Haggle Down Your Holiday Costs Discussion Area

rhammer

Wow! Good haggling ethank! I was thinking about going to Cuba. How did you manage to save so much off your holiday? Who did you book with in the end (was it direct with Thomas CooK?).

earthling1

In the article about Holidays and in particular the part about haggling with different travel agents the text says - "This is the reason Teletext Holidays is a top pick. You can simply search its site and scan for phone numbers of all your destination's specialist holiday companies". Well you can't as all it gives are the numbers for the Teletext agents. Am I missing something? When it says travel agents do they mean the Tour Operatiors?

rhammer

earthling1 - the article is a bit out of date! Teletext holidays used to be a good website for comparing holidays from lots of different travel agents and suppliers (over 100 I think!). Now they only work with one supplier for their package holidays. So they are no longer a holiday comparison website!
www.Icelolly.com is a great place to compare budget holidays (just like Teletext used to be). With regards to haggling with travel agents, I stumbled across a website the other day called www.muchcheaper.co.uk which offers a free beat my quote service where agents compete to win your booking. Haven't used it yet myself though so can't vouch for it being any good!

kirkwisebeard

Not a massive saving admittedly... but when me and my wife had our honeymoon in Prague, we rang the hotel we were going to book to ask if they could cater for our dietary requirements, and they asked how much Bookings.com was charging us... we told them, and they said that if we paid them direct they'd throw breakfast in for free... Bookings.com wanted an extra 7 euros a day for that, per person... so 280 euros saved there, and breakfast was great...

Bubbles123456

Hiya,

I'm looking to book a holiday for late June, 10 nights, hopefully to Greece half board or all inc. I've tried haggling before and failed! I just wondered if anyone had any tips? Up to date ones!

Many thanks

richardw

If UK teams do well in the World Cup there may be more holidays available.

Yinster

Looking to go away next year to Las Vegas for my birthday as it is one of the big ones plus the fact I had a crap birthday this year. So as we were heading to Las VEgas also added San Francisco too. Originally got a quote from Virgin Holidays for 4 nights in San Francisco and three nights in Las Vegas for just over £2800 for two of us, all flights and 4 and 5* accommodations including resort fees.

After a week of chatting and contacting other agents and Virgin Holidays to give them a chance to match it, we ended up going with Netflights who we used before for the extra same flights, accommodations including resort fees and an extra night in Las Vegas plus transfers for just over £2300. So saving about £500.

A wee mention also to Flight Centre. They couldn't get it cheaper but didn't like to be beaten so they said they do it £1 cheaper per person if we paid for it all upfront as they be working at a loss. If we had the money there and then I probably take them up on the offer. But very happy with the price we got.

yorkyboy

Be careful when looking on Icelolly.com I went to book a week on the Costa Brave with Best Priced Holidays quoted at £217pp all inclusive this price was confirmed when I telephoned it was only after taking all my details including credit card info that I was informed that the price quoted didn't include hold luggage this would be an extra £50 pounds per case each way, at this point I said I didn't wish to proceeed and asked for comfirmation that no charges would be made against my card

ronniebowman

Hi, I am new to this forum and struggling to find how to start a new thread, however it is holiday related. If anybody goes onto Thomas Cook right now and selects Holidays, then Beach holidays, then searches for all (do not apply and filters), then put the results in lowest to highest order, there is a holiday there to the Dominican Republic in April 2015, 14 nights, ALL INCLUSIVE for....£20 per person. Amazing right? Maybe this offer has gone by the time you read this but it has been there all day today. Amazing offers of this nature have been appearing daily. Yesterday there was 3 nights in Turkey for £7, the other day 9 nights in Spain for £23 and many more. The thing is, usually when you click onto the offer it will take you to another page with further details. There is then a green box saying "Get me a quote for this holiday". Every time we previously clicked this it returned an error message and says there are many people looking at this right now. This morning however, we successfully booked the £20 Dominican holiday for my wife's' parents as a gift. After successfully receiving the confirmation email for the booking we then booked ourselves the same deal, which also successfully went through and was confirmed via email. Of course, this seemed too good to be true. At about 2pm, Thomas Cook called my wife and explained it was an error and that we ad to pay the additional £2460 for the holiday. Where do we stand with this?? We have paid for a service offered by a company and they are refusing to provide that service and have changed the advertised price. The website does state the advertised prices are not "Live" and that errors doe sometimes occur, but surely this is misleading information. Any thoughts please??

Alan_Bowen

It is obviously an error of monumental proportions and as you are not travelling until next year, their and everyone else's booking conditions give them the right to cancel the booking. It seems they caught the IT problem almost immediately and you knew it was wrong from the beginning. If it had been £1000 rather than £1500 you might have been able to argue but £20 against £2460.......