Cheap Package Holidays

It’s possible to haggle even 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. So, with this step-by-step guide package holiday guide, hopefully next time someone asks the dreaded "how much did you pay?", you'll hold your head up high.

• Package vs DIY
• When to book and where to go
• Top tips for 2010
• Haggle down the cost of your holiday
  • Step 1: Pick your perfect holiday
  • Step 2: Haggle down your holiday cost
• How much will you save

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, 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).

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 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, ie, 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, because 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 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.

This year there are bargains to be had to and Mexico or Sri Lanka due to swine flu and civil unrest. Yet the Foreign Office has lifted its warning against travel to Mexico and certain areas of Sri Lanka too. However this is a very personal choice; before booking, do always read Foreign Office advice thoroughly.

• Find currencies as weak as the pound

  The pound's weak, so find somewhere with a currency that's just as weak.The 2009 Post Office Holiday Costs Barometer found that Bulgaria, Turkey and Croatia are the best value short-haul destinations. France, Cyprus and Italy will hit the wallet hardest.
  
  For long haul, the most cost-effective spots are Thailand, South Africa and Kenya. The priciest are Antigua, the USA and Jamaica.

  It’s also worth noting that not all Eurozone countries offer the same value for money. The Post Office’s survey put Portugal fifth place overall, but it was still cheaper than the other euro countries. The survey covered 18 top package destinations; of course, currencies fluctuate, but this is a useful guide. See full results.

  If you can manage to bag Cheap Flight and Cheap Hotel to a non-traditional destination with an even cheaper cost of living, such as India or Argentina, your pound will stretch even further. See Mercer’s Cost of Living Survey for inspiration.

• Choose all-inclusive or self-catering

  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.

• Take advantage of holiday sales

  With more Brits staying put this summer, tour operators are desparate to flog trips and are reducing the cost of for early, as well as late, breaks. They may not necessarily be the cheapest, but they will be a powerful bargaining chip when playing brokers off against each other.

• Don't book excursions through your tour operator

  Avoid booking activities through through your holiday rep, as mark-ups can be massive. Tour operators tend not to have dropped excursion prices as they’re a captive market, yet if you venture to book elsewhere prices are highly competitive.
  
  Compare local tour companies' costs once you get there, and take along your own food and drink.
  
  Do some planning before you go; see if you can buy excursion tickets online first for less. As an example, buy tickets from Lastminute.com*’s for the Terra Mitica theme park near Bendidorm, and adult ticket is £16, saving £12 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 Deals brochure and you get back three or four times their face value.
  
  Deals in the brochure include France’s Asterix and Germany’s Europa theme parks, meaning you can get entry at a fraction of the cost. As an example, and adult ticket for Parc Asterix would cost c.£33 on the door; it costs just £10 in Tesco Clubcard points. For more info, read Loyalty Points Boosting guide.
  

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 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, and you can 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 - 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.

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.

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 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 the Maldives, at a four star hotel, for two, leaving in a week's 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 £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.
  
  

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