Cheap Package Holidays Slash costs by 10% (even late deals)

It’s possible to haggle already-cheap package holiday late deals down by a further 10%. One MoneySaver who "had no idea this’d work" reports £600 off a Crete holiday, just by calling three travel agents.

This step-by-step guide shows you when to book, where to go and how to haggle.

Package vs DIY holidays

The first thing to decide is whether a package holiday is right for you, or if you would get a better deal booking a DIY flight and hotel online.

A package holiday is an all-in-one, where the tour operator provides flights, connections and accommodation for one price. That means they're off-the-peg and best suited for standard breaks of standard length. So...

As a rough rule of thumb, packages are usually cheapest for seven, 10 or 14 days away in a traditional holiday destination.

If you're going away for a different trip length, to a less visited spot, on a city break, or multi-stop holiday, you'll tend to be better off with a DIY break. Read the Cheap Flights, Cheap Hotels and Cheap Holiday Rentals guides, as well as the Hotel Sales deals note, for more on those.

Package holidays usually have added ATOL and ABTA consumer protection (though always check when you book - read more below: ATOL cover).

This means if the holiday company fails, either you'll be given a refund or, if you're away, can complete your trip. However, changes to the ATOL system now mean package holidays aren't the only way to get ATOL protection for your trip.

From April 2012, ATOL protection was extended to include flights and accommodation or car hire booked from the same company within a day of each other, even if they're not part of a formal package. This is a handy bonus. See the MSE news story ATOL Travel Protection Extended for info.

With DIY holidays that aren't included under this extra ATOL protection, if one of the components fails, you're unlikely to get your money back, unless the transaction was over £100 and you paid by credit card (read a full guide to Section 75 Refunds).

Flight delayed in the last seven years?

A blockbuster ruling by the European Court of Justice means some can get up to £480 compensation for delays - if the airline was at fault. This include package holidays. Full info, including how to claim, in the new Flight Delays Compensation guide.

It's all about when you book

When it comes to timing your package holiday booking, there's one thing to remember:

The later you book, the cheaper, but this means limited choice. If you can't book late, book as early as possible.

The later the better...

Booking late is the cheapest way to get a package. Later means no more than EIGHT to TEN WEEKS before departure, when the bargains flood in.

The reason's simple. Tour operators have chartered the planes and reserved the rooms, and, if they don't shift 'em, they lose money. The later you leave it, the more desperate they are to flog empty rooms, so the price drops further.

Yet the later you wait, the more you need flexibility about dates and destinations. So if crèche facilities or a specific hotel are a must, be careful.

If you just want anywhere hot and cheap, leave it very late, ie, the week before you go, and you may get elegant trips for dirt-cheap prices.

or the earlier the better

The other way to get discounts, though not as big, is to book early, as much as NINE MONTHS in advance, because many tour operators offer early booking brochure discounts. These can include £100 per couple discounts or buy-one-get-one-free weeks. Such sales help them match supply to demand more easily.

Location and timing are crucial

Take a holiday when others can't, such as before school holidays in May and June to family destinations like Florida, and you'll get a better price.

The same's true if you venture to once-in vogue mass destinations that are no longer chic, where hotel capacity is unquenched by off-the-boil demand.

Haggle down the cost of your holiday

The most important thing to understand before haggling is:

Tour operators make holidays, travel agents sell them!

Admittedly, they're often both subsidiaries of the same company, yet the distinction is crucial. That's because, just like a Kylie CD is available at different shops at different prices, many different travel agents will try to sell the same tour operator's holiday at different prices.

This is the HEART of the haggling system. The aim's to find the travel agent who'll sell it to you for the least. While this system works best for late deals from major tour operators, if you're booking early at a high street travel agents, it's still possible to lop £100s off the price by haggling.

Do bear in mind that haggling mainly works on packages from major high street tour operators, eg, Thomas Cook, rather than smaller niche operators.

Step 1: Pick your perfect holiday

The aim's to locate a suitable holiday and grab all the details. Make sure it's within your budget. A holiday you spend the rest of the year worrying how to pay for isn't relaxing (try the free Budget Planner for help).

You can benchmark a decent price on the web

To get an idea of the type of price you should be paying, use the web, though grabbing brochures for likely destinations helps too. Though it's not perfect, use review site TripAdvisor* to check out hotels.

Also check Weather2travel, which charts average weather conditions for different countries to see whether your destination will be sunny or soggy.

There are a growing number of package holiday listing sites:

While the web's great for getting a price, you can't haggle on it. Ultimately, this is all about speaking to real travel agents, to get real prices and cut the price.

For this, sites such as Teletext Holidays are great, simply because they allow you to search for a place and see cheap holiday travel agents for that region. Yet don't believe an advert if it mentions a holiday; you must call and check it's actually available.

It's also worth heading down to high street travel agents to see if they'll cut you a deal, especially if you're booking early. Sunday newspapers often list discount travel agents.

Once you've found a holiday you want, within your price range, ensure you write down as much info as you can.

That means tour operator details, flight times, hotel destination (or minimum star if it's allocation on arrival), whether transfers, meals and plane meals are included – everything you can get. Though don't spend too long on the phone to the original travel agent. It's unlikely you'll actually book through them.

Step 2: Haggle down your holiday price

Now the holiday's picked, it's a game to get EXACTLY THE SAME holiday cheaper. Here, our Teletext Holidays bias becomes clear. However, it's worth remembering to stay polite, charming and smiley throughout this, as travel agents don't like the tactic – or us – much.

We went through the process as we wrote, though tragically it was only for the sake of research. Our destination was a week's self-catering in Barbados, at a three-star hotel, for two, leaving in two weeks' time.

• Use the Teletext location lists to find agents
  
  This is the reason for the Teletext Holidays bias. You can simply search its site and scan for phone numbers of all your destination's specialist holiday companies. Also try TravelSupermarket* and Icelolly.com, as they list brokers too. Act quickly, as prices and availability change.
  
  The Teletext-advertised price was £570 per person, compared to a brochure price of £786pp. After calling, the other costs brought it down to £593 including booking fee, transfers and plane meals. These supposed 'extras' are almost always split out with late bookings, so always check.
• Call and ask if it can beat the quote you have
  
  Just pick one, and with politeness and charm, tell it you've been quoted a holiday price. Give it the details and ask if it can beat the price. Try to negotiate in price per PERSON, not total cost, as discounts seem less to them.
  
  Our price was £593, so we quoted £585 and it came back with £570.
• Then continue the process with a few more
  
  Now call a few more, quoting the best price you got and see who can beat it. To speed up the process, you could knock about a tenner off your existing price before you haggle. But don't go too far with this, as the agent will often ask for the name of the rival outfit.
  
  Quickly repeating this process with three others, the price soon dropped to £523 per person. After that, no one else would budge. Still, so far that's a saving of £140 for two, with just a few phone calls.
• Call the tour operator directly
  
  Once you've hit the price floor, to be absolutely sure, call the tour operator's own direct booking arm. Thomas Cook*, Cosmos*, First Choice* and Virgin* all have them.
  
  At this point, we called the tour operator offering the holiday, but the cost must have been down to the bone already, as they would only match, not beat, our price of £523.
• Give the first broker the chance to match it
  
  Finally, just to try to be fair, if a travel agent spent a lot of time with you to find the holiday in the first place, why not give it the chance to match – not beat – the price to regain your custom.
  
  Compared with the brochure price at £1572 for two, it was a saving of £526 for two on the original price. And this is on a relatively cheap holiday. The more expensive the trip, the bigger the savings.
  

How much will you save?

Many people have tried this technique with varying degrees of success. Here are some quotes from the forum:

Be aware that travel agents don't like this

A few years ago, Martin presented an ITV Tonight programme on this technique, taking a couple of families and showing how much they could save by haggling.

Travel agents vented their spleen, letters were sent and their trade magazine devoted pages to it. Apparently showing people how to cut their costs is ‘immoral'. Read their views and Martin's response and his later blog: Martin Lewis turns down travel agents’ invitation” – is that news?.

The aim seems to be to persuade us that travel agents have it tough. We don’t really need persuading. We're pretty sure in the current climate some agents – like those in many other industries – are having difficulties, and we wish them all the best.

Yet that isn’t enough of a reason for us to hide the fact that haggling with travel agents results in consumers paying less. This is a site for consumers, after all.

To be fair to travel agents, try to minimise the amount of their time you use when originally sourcing the holiday you want, if you're going to buy it cheaper elsewhere anyway. It's one of the reasons we favour phone specialists who deal with this all the time, rather than walking into an agency.