in London is just before four in the afternoon. That’s the real reason winter sun sells. If you’ve been reading about SAD lamps and what the evidence actually says, a week at around 20°C with daylight until about six in the evening is the most effective version of the same idea.
But timing changes the price. Half-term fortnight is the dearest week of the autumn, and if you’re stuck with school dates, our October half-term breaks guide covers where the family-friendly bargains are. If you’ve got no school dates to worry about, I’m guessing the first three weeks of November and early December are your softest prices, but check the calendar on the comparison site rather than trusting me. Christmas week is where the £600 limit tends to break, so if you’d rather stay put and do something festive, the Christmas market breaks list is a cheaper alternative.
Pack a cardigan. A winter beach is windier than the brochure lets on.
How I’d spend £600
If the aim is warmth, I’d pick Egypt all-inclusive and ignore the basket. If the aim is a fortnight of cheap eating and walking, I’d pick the Algarve and accept the jumper. If the aim is a proper beach in December with reasonable bar prices, Tenerife is the only one that gets near both. I’m guessing its packages will nudge over £600 on the popular dates, so be ready to flex your departure day.
And Madeira? Book it for the gardens in February, not the beach in December, and take a bigger budget.
So here’s the question I’d put to anyone with £600 and a week to fill: what are you actually buying, warmth, a cheap fortnight of food and drink, or the photograph? Because those are three very different holidays, and only one of them fits the number.
Sources: Post Office Travel Money, Best-Value Winter Sun Holidays 2026; Time Out, The Best-Value Winter Sun Destinations in 2026; TravelSupermarket, budget winter sun destinations (prices from late 2024); GOV.UK foreign travel advice.
