Foreign Perspectives

It’s nice to see that vacation rental accommodation is starting to attract higher profile vacation rental commercials these days. Sadly, many people miss out on this really excellent way of going on holiday through their habit of simply looking at hotels.

As the little video says, it’s quite often substantially cheaper to go on holiday in a vacation rental property (also known variously as villas, apartments, self-catering, cottages, and various other names) than it is to go to a hotel. To give you an idea of how substantial that difference can be, in our own holiday property we charged less than half the cost for an apartment when we rented it as a vacation rental compared to when we rented it as a hotel suite.

However, the cost is only part of the picture. Many of the properties listed on the likes of Vacation Rental.org are in idyllic spots that you’d never find a hotel and the accommodation is generally much, much larger than what you’d get in any kind of hotel regardless of the price you paid.

Anyway, here’s one of the first of what’ll hopefully be a series of high profile adverts for these properties:

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Whilst we seem to be in the depths of winter if the weather over the last few days is anything to go by, this is also the very time of year that holiday planning needs doing if you want to pick up the best offers.

Some of those offers may turn out to be last minute deals though so it’s best to be prepared for those. Keeping a case packed with all the essentials really increases your opportunities though some items are pretty hard to come by this time of year. No problem with most snowgear of course but try finding a pair of Moda sunglasses and it’s a whole different matter.

Kind of crazy too as sunny holidays are a round the year deal these days. Even aside from the seriously long haul deals you can generally get to somewhere where you’re gonna need those sunglasses within a few hours flying time.

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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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