Cheap Package Holidays

Never think the package holiday price you see is what you should pay. This step-by-step guide shows when and where the best bargains are, and how to haggle down getaways by 15%-plus with a few calls. The holiday haggle isn't just for already reduced late deals; you can slash £100s off holidays booked in advance too.

One MoneySaver who "had no idea this would work" reports £600 off a holiday to Crete, by haggling with just three travel agents. So hopefully the next time you're on a flight, and someone asks the dreaded "how much did you pay?", you'll be able to hold your head up with pride.

• Package vs DIY
• When to book and where to go
• Haggle down the cost of your holiday
• Step 1: Pick your perfect holiday
• Step 2: Check current deals
  
• Step 3: Haggle down your holiday price
• How much will you save?

Grab a scorching holiday bargain

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, thus …

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, a less visited spot, city break, or multi-stop holiday, you'll tend to be better off with a DIY break. Read the Cheap Flights and Cheap Hotel Prices guides for more on those.

The other package holiday bonus is they usually have added ATOL consumer protection, which means if the holiday company fails, either you'll be given a refund or if you're away, can complete your trip. With DIY holidays, if one of the components fails, you're unlikely to get your money back, unless it cost over £100 and you paid by credit card (read a full guide to Section 75 Refunds).

When to book and where to go

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

The later you book the cheaper it's likely to be, but this does mean limited choice. Yet 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; then the bargains flood in.

The reason is simple: the tour operators have chartered the planes and reserved the rooms, if they don't sell them, they lose money. Thus, 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 you need crèche facilities or want a specific hotel, be careful. However, if you just want anywhere hot and cheap, leave it very late, eg, the week before you go, and you may get elegant trips for dirty 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 – as many tour operators offer early booking brochure discounts, usually around £100 per couple, or buy-one-get-one-free weeks. These 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 the prices are cheaper.

The same's true if you venture to once en vogue mass destinations that are no longer chic, where hotel capacity is unquenched by off-the-boil demand, or areas where some would worry, possibly unnecessarily, such as Israel's Eilat; hot all year round and reasonably far from most of the troubles.

Haggle down the cost of your holiday

The most important thing to understand before haggling is that …

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, but they don't all sell it for the same price.

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

Step 1: Pick your perfect holiday

Now, the aim is to locate a suitable holiday and get all the details. Do ensure it's within your budget; a holiday you spend the rest of the year worrying how to pay for isn't brilliant (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, and you can use review site TripAdvisor* to check out hotels. There are a growing number of package holiday sites:

• Travelsupermarket. A very broad selection of holidays

  While its functionality is straightforward, TravelSupermarket* covers a wide range of holidays. The downside is you have to pick the exact resort you want, a pain if you're flexible and just want the cheapest.

• Teletext.co.uk. Wide range of mainstream holidays

  The site linked to the TV pages, Teletext.co.uk is a good place to get inspired, and very useful, as Teletext plays a hefty part in the haggling process later on. A handy little function is you can click 'Exotic Destinations' to see the best long-haul bargains for inspiration.

• Travel.co.uk. Clever features but limited range

  Travel.co.uk has some funky features. Enter your travel details, and it searches all the eligible holidays and allows multi-destination searches if you're not sure where you want to go.

  It also plots prices on a graph, so you can see the cheapest day to travel. If you don't have a specific place in mind, leave the destination blank and it comes up with top deals.

Use old fashioned Teletext on the TV to find a holiday

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

For this, TV Teletext is great, simply because it's a HUGE list of cheap holiday travel agents split into world regions. Yet don't believe an advert if it mentions a holiday; you must call and check it's actually available.

As well as the web, it's worth heading down high street travel agents to see if they'll cut you a deal, especially if you're booking early. The Sunday newspapers often list discount travel agents and you can try the web using multi-agent sites.

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: Check current deals

If you’re booking a holiday in advance, check out current special offers; in these tough times, tour operators are offering hefty discounts. You should be looking at 10% off the brochure price, at the very minimum.

Below is a list of current holiday sales. They may not necessarily be the cheapest, but they will be a powerful bargaining chip when playing brokers off against each other.

Current promotions

• Online discounts with Thomson.

  Thomson is offering half board upgrades for just 1p on certain Summer 2009 holidays. There are also discounts on some summer 2009 holidays, such as Majorca for £137pp (saving £98). See the full list of deals.

• 10% off Virgin holidays

  Virgin is slashing 10% off all Florida and Caribbean holidays and 5% off all others when you book online, until further notice. While not a massive discount, it is well worth mentioning this to other tour operators once you’ve decided on a holiday.

• 5% off long haul Kuoni packages and free nights

  Posh long haul tour operator Kuoni is doing up to 5% off beach packages when you book online, plus free extra nights on many holidays. Prices shown are per person and based on two adults sharing a twin room. To see what’s on offer, search the holiday sale.

• £100s off TransIndus Asia holidays

  Asia tour company TransIndus is slashing the price of some packages. Special offers include £1000 off a 16 day tour North India, making it £1994, instead of £2994. Of course, the discount's only so huge because the holidays are pricey in the first place!

Step 3. Haggle down your holiday price

Now the holiday's picked, it's a game to get EXACTLY THE SAME holiday cheaper and here my Teletext bias becomes clear. However it's worth remembering to stay polite, with a smile and charm throughout this, as travel agents don't like this, or me much.

I'm going through the process as I write, though tragically it's only for the sake of research. My destination is a week's half board in Egypt, at a five star hotel, for two, leaving in two weeks' time.

• Use the Teletext location lists to find agents

  

  This is the reason for my teletext bias, as you can simply scan its pages and jot down the phone numbers of all your destination's specialist holiday companies. Act quickly, as prices and availability change.

  The Teletext advertised price was £400 per person, compared to a rough brochure price of £650. After calling, the other costs brought it to £430 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 up, and politely with 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.

  My price was £430, so I quoted £420 and it came back with £400.

• Then continue the process with a few more.

  Now call a few more, quoting the best price you've got and see who can beat it. To speed up the process, you could knock around 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 £370 per person. After that no one else would budge. Still, so far that's a saving of £120 for two, with just a few phone calls. And this is on a relatively cheap holiday; the more expensive the trip, the bigger the savings.

• A few extra tricks to finesse the final pounds

  Once you've hit the price floor, and no one you call will beat the price, there are a few final tricks to try, but only if you've time, as there are marginal diminishing returns with more calls.

  You can try to shift to agents which advertise to 'beat any price' such as Co-op Travelcare Direct, HolidayHoliday, and Travel Economy. While often this is simple marketing spiel, it can work.

  After that, to be absolutely sure, call the tour operator's own direct booking arm; Thomas Cook*, First Choice and Virgin all have them. And finally, just to try and 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.

  At this point I could only shave a further £10 off, reducing the price to £360 per person, rather than £430 (which is nearly 20% more). That's a total saving of £140 for two over the late deal price.

  Obviously compared with the brochure price at £650 (80% more), it's a mammoth saving of £580 over the late deal price. The savings might have been even bigger… but it's tough to do and type.

  See below for more examples.

How much will you save?

Many people have tried this technique with varying degrees of success; here are some quotes from the forum …

Name: MoneySaver2. Location: Florida. Savings: £4,000.
"Recently we booked a holiday for a family of four to Florida. Initial quotes were in the region of £5,000 to £6,000 for chartered flights, accommodation and car hire. By employing the haggling technique, we managed to get the final price down to just over £2,000 all-in!"

Name: Shughesnerys. Location: Greece. Savings: £600.
"I have just saved myself over £600 on a holiday to Crete. I had no idea it would work, but I got three quotes from three advertisers on the Teletext ads. I am so happy to have got all this money off!"

Name: Clutterbux. Location: Cruise. Savings: £920.
"I just followed the tips on haggling down the price of our holiday and managed to save £460 per person on our next cruise. It works, just give it a try!"