Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Cheaper travel’ Category

We’ve almost given up hope of getting flights to match the apartments/villas that we can find in Majorca.

For one thing, a lot of the self-catering places have specific days for checking in which means that the flight prices on those days are much higher than they are for the rest of the week. The effect of that is that we can’t run with a place that requires us to checkin on a specific day as we can’t afford the flights to get to it.

Then there’s the ongoing hassle of very little in the way of online booking for these places so we’ve to send off a heap of enquiries and wait ’til each place gets back to us which is a real pain.

On the plus side, at least the car hire is pretty cheap so we can add that on. Or can we? Given that it’s a peak holiday season I’m none too sure that we’ll be able to get a car which would, of course, affect the locations that would be viable for us for the villa.

We’ve still not ruled out somewhere in the direction of the Alps for our Christmas break as we quite liked the area the other week.

As usual for us, we were looking for last minute Alps hotels which, for the most part, means looking at RatesToGo. Why? Well, that’s one of the sites that specialises in selling the final couple of rooms in the hotels that they list. Courtesy of the way that expenses work in hotels, it’s in their interest to fill those last couple of rooms and often that means that you get a substantial discount on the RatesToGo site vs the rate that you’d get even when booking directly with the hotel.

One minor hassle with the site is that because these are usually the very last rooms available in the hotels listed, you can’t hang around deliberating about your choice of hotel because chances are it’ll be gone if you do. For example, the rather nice Eurogroup Hotel Le Royal Ours Blanc is already gone. That’s a good example though as the site doesn’t just have the dregs of hotels listed: many luxury hotels use it to sell their final rooms too ie the bargains that you see are quite genuine.

Several hours on and we’re still waiting for the replies from the villas in Majorca that we’re hoping to stay in over Christmas.

That’s the one thing that I really hate about booking self-catering places. At least with a hotel you can just click on their site and it’s booked. With self-catering there always seems so much more administration to go through and, for the most part, for no good reason.

Still, at least we have sort-of settled on a place to go (assuming that the flight prices don’t go against us whilst we’re twiddling our thumbs, of course).

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

Since we’ve gotten over the peak of the Summer season and, more importantly, I now have the Spanish exam behind me, our thoughts are turning to holidays for ourselves.

London is an easy choice for us as we’re just 20 mins from the airport and the flight times are pretty convenient too. Not only that but there’s loads of things to see and do in London year-round so we don’t need to aim for any particular date.

One interesting option that we think of now and again are London apartments. You might think that these would be very expensive and, of course, some of them are. Not all though and particularly not if you choose your dates wisely as many serviced apartments are aimed at business people and therefore have lower rates at the weekends.

Failing that, London is naturally full of cheap hotels although you should be careful with these as some are cheap because they’re not that convenient to public transport. If they’re reasonably close to a tube line even hotels that are relatively far out can be extremely practical as you can get a surprising distance on the tube in 20 minutes.