Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Cheaper travel’ Category

Although we’ve quite a selection of flight options from airports locally, it’s not always so easy to manage to get from A to B when you’ve got to go through C to do it.

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.

We ended up choosing Venice as our Halloween trip basically because the flights to it from our selection of local airports were among the cheapest to anywhere and it seemed to offer us the most of those cheapo destinations in terms of attractions and general interest.

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).

Whenever you’ve a peak of bookings, you’re sure to have a peak of cancellations too.

Today for instance is a public holiday here which means, among other things, that the buses aren’t running. So, right on cue, we received a call this afternoon from someone who can’t reach us today. Since the cancellation conditions state that you need to cancel one day in advance, this would normally mean that we’d be billing him for the room tonight but we managed to pick up another booking for his room so he gets off without paying.

As there’s also a bank holiday on Monday, we’re pretty full at the moment and have just found out that the above guest doesn’t have any transport of his own and that a part of four walkers is coming to stay on Saturday night. That leaves us with five people checking out on Sunday who we now know don’t have any transport until Tuesday as there won’t be any buses or taxis on either Sunday or Monday.

I suspect that both lots may want (well, need) to stay another couple of days.

One of the regular nightmares that seems to get worse every year is the business of getting away for the bank holiday weekends.

We all know that the roads will be full, the airports chaotic and the ferry queue backed up yet for just about every bank holiday weekend you see the queues everywhere. From the other side of the fence it’s just as bad: we could do with another floor added on to the building at peak periods yet the bookings drop away just as quickly right after the bank holiday and we’re rattling round a big building.

Although you’d think that people would be glad to get a place to stay at such times, in fact we usually get an equally large jump in no-shows. Just this weekend we had a family who’d booked almost half the building between them yet neither cancelled nor turned up. Had they cancelled, we’d have filled the rooms easily enough yet they didn’t so we had to keep the rooms available for them.

One thing to watch in these days where almost all reservations are guaranteed by a credit card is that if you don’t cancel, you’ll get charged at least for the first night and increasingly often for your entire stay.

When it’s cold and dreary at home it seems that many people get going on their summer holiday plans if the stats on our various listings sites are anything to go by.

In December, there’s just too much focus on the Christmas period of course what with shopping and the sheer volume of work that goes into sorting out the Christmas celebrations for most people. So, for the most part people begin their holiday planning for the upcoming summer in the first or second week of January and thereby snap up the bargains.

We’re already seeing a big jump upwards in the searches arriving on the self-catering booking sites reflecting that holiday planning activity and have seen some bookings already for the peak summer period so some of the better places have already been booked. Actually, the very best places tend to get booked not too long after the previous summer!

Anyway, if you’ve not yet started on sorting out the plans for your summer holiday, it would be best to get going on that now to give yourself the widest possible selection of places to choose from.