Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

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).

Despite spending almost two days solid looking for a place for us to go for Christmas, we’re still looking.

Having said that, we’ve narrowed the search down considerably. For one thing, thanks to a spate of rather chilly weather here, we’re thinking that perhaps trawling round the German Christmas markets in the biting cold wasn’t such a good idea after all and perhaps somewhere rather warmer would be the way to go.

So, where? In principle, the Canary islands are the place to go for certain warm weather but they’re way too expensive at this time of year so we’re looking at Ibiza and Majorca at the moment with a side-bet on Alicante and Valencia.

At the moment, the problem is that it’s not nearly so easy to find apartments as it is to find hotels online. One major pain is that most apartment/villa bookings are “on request” which means that we’re sitting waiting for replies re availability and prices from several places.

Now that we’ve started looking at the detailed costings, we’re thinking of the tradeoff of the £30 each flight vs just driving there.

Going in the car is a whole lot simpler of course in that there’s none of the hassle of weighing luggage and juggling stuff from one case to another that you get into with airline trips. A minor downside is that it’s about six hours drive from here to Alicante but then it’s nearly three hours to Barcelona airport so it’s not a whole lot further.

Much simpler to organise too in that all we need is the accommodation and no worries about flights nor airport parking.

Despite spending the whole morning searching for somewhere to go over our Christmas break, we’ve still not settled on anywhere to the extent of booking it.

At the moment, we’re looking towards places further south than in the original plans in that we can get away for longer for around the same amount of money as we could when we were considering the likes of Germany or Switzerland.

So, in the frame at the moment is Ibiza which comes in at the lowest price for the flights and the apartments but means that we need to book into a hotel in Barcelona before and after the holiday that costs almost as much as the apartment we’d be staying in for the week in Ibiza. Also, Ibiza doesn’t have a great image and the apartment in question isn’t in a great town on the island.

Next up is Mallorca for which the flights are more expensive and so are the apartments BUT we don’t need the night before and after the holiday in Barcelona so the overall cost is much the same as Ibiza. There seems to be a whole lot more to do in Mallorca too which is a big plus point.

Late news: Wendy fancies Basel in Switzerland so she’s looking up hotels for there too.