Foreign Perspectives

Finding really cheap car hire is really simple over the winter months but at this time of year it’s something of a nightmare unless you’ve had the foresight to book it months in advance.

The reason is simple really: everyone’s going on holiday right now. Not only that but this year is particularly problematic in that the discount airfares have increased quite substantially in price so everyone is making more of an effort to save money in other ways and, for most people, car hire is one of the easiest things to target as it generally makes up a substantial chunk of your spending on a holiday.

Of course, the problem is that as so many people are thinking along the same lines, the very cheapest car hire deals get taken out very quickly indeed so the usual tactic of going for the very cheapest doesn’t work at the moment. However, all is not lost as finally there’s a site offering car hire price comparisons which takes out an awful lot of the donkey work in finding the best deal.

Usually I’d be quite wary of this type of site in that it’s obviously making money on the commission that the car hire companies pay out and in fact in my first test of it I was going to say “AVOID” in that it came back with car hire prices £10 higher than those I’d gotten direct. However, click-through to the various offers and you get the same price as you’d get direct so the only downside is that you’d need to click-through to the first couple of offers to get the real price (in my case the third listed was a good deal cheaper than the first two).

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you’re going a fair distance and will be in a country where you have relatives then chances are that you’ll have to see them.

However, don’t forget that this can substantially distort “your” holiday. For one thing, if you’re going far enough they’ll probably feel obliged to organise lots of stuff for you to see and do whilst you’re there. If they’re cousins who you’ve never seen or perhaps ones who you’ve only seen at home and this is a return visit then you can pretty much forget about going to where you might want to go.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have them offer to take you around various places but you can sometimes end up getting dragged round all the relatives in the area which can seriously eat up holiday time. If that looks likely to happen you need to be clear on why you’re going to visit them: is it because you’re going to that country anyway and dropping in to say “hi”, or is it specifically to see them? The answer makes an enormous difference. For example, we were going around the world once and planning on dropping in to see one family along the trip but some people over here couldn’t understand why we weren’t spending our entire holiday with them!

Popularity: 2% [?]

It used to be when you wanted a new lighting fixture you called the electrician and he came and installed whatever he had or at best gave you a choice from two or three.

These days of course that’s all changed and lighting fixtures are something that we choose ourselves from a quite bewildering selection at one of the many shops stocking them. The choice is truly vast these days with variations in everything from the style and colour to the type of bulb that they take.

One major disadvantage of all that choice that we’re finding in our place is that the previous owners seem to have chosen fixtures almost at random and we need to keep a whole box of different bulbs in an attempt to be able to replace one when it blows!

Popularity: 3% [?]