I recently found myself doing something I love—vacation planning. While exciting, this process can be fraught with confusion and frustration for many. We have more options available to us now than ever before. There are a multitude of web sites, each professing to offer the best deal for your hard-earned money. In addition, airlines and hotels each have their own sites and of course, tour operators are available online as well. If it took me a couple of hours to wade through all available resources, how would an occasional traveler even begin to process this information?
These issues have been debated, written about, poked and prodded before. One aspect, however, I was most curious about are the promises by many websites that booking your airfare and hotel together in a single vacation package actually saves you money. I decided to put these claims to the test.
I priced out several trip options. I won’t go into all the various sites and options I used, so consider this an executive summary of my very rudimentary research.
I selected three quite different destinations: Orlando, Paris and Cancun. For each I researched a 7 day trip staying at a 3-star hotel. So, was booking hotel and air cheaper? I wish I could definitively say that booking hotel and air are clearly cheaper, but the results were hardly conclusive.
As frustrating as this result is, there were a couple of valuable lessons learned. The constant between all the searches, oddly enough, were the flights. The cost was the same on both the bargain as well as the airline sites. The price difference in hotels really wasn’t that extreme either. In the most severe case, there was a difference of $12 per night.
Aerogal - Baltra Airport
What did make a difference in two of the searches was the bizarre discount applied when booking hotel and air together. The discount amount changed based on destination, date and class of hotel and I could find no rationale to decipher it. In two of the searches, the difference was only a few dollars, but in the Orlando test the savings were more than $100.
So what does this wildly unscientific and somewhat arbitrary analysis teach us? The lesson here is that when planning a trip, copious amounts of research is absolutely necessary, as no two travel destinations are the same and each comes with its own special booking options and concerns. Patience and persistence are a traveler’s best friend.
However, think twice about selecting the cheapest possible option. As we’ve seen, the savings can be minimal when booking with a low-cost site. By booking with such a site, you may be giving up crucial benefits. In many cases, the hotels must be fully paid and are non-refundable. Changing or canceling airfare in this situation can be equally difficult. You’re also losing any extras from the hotel or airline, such as upgrade opportunities and hotel loyalty points. If the price is roughly the same, I would always choose to book directly with the hotel and airline. Life is unpredictable, and a little flexibility can go a long way in maximizing your value.
It is entirely a matter of taste which option you take, but regardless, research and comparison shopping is essential to designing the best travel experience.
I like to travel by car – as I mentioned in a post. So for me the best way to plan a trip was – until now – to check the interesting monuments to visit and to reserve a hotel through booking.com. Last year I’ve compared as well several sites offering reservation opportunities – and in the and I chose the best deal for me. I found a special room price – it was the last empty room for that period so it had a special offer – being also reserved with some time before the actual vacation. But I did not want any local tour or stuff like that included – for, like you’ve said – in the end it’s all about personal preferences and choices.
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In particular case, we got an AWESOME airfare + hotel through Expedia. Flights from LAX to Budapest were running $1500 per person. But we found a deal for flight AND a week at a 4-star hotel for only $1000 a person. A third the price of just the airfare!
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Jetpacker – That’s great! We too got a great package deal to Dublin last year. They can definitely be advantageous, but the traveler needs to do some research to make sure.
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Matt, so interesting that you wrote about this. I just wrote a post last week called “5 ways a vacation package can save you money.” Like you, I LOVE the research and planning part of trip (we are a lot alike in our travel tastes).
I do believe vacation packages can save people money. You can read the 5 ways it can save but I think the best savings for packages are in the offseason, when you are only going to one location, and there are 2 or more people traveling. Vacation packages aren’t as good of a deal for many solo travelers but they can save people money.
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Matt Long Reply:
May 6th, 2011 at 12:31 pm
Definitely offseason, totally agree with that. I’ve never looked at the solo side of the packages, that would be interesting.
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