Long gone are the days when you could leave booking your holiday until the last minute, confident that you would get the quality bargain that you were holding out for.
These days, with dynamic pricing from the airlines and hotels, as seats and rooms get booked and availability gets less the price will creep up. You only have to look at an airline like Easyjet to see that they will start with low prices such as £39 to Rhodes, Bodrum, Ibiza etc and within days these will edge up towards £69, £79, £89 and eventually into the hundreds of pounds as you get ever closer to the departure date.
The reason for this is simple - supply and demand. The airlines, and now the hotels, have built in algorithms in their systems which automatically raise prices as availability reduces. They know they can do this as people will always want to travel, particularly at peak times such as school holidays.
Back in the day (and we are really going back here) when I worked for Thomson Holidays, which was the number one UK Tour Operator and has now been swallowed by TUI, they had late holidays called “Square Deals”. These were made up of unsold seats on their charter airline Britannia Airways and unsold rooms on their contracted hotels - rooms that they would have to pay for regardless if anyone was in them or not. It made sense to combine the two elements together and offer a Square Deal on a 3T, 4T or 5T basis - with the “T” being Thomsons own star rating system. They sold the packages to a particular destination but the customer never quite knew which hotel they would end up in - sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Well, it was certainly good for Thomson.
These deals do still exist in some shape or form, and you may have seen them in the windows of the ever dwindling number of travel agents around the country. But the fact remains that they are few and far between and you will never know what you are getting for your money until you arrive. It may be an All Inclusive deal at an incredible price - but there are “All Inclusives” and “good All Inclusives” and you certainly don’t want the former (but more of that in a later post).
But the point is that if you want a holiday to the hotel that you have been looking at on a web site or in a brochure then you should be acting quickly.
Scheduled airline seats, the likes of British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates etc can be booked as much as 350 days in advance, usually at a low price - and if you use a decent Tour Operator, such as Tradewinds, then these seats can invariably be held for you for a very low deposit. It generally doesn’t work the same with low cost carriers - Easyjet, Jet2 and their like as they will usually want the flight paid for in full at the time of booking, but the prices will be much lower than leaving it until nearer your preferred departure date.
Hotels can also be booked well in advance and, like airlines, they will have early booking offers. We typically get up to 50% off with many of our contracted hotels for booking in advance. Contracts for the next year are usually issued around March or April and at that point your room can be reserved at a considerably reduced rate.
Families should really take the initiative and book as soon as possible. July and August are really the peak season for travel for those in the United Kingdom. I would urge all families to start looking today for next year and be prepared to book by August or September of this year - you will save a fortune!
The situation is not so dire for those travelling without children as you can be more flexible. Why travel in July or August when the weather is generally great at home and you can travel in May, June, September or October for the Mediterranean - or anytime out of peak school holiday season to further flung places such as the Caribbean, Mexico or the Indian Ocean (local weather seasonality permitting). But again the advice would be to book well in advance to get those deals
by 
Tradewinds
Tradewinds