Foreign Perspectives

It’s just after Christmas so that means that the vacation planning season is upon us. Or so it should be if you want cheap tickets that is.

Of course the ticketing aspect is just one of the components of your vacation cost and you should look into lowering the cost in all areas this year. After all, with the economy in the state that it’s in globally, chances are that there are some serious bargains to be had in all areas that you look at.

It’s simple to get a bargain then? In some ways it should be given the relatively low level of booking that seems likely to prevail this year. That said, do bear in mind that many tour operators will be seeking to keep their prices up which means that they may cut capacity. Thus whilst finding cheap hotels may be relatively easy (it’s hard to reduce capacity short-term for hotels), actually getting there might prove more difficult if the number of flights and range of destinations have been cut back by the operators.

Ordinarily, the best approach to getting a good overall price is to get the accommodation nailed down first and then sort out the transport, this is a year when it could pay to get the transport sorted out very early and worry about the accommodation a little later. The reasoning behind that is that it’s quite easy for the airlines to cut capacity and  bump up the prices that way, accommodation providers have a largely fixed allocation of rooms and therefore are more likely to cut prices to fill them later on if need-be. That said, do bear in mind that when airlines cut capacity this can in some cases mean that flights from A to B are cancelled altogether so this approach is best applied when you’re looking at a destination served by a number of airlines.

As far as local car hire at your destination goes, it’s not nearly so easy to work out a pricing strategy in most cases. This is because the number of cars at a given destination isn’t entirely fixed in the way that accommodation at that destination is, but neither is it so easy to change the number of vehicles available in the way that airlines can adjust capacity either. The one exception to this is with relatively small islands where generally the pool of available cars is fixed for the season (book early if this applies to you this year as supply does run out on the smaller islands).

It’s too early to say for definite whether this will be a year of very low holiday prices but the shape of the economy seems to suggest that it will be.

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Our friends over at TravelGrove asked us to have a look at their new site for them so here goes…

What’s a “meta search engine” anyway? Well, rather than search each of the sites directly yourself what a “meta search engine” does is to search the results of other search engines. The theory is that this way you’ll get the best possible results.

In the case of TravelGrove it’s not quite a fully-fledged meta search engine as yet in that it submits the relevant searches to the other travel provider sites and opens up the relevant page on their site. Although this isn’t a full meta-search facility, it does save you a lot of time in re-entering the information. Do watch for the popups though; I found that sometimes the site just sat there seemingly doing nothing whereas in fact what was happening was that the popups it was generating were getting blocked.

As always with these things, the discount airlines aren’t searched so if you’re going from an airport mainly served by the discounters you may not pick up the best price. Having said that, these days the “discounters” are sometimes more expensive than regular airlines so you’re not necessarily losing anything.

In addition to the usual flight, car hire and hotels they’ve added cruises. To be honest the cruise search seems pretty basic at first sight. However, don’t let that put you off because it comes up with some excellent prices and the limited search options may well throw up a fantastic cruise that you might not otherwise have throught of.

There’s also the seemingly obligatory community section which offers you the option of running up a travel journal along with a map of the spots you’ve been to. This site is new so don’t expect an awful lot of entries here yet. Those that are have the usual range from dreadful to quite useful.

Finally, there’s a surprisingly complete travel guide section. At the moment most of the detail is around the US and Mexico which has some surprisingly detailed entries on eg Monterrey. There is information on places outside these areas but it’s currently mainly confined to country guides rather than specific resorts in, say, France. Having said that, the detail in the US guides sets a good precedent and over time hopefully they’ll roll out a similar level of detail elsewhere.

Overall, it’s a nice site which might save you some money and which has plenty of information to help you plan your vacation.

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In these days when virtually everyone books their accommodation online it’s particularly important to read the small-print regarding cancelling your trip or simply not turning up at all at your accommodation.

If you simply don’t turn up almost all hotels will charge you for the first night of your stay but some resort style hotels will charge you for the entire stay. In both cases this is a non-refundable charge.

However, you don’t necessarily need to pay it. In most cases, if you call the hotel a day in advance of your stay you’ll generally not have to pay anything further. Even cancelling the same day can sometimes save you money. For example, although we can charge for a noshow unless the reservation is cancelled a day in advance, in reality we waive this if we can get someone else for the room following the cancellation. Incidentally, it’s really not necessary for you to make up some excuse to explain your cancellation: hotels have heard them all before and it’ll make no difference as to whether or not they charge you.

Do watch any deposit payments that you’ve made though as in many instances these are kept by the reservation system that you used and are usually not refundable. If you find a hotel listed on a reservation system it’s usually worthwhile to contact them directly as this will save you the booking fee and you may get a discount too.

You might think that these “noshow” charges are just profiteering on the part of the hotel. They aren’t. Whenever you make a guaranteed reservation online the hotel is obliged to keep the room for you even if other people turn up asking for a room. In some cases we have turned away as many as a dozen couples looking for a room because our last room was subject to a guaranteed reservation only to find out that the people who’d booked it never turned up.

And a final plea… read the description of the hotel and particularly its location. Hotels are usually listed by “resort” which means that all hotels within about 25 miles of a city will come up as being attached to that city. This means that hotels well into the country are listed as associated with cities. Cancelling because you discover that a hotel you expected to be in the city centre is actually in the country doesn’t save a “noshow” charge if you only discover that when you arrive in the city.

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