Booking your own package

[acepepper]

Thanks for all your help everybody. I think we've pretty much decided to go DIY, it's mainly the flights we're finding expensive. Perhaps we should leave it till later in the year as we're not going until feb 2003. In answer to Bev, we'll be going from Gatwick and we're 2 adults and three kids, although two of them are over eleven. The cheapest we've come up with so far for villa, flights and car, £2,300. Obviously passes are extra, but we pretty much know what we're going to do there.

Anyway thanks again everyone, I daresay I'll be bothering you all again soon.

 

[boff]

Dear acepepper,

£2300 sounds pretty good for what is basically 5 adults plus one child etc etc. We payed around £320 for our flights and £500 per week for the 5 bed villa and about £380 for an intermediate car so it sounds as if you've got a pretty good deal.

Have Fun

Boff

 

[acepepper]

Also to Bev, you asked for our exact dates. They will 6 feb - 20feb 2003.

Cheers.

 

[BevS97]

Hi Acepepper -

I have to agree £2300 sounds pretty good to me, that's only around £460 each.

Does that include your all-inclusive car insurance?


I haven't time to do masses of research, but just looking at some of my favorite links.

For Car Hire, I like Choice Air, but they don't have their prices online, you have to email them - so for the purposes of comparison, I've looked at Florida Car Hire http://www.floridacarhire.com/

I've assumed with 3 kids you'll need a Full Size car, although you might want a mini-van? that's £358, or £390 for additional drivers and a tank of gas.

There's about a million places you can rent a villa, I am guessing that you want something with at least 3 bedrooms? Looking at Premier Vacation rentals, you could get a 3 bedroom for $120/night - I think with a bit more research you could find something for $500 a week - I am sure I've seen them for that price on http://www.vrbo.com/ - that might even be a bit low, which makes your flight portion of the price look even better.

So,

Full Size Car - All Inclusive £358 GBP
Villa at $1000 £685 GBP

That leaves £1230 for 5 flights, or less then £250 a flight - while there are flights out there for less than that, they are hard to find, so I think you've got a pretty fair price already. Virgin's price for your dates is £323 looking at travelocity

The one thing I would say is that with the package you may not be told where the villa will be, whereas if you book your own you get to pick the exact villa.

So, in this case, I would say that the package is a pretty good price - but I haven't done extensive research

I want to emphasise that I wouldn't say DIY is always cheaper than a package- or vice versa, DIY is certainly more flexible, you can split up your stay and spend a few nights at the beach, or in a Disney hotel and the rest at a cheaper hotel or a villa,

What I do always do, is make a list of every component in Excel, so that I can be sure I am comparing like with like - packages can have lots of supplements, and with DIY it's easy to overlook certain aspects, so this way you can get a true comparison

My list looks like this:

Flights
Flight Supplements
Car Hire
Car Hire Insurance
Travel Insurance
Hotel
Under Occupancy Supplements
Disney Passes
Other Passes


Hope that helps,

Bev

 

[acepepper]

Bev,

Thanks for all that, it definately does help. I'm amazed by the amount of effort you've put into this on behalf of someone you don't know! That goes for everyone on here. It's so nice to find a group of people who seem to get so much pleasure from helping others, for absolutely no gain for themselves.

Thanks everybody.

 

[BevS97]

Your quite welcome Acepepper - and I've gained loads from the Dis - just mostly intangible stuff that you can't put a price on - like good friends, some of whom I've met in person, and 'insider tips' which have helped to improve our vacation - those things are worth 20 minutes of my time to help someone out

I remember last year, I had a really good price on a package- so good, that to this day I'm convinced it was a misprint - lots of people on here told me I would be better doing it DIY, but I kept checking the figures and the package always won, so we went with the package.

This year, we are doing it DIY - basically because I started with cheap flights and built up from there - now that I have booked everything I am very happy with my 'deal' but I think I could have probably got a package for the same or less - BUT - it wouldn't have been a villa and AKL, more likely the Holiday Inn Express or similiar.,

Bev