by The school summer holidays are a month away and you still haven’t booked your holiday? You are not alone, and you certainly have not left it too late.
While the January sales place a lot of emphasis on finding a holiday bargain, you can get just as good (or sometimes, better) savings if you book at the last minute.
Last week, easyJet Holidays’ Director of Trade and Development, Tony Hopkins, said people are getting late: “We’re definitely seeing later booking patterns. There is strong demand, but it is late,” he said.
“This year in particular, people are looking for upgrades but they don’t have to be cheap – more than 50 per cent of our bookings are four and five stars. They’re not scrimping, but they want to know how much it’s going to cost.”
The question is, how do you find the best deals? Here are eight top tips.
1. Buy someone else’s holiday
Launched in 2018, Transfer Travel (dubbed the “eBay of holidays”) offers a marketplace for people to buy and sell holidays, effectively renaming existing bookings rather than starting from scratch. The website takes a cut from the transaction and acts as an intermediary to ensure that payments are processed safely.
Transfer Travel currently has deals including three nights in Paris leaving on August 1 (including Olympic tickets to see football and volleyball) for £1,690 for two: “I’m selling this because me and my girlfriend have broken up and he doesn’t want. get lost,” writes the seller.
2. Sign up for newsletters specializing in markets
A good, low-effort way to score last-minute travel deals is to sign up for newsletters that feature vacation deals. Jack’s Flight Club is a good starting point for cheap flights. The founder writes: “I know not everyone has the time or knowledge to dig up the cheapest flight deals, like Bali for £189 or Peru for £212. But hey, I can.”
A recent newsletter had return flights to Egypt for £117 and a return ticket to Mexico for £426. To make the most of these deals you must, of course, be flexible with dates, and without delay.
Other late deal newsletters include Holiday Pirates, Cheap Holiday Expert and Holiday Hypermarket – or if you have a trusted tour operator, it’s worth signing up to their mailing list to be the first to get their best deals at the last minute.
3. Use a holiday comparison site
Holiday comparison sites mine the internet for live deals and list them, with links, so users can make their own choices. Travel and Kayak Supermarket are the leaders in this world. Expedia also has a last minute holiday package page for bookings made before July 14, which you can claim if you become a free member.
There are also Online Travel Agents (OTAs) that specialize in hotel and flight deals, perhaps most famously lastminute.com. According to a study by the consumer watchdog, Which one of them?, Travel Zoo and Secret Escapes are among the most trusted sites for vacation deals. However, beware that some OTAs offer eye-catching prices, only to charge exorbitant fees for add-ons, name changes or calling customer service lines.
Across the board, it’s worth focusing on the price itself rather than the savings. Holidays are dynamically priced, so any claims that holidays are reduced by huge percentages should be taken with a pinch of salt.
4. Check out traditional tour operators
All traditional tour operators have late deals. Why? They book the airline seats and beds in bulk, in advance, so they have to sell them at some point. You’ll find savings on Tui’s late offers page, as well as last minute offers on Jet2Holidays and easyJet Holidays. BA Holidays also has a last minute booking page, including flights and a hotel package for seven days in Lanzarote from £390 per person.
5. Check what’s included
Booking a week in Majorca is good for pennies, when you have to spend hundreds more on car hire, transfers, luggage and other extras. Make a checklist of what you need and tick them off as you go through the booking process, and always check the cost of essential extras before you commit to your holiday.
6. Be flexible with dates and destination
The more flexible you are with times, dates and destinations, the better deals you’ll get. Skyscanner offers the option to search “Everywhere”, allowing you to find cheap deals on highlights (for example, we found return flights from London to Ibiza during the summer holidays for £69). Likewise, Airbnb has an “I’m Flexible” option that allows you to focus on the type of property you want (lakeside, with a hot tub, for a large group), rather than the destination.
7. Travel off-peak (if you can)
You already know about this. But it’s always worth remembering that if you’re not involved in the school holidays, you’ll get huge savings by booking outside the peak summer holiday period from late July to late August.
8. Look later in the summer for family markets
If you are tied to the school calendar, the second half of August is almost always cheaper than the beginning. Why? Probably because people are impatient, and want to escape as soon as possible. It could also be that people don’t want to go abroad the week before schools go back, and may want to make the most of the August Bank Holiday weekend at home.
“A little patience pays off,” wrote the Telegraph’s chief culture and consumer expert, Nick Trend, in an article earlier this year. “Book for the last week of August (24-31) and you’re likely to save hundreds of pounds.”
Get 25 of the best summer holidays to book now here.
