Searching for your accommodation while holidaying in a foreign country can be quite tedious at times but also it can be a fun exciting task; all depending on budget and availability. If you have left it 'quite late in the day' to start searching for places to stay while on your trip and you happen to be going to a very popular place during a high-season month, it then will likely become quite tricky. So be organized and prepared and make sure you give yourself enough time – this is probably the most important tip for helping you find the very best room that your budget can afford. This is not saying that you always get the best deal when booking well ahead in advance, as you can sometimes find some fantastic 'short-notice', 'last-minute' deals that usually occur whenever a hotel or resort has had some unexpected circumstance that leads to some vacant accommodation in a location that would otherwise always be fully booked during the time in question. Despite all these potentially amazing accommodation promos, it is not a good idea to rely on these happenstance occurrences as being your strategy to getting a great holiday deal , as more often than not you will find yourself being left disappointed and more importantly, homeless for your holiday. As I mentioned earlier; the key is to be prepared & organized, so get ready fairly early; 3 – 6 months in advance is usually a good length of time to book ahead for most locations & will certainly be far enough in advance to leave you with a variety of plenty options to choose from.
Spend Time to Thoroughly Investigate All Options
A very common mistake that many of us make when booking holiday accommodation is being too hasty and impatient when making our decisions on where we choose to stay. This will usually be because you have just found a great, fun, comfy and or exciting place that is within your budget. It might even be in the ideal location that you had identified during the holiday planning as being the area where you wanted to live out your week, fortnight or if you're very lucky, even longer. However, even though the place you are looking at ticks most the boxes, if you just go ahead and make your booking right away then you will almost certainly be missing out on saving some extra funds. The savings I am referring to could present themselves in many different ways, you just need to be very Diligent, sometimes Think Outside The Box and also in certain circumstances – be Ruthless (this doesn't sound too nice, but it is frequently a necessity when brokering deals, and in the end of the day nothing being said is personal, so offence should not be taken by either/any of the participants of the deal making or breaking! To give you some actual examples of money saving and deal making methods, I will tell you about a couple of bargains I managed to successfully negotiate for my travelling companions and myself in recent years:
- While organizing a group holiday over in Bali to spend some time catching up with friends, I came across a resort that had enough vacancies so that each travelling party (it was mostly all couples, some with kids) could have their own villa and all villas where in walking distance from each other. This looked ideal as it meant we could easily communicate and catch up with everyone, while at the same time we all had our own private villas to retreat back into whenever anyone wanted to have some personal space. I first found the resort after receiving a tip from a friend of a friend and was checking availability & prices on the resorts website which all looked good, however I decided to cross check the pricing with some of the big online travel agencies (OTA'S) because I know from experience that they often are able to undercut the resorts on price. I eventually found an OTA that offered the same booking at around 20% less, so I then contacted the resort directly to let them know about the lower price I was able to get if booking through the travel agency, and posed the question to the manager at resort to ask what they could do about this, so that I was more inclined to make the direct booking with them instead of with the OTA. I was then offered the rooms at the same rate of 20% less and on top they also added in a free breakfast every morning for the entirety of our stay (10 days).
- I was booking a city break over to New York with my fiance and had found a great hotel in a superb location close to some of the main shopping areas and best nightlife; this would keep my partner happy as she could 'shop till she dropped', and I could have a taste of the New York clubbing scene of which I had heard many great things. The hotel was quite pricey but certainly worth the money – I had already managed to secure a standard room at a slightly discounted rate as I had managed to catch one of their yearly promotions; however I really wanted to impress the fiance and wanted to get something a little more glamorous. So I got in touch with a manager at the hotel and started discussing their website with them, giving some ideas for how they could be capturing more business online and explained that I was both an online marketer & an avid blogger and I would always do some sort of write up of vacations and in some cases would put time into reviewing the places I stayed and attended while I was away. I also talked about my fiance and asked about local places and activities I could take her to/on so that I made the best impression. I was hoping that all this ground work I had been doing would pay off in some way or another, and to my good fortune it did! When we arrived at the hotel we were greeted by the hotel manager who gave us the great news about the upgrade we had been given on our booking. When we then made our way into the amazing suite we had been generously gifted we were again over the moon to see that they had prepared some Champagne on ice with a couple of fine Champagne glasses to get our holiday off to a start that we could not have been happier with.
So hopefully those two examples will help you with some ideas of how you will be making some savings and enjoying some brilliant holiday accommodation deals when you are planning your next break away whether it be city stay or a paradise beach getaway.
Martin Wynn
