Of course, it’s completely different now and they want you to do without checked luggage altogether if you can. Despite their normally over the top approach to charging even Ryanair has raised the carry-on allowances to a notional 10kg  (Ryanair say “It should weigh no more than 10kg”). In practical terms, so long as you go for online checkin, there really isn’t a limit so long as you can actually carry it onto the plane and so long as it’s not too far off the 55x40x20 size.

Even the liquid limits don’t seem overly severe so long as you don’t try to bring drinks. Normal sized tubes of toothpaste might look big but they’re no more than the 100ml limit. You can even bring on drinks so long as you buy them after you’ve passed through security thus avoiding the ridiculous prices on the plane (though don’t be drinking too much on Ryanair as it’s £1 for the toilet).

Laughably these days you’re still not allowed to take “magnetised materials” onboard although that’s a rule that has been totally impractical to enforce since credit cards came on the scene not to mention the magnetic stripe on many tickets. I wonder when it’ll occur to IATA to revise this?

What is a real pain is getting everything into the one bag. As you read this I’ll be struggling to get a weeks worth of clothes plus assorted items for my OU summer school into a bag: white coat, big lump of a course book, computer, etc. I’m sure that there’s room for a “how to pack a carry-on bag” course!

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The transport costs are considerably lower normally as you can just get in the car, over on the ferry and you’re there. In most cases you can do the door to door transport in much the same time as you’d be talking about with flights by the time you add in the couple of hours prior to the flight and all the messing about getting to and from the airport. Moreover you don’t have any of the hassles entailed in avoiding the excess baggage charges and, of course, you have your own car so you don’t need to budget for renting one.

The accommodation costs are massively less as you don’t have the multi-room problem (why can’t hotels allow for larger families?) and the food costs are a whole lot more controllable if you aren’t tied to hotel/restaurants all the time. In some cases you can get a weeks accommodation at one of the parks for less than you’d get a nights accommodation for a family in a hotel and that’s not requiring you to go downmarket to make savings like that either.

Once you’re there you’ll find activities laid on to suit just about everyone at every age and, of course, there’s the option to explore the local countryside too.

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So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.

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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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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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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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Whilst you can obviously leave many things to the last minute that can cost you dear. Just consider what seems on first thought to be a simple matter of parking the car. Last time I tried that in our local airport the price ranged from £2.50 a day with no additional charges through to £10 a day with charges for the airport shuttle.

That was at a small local airport and it’s a lot more complex when you’re looking for gatwick parking as the people over at Essential Travel reveal on their website. I knew that Gatwick was quite a large airport facility but I’d never have dreamt of it having as many as 17 car parks and, of course, they all come with different rates and offers. Even stingy ole me wouldn’t dream of pricing around that many car parks so it’s just as well that their site does that hard work for you as there’s quite a bit of money to be saved if you get the right car parking for your holiday.

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Our closest airport is all of 20 minutes away so is definitely our preferred departure point but it’s one that we just can’t seem to manage for a flight to Belfast next week. Flights go to the Birmingham, Stansted and Brussels but all arrive just after the last flight to Belfast from those airports would have just departed.

Next choice is Gerona which has a massive range of departures. However, that’s about 90 minutes drive from us so in practical terms departures before 10am aren’t really that viable and unfortunately the flights out leave more like 6am which would mean a 2am departure from home for us ie not really a runner.

Final choice seems to be Barcelona which has the big plus point that it’s a direct non-stop flight but the downer that it’s about two and a half hours drive to get there. Having said that, the even departure time is close to perfect.

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When you’re heading to a long-weekend destination then typically most people will leave home on Friday and return on Sunday or Monday. If you leave home on Monday and return on Friday then you’ll get substantial savings on the flight prices, sometimes sufficiently large savings to let you stay most of the week for the cost that everyone else is paying for a weekend.

Likewise, when you’re looking for a las vegas hotel then make sure that you’re not going during a conference week.

Using tactics like this you can really stretch your vacation money which is what most of us need to do in these difficult times.

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I was surprised to find that there’s quite a selection of fairly reasonably priced appartment accommodation right in the city itself. Last time I looked everything was at crazy prices as you would expect for such a popular and compact city. Getting to the accommodation sounds like something of a trek though. We’re flying Ryanair so “Venice airport” is actually Treviso which is about 30km outside the city (vs 10km for Marco Polo, the main Venecian airport) and involves a coach trip (EUR 9 each, each way) as Treviso isn’t well connected to Venice. Still, once we get off the coach we’re pretty much in Venice and it’s quite a nice boat trip round to the dock nearest our accommodation.

Water transport in Venice is quite expensive although to be fair if you’re based right in the city as we will be you don’t really need to use it that much. Sure, we’ll go on the round-the-island trip but other than that and probably a trip to Lido we’ll likely only be heading out on the water to see the glass making at Murano so don’t expect to spend too much on getting around (it’s quite a walkable size of city).

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