It’s possible to haggle already cheap package holiday late deals by a further 15%. 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, 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, 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 and Cheap Hotel Prices guides, as well as the Hotel Sales deals note, 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).
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. 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's simple: tour operators have chartered the planes and reserved the rooms, and, if they don't sell them, 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 you need crèche facilities or want a specific hotel, 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 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.
Top tips for summer 2010
Everything from volcanic ash to the World Cup means tour operators are desperate to get leftover breaks booked up, so late summer bargains abound. Yet the pound is at a low rate against the US dollar. Here are some top top tips to keep it cheap:
Find currencies as weak as the pound
The pound's weak, so find somewhere with a currency that's just as weak. The 2010 Post Office Holiday Costs Barometer found that Portugal, Spain and Bulgaria are the best value short-haul destinations. Italy and France will hit the wallet hardest.
For long haul, the most cost-effective spots are Thailand, Malaysia and Kenya. The priciest are the USA and Egypt.
It’s also worth noting that not all Eurozone countries offer the same value for money. The Post Office’s survey put Portugal as the cheapest, but Italy is still one of the most costly. For more, read the Where your pound goes furthest news story.-
Be an inny, not an outy
If you're going abroad, the real cost is when you get there.Eating out is likely to be a big hit, so either consider full-board or all-inclusive. Alternatively, self-cater, and pop to the local supermarket.
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Don't book excursions through your tour operator
Avoid booking activities through through your holiday rep, as guests are a captive market, so mark-ups can be massive. Venture elsewhere, however, and prices are competitive.
Compare local tour companies' costs once you get there, and take along your own food and drink.
Before you go, try to book online for less.
For example, buy tickets for Benidorm's Terra Mitica theme park on Lastminute.com*, and adult ticket's £22, saving £6 on the £28 face value.Tesco shoppers who've stored up their Clubcard points have another way to get ultra-cheap European attraction tickets. Spend Tesco Clubcard vouchers on goods or services listed in its Rewards brochure, and you get back up to four times their face value.
Deals in the brochure include France’s Asterix and Germany’s Europa theme parks. Parc Asterix adult entry, for example, costs £31 on the door, but £10 in Reward vouchers. Full info in the Loyalty Points Boosting guide.
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, 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
The aim's 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 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. 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 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, which is a pain if you're flexible and just want the cheapest.
Teletextholidays.co.uk. Wide range of mainstream holidays
The site linked to the TV pages, Teletextholidays.co.uk is a good place to get inspired, and very useful, as Teletext plays a hefty part in the haggling process later on.
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Icelolly.com. Great if you've no clue where to go
For a starting point, you won't go far wrong with Icelolly.com. Enter your travel details, and it searches all the eligible holidays.
If you don't have a specific place in mind, leave the destination blank and it comes up with uber-cheap 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, Teletextholidays.co.uk 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.
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. The Sunday newspapers often list discount travel agents, and you can try the web, using multi-agent sites such as Icelolly.com.
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.
Warning! Check it's a genuine package
Brokers sell two types of trip. First there’s the traditional package, where flights, transfers and hotels are all booked with one tour operator, eg, Thomas Cook or Thomson.
Then there are holidays which the agent puts together, with separate flights (often Ryanair or Easyjet), hotels and transfers. Giveaway words are ‘dynamic’, ‘tailormade’ and ‘pyramid’ hols.
While agents call these packages, often they aren’t. Not all dynamic packages are ATOL protected, ie, if your airline goes bust, you could get stranded.
Plus if it’s a budget airline, such as Ryanair, you can get stung with luggage and other fees. In this case, you’d be better of booking your flights and hotel yourself to see the fees clearly and maybe beat the price (see Cheap Hotels & Cheap Flights).
Good questions to ask a broker: “Is there a tour operator, or is this a dynamic package?”, “Is this holiday ATOL protected?” and “What happens if my flight is canceled?”
Step 2. 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, charming and smiley throughout this, as
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 the Maldives, at a four star hotel, for two, leaving in a week's time.
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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 £630 per person, compared to a brochure price of £1204pp. After calling, the other costs brought it to £660 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 £660, so I quoted £650 and it came back with £640.
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 £595 per person. After that no one else would budge. Still, so far that's a saving of £130 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, to be absolutely sure, call the tour operator's own direct booking arm; Thomas Cook*, Cosmos, 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 called Cosmos, the tour operator offering the holiday, but I'd obviously shaved cost down to the bone already, as they would only agree to match, not beat, my price of £595.
Obviously compared with the brochure price at £1204pp, it's a mammoth saving of £1218 for two on the original price - less than half 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:
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! - MoneySaver2
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! - Shughesnerys
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! - Clutterbux
Travel agents’ response to this
A few years ago I (Martin) presented an ITV1 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 the trade magazine devoted pages to it. Apparently showing people how to cut their costs is ‘immoral' and I have devil horns. I believe many simply didn't like the idea of having their margins cut and responded accordingly. Read Their views and my response.
Where I do have some sympathy is with independent tour operators, who source and put together packages themselves. Yet in this case there isn't a ‘commodity' good impact; you can't simply buy the same thing elsewhere anyway.
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 I favour phone specialists who deal with this all the time, rather than walking into an agency.
Glossary
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