DIY or travel agent

nimac20

Hi

I'm in the early stages of planning a holiday to California next year, around 3 weeks travelling from San Francisco through Yosemite to Los Angeles. There will be 2 adults and 2 children.

My question really has to do with the pros and cons of booking the whole thing myself versus going through a travel agent. Price is a consideration so am looking not to spend a fortune but if am prepared to spend a little more for a better planned holiday.

This is out first major family holiday so i'm not 100% sure of cost just yet! Does £4,000 sound doable for flights, accommodation and car hire?

Thanks.

nickcc

Depends on the children's age regards cost. After 11 they pay full fare on all airlines, we paid £840 each from LGW to Orlando as it was during the summer holidays which then leaves little money left for the rest of your holiday.

zagfles

Can't really see the point of using a travel agent for this type of holiday - you're driving so doing most of it yourself anyway. You'd need a specialist agent to get any real help, bog standard high street agents would likely be useless, and this would likely be expensive.

Make sure you research likely weather conditions for your trip for instance if you intend to head east out of Yosemite through the Tioga pass, it's closed for much of the year. Accomodation in Yosemite gets booked up well in advance so if you want to stay in the park book early.

But outside the national parks and big cities you might want to be flexible and not book all your accomodation in advance, particularly if you're going off peak, motels are plentiful.

Murphy_The_Cat

nimac20 wrote: »

Hi

I'm in the early stages of planning a holiday to California next year, around 3 weeks travelling from San Francisco through Yosemite to Los Angeles. There will be 2 adults and 2 children.

This is out first major family holiday so i'm not 100% sure of cost just yet! Does £4,000 sound doable for flights, accommodation and car hire?

Thanks.

What time of year are you looking at ?
Peaktime flight prices are a LOT more than Offpeak.
Depending on when you're going, £4000 would vary from 'ooh, thats pushing it a bit, to 'not a chance'

Please bear in mind that circuitous and inventive flight routes, staying in (very) basic hotels, eating 99c McD meals and driving a Fiat 500esque car will make things cheaper, but even so.

a quick mooch through google flights, kayak, skyscanner etc for this year will give you a realistic starting point for flight prices, as will a look at somewhere like trivago or Hotels.com.
Don't dismiss the idea of getting positioning flights to/from a non-UK airport and starting your holiday from (say) Dublin. The potential saving can be considerable. As a guide DUB - SFO, LAX to DUB was £1504, MAN-SFO, LAX-MAN was £2525 & LHR - SFO, LAX to LHR was £2491 on the random June 2016 dates that I've selected. There are flights to/from Dublin and possibly accomodation to allow for, plus (potentaily) longer flight times. But its an option.
Especially if it make the difference between IN budget and OUT of budget.




For car hire, rentalcars & usrentacar are name that comes up often as good companies

Don't be surprised if the final figure comes out at a lot more than £4000 :eek:

blindman

nimac20 wrote: »

Hi

I'm in the early stages of planning a holiday to California next year, around 3 weeks travelling from San Francisco through Yosemite to Los Angeles. There will be 2 adults and 2 children.

My question really has to do with the pros and cons of booking the whole thing myself

versus going through a travel agent. :eek::eek:

DIY this simple trip

Price is a consideration so am looking not to spend a fortune but if am prepared to spend a little more for a better planned holiday.

This is out first major family holiday so i'm not 100% sure of cost just yet! Does £4,000 sound doable for flights, accommodation and car hire?

Thanks.

Southwest thread

can help you plan an Itin

Start the trip from Outside-UK can cheapen flight costs tremendously.(just noticed MTC has mentioned this)

US hotels\motels cater for family rooms for 4 and costs can vary widely.

We did a 3 week road trip a year or so back and even with MSE style savings it cost £3K for the two of us.

Firstly

When are you going?

bellaboo86

I've used a company called round the world experts twice and they are really good.
I priced a holiday up with them before and then went to my local travel agent to compare prices.
The local agent told me she couldn't get me the same standard of accommodation for that price so I should go with the other company.
Also, San Fran is mega expensive accommodation wise so expect to pay a lot of money.
I went last year and spent more n a !!!!!! best western room than I did for a suite in a Vegas hotel.

duchy

blindman wrote: »

Southwest thread

can help you plan an Itin

Start the trip from Ex-UK can cheapen flight costs tremendously.(just noticed MTC has mentioned this)

US hotels\motels cater for family rooms for 4 and costs can vary widely.

We did a 3 week road trip a year or so back and even with MSE style savings it cost £3K for the two of us.

Firstly

When are you going?

Ex UK ????

Did you mean Ex-Europe ?

Mr.Generous

done this trip twice, drive the Pacific Coast Highway (highway 1), great drive, amazing views, see a beach where walrus and elephant seals lounge around, and loads of seals. Go through the Big Sur - amazing coast line. I used carhire 3000 I think, best value twice. try and stay at least a night in Monterey - (If I were you avoid Morro Bay) then Santa Barbara. Top MSE tip, I heard some Americans asking for AAA discount on accommodation so I started asking. No I'm not a member but half the time they give it to you if they have rooms still available. If you can drive on to San Diego, LA is a bit of a dump once you've seen Hollywood. We found it much cheaper to fly into Vegas than anywhere in California so we hired and returned car there. This also means a drive through the Mojave dessert, we saw the airline graveyard place and death valley. Best road trip to date, I'd love to do it again. You will all love it.

John259

I like the open road and the national parks, so for me the highlights in California are the Pacific Coast Highway and Yosemite followed by Lake Tahoe, Sequoia and Joshua Tree. (FWIW I'm not keen on big cities in the USA, or elsewhere for that matter.)

If you fancy doing your own research, here's some recommended sources:

You can use Google Maps to check where places are and probably more importantly how far away from each other they are. You can also use Google Maps to search for motels, and in StreetView mode you can look round towns, highways and some of the hiking trails in national parks.
https://maps.google.com

Wikipedia has useful background articles on US regions, states, cities, towns, national parks and even highways.
http://en.wikipedia.org

The US National Park Service web site has lots of practical information about visiting each of the wonderful national parks and the numerous other similar areas that they administer such as the national monuments.
http://www.nps.gov

Each state also has its own state parks, some of which are superb. You can use Google to find the web site for each state's parks.
California state parks:
http://www.parks.ca.gov

YouTube has some excellent videos of places, road trips and dashcam videos of highways. There's also an awful lot of total rubbish on there so it takes some effort to find the good ones. I like to think of videos as being the modern-day equivalent of the old-time printed guide books.
http://www.youtube.com

Some passes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains are closed every year due to snow from around December to May or June. The annual road closure most likely to affect visitors from Britain is the Tioga Pass (CA120) from Yosemite Valley to US395 near Lee Vining.

Even fairly small towns in the USA and Canada have "gas, food and lodging" (petrol stations, restaurants and motels) especially if they have an interstate exit. These services tend to be clustered around interstate exits or on the main roads into town, rather than in the actual town centre. So you're not limited to staying in big cities all the time.

Accommodation in national parks is expensive and books up months in advance. However, nearly all the parks have towns fairly close by with motels at lower rates with no need to book in advance.

You can also save money by staying outside big cities rather than in their centres.

You might find some episodes of this video playlist of a British family's California road trip of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb-8Gy55ZLXaVGaWY3_O_KUo2H5cgmb7P
I've done that loop, although not all in a single trip, and it is as superb as they say. I've visited Disneyland and enjoyed it, but I wouldn't want to visit any more theme parks.

blindman

duchy wrote: »

Ex UK ????

Did you mean Ex-Europe ?

Ex can mean "from" or "Out of" but can also mean "not" or "without"

So I've changed it so it is clear

blindman

John259 wrote: »

I like the open road

Blah BLah Blah

I wouldn't want to visit any more theme parks.

None of which actually answers the OP Q's

Just another long rambling post that links (suspiciously) to lots of You tube clips.
None of which are from John

How do you make money on those You tube clips??