For the Luddites among you, surely the game is up. If you’re not connected to
the internet, it’s time to face the facts: you’re losing out. You’re missing
the best bargains, you’re being penalised for using that old-fashioned thing
called a phone and you’re generally having a much harder time booking your
holiday than all those flashy cyber-surfers. Or are you?
Well, not necessarily. The phone isn’t always the worst approach. On the
contrary, it can be a vicious weapon in your battle to get a hot holiday for
a song. You just need to know when to use it ... and when not to.
So, read on and we’ll tell you. Armed with our on- and offline strategies,
you’ll strike fear into the heart of the travel industry — they won’t have
any choice but to give you the deal of the century.
SHORT-HAUL FLIGHTS
Let’s not beat around the bush. No-frills airlines don’t want you wasting
their time by phoning them. They’d like you to find your flights online, pay
up and clear off.
Yes, you can book with EasyJet (www.easyjet.co.uk, 0905 821 0905) or Ryanair (www.ryanair.com
, 0871 246 0000) over the phone, but you’ll pay a premium to do so. Calls to
Ryanair’s booking line are 10p per minute — and it costs an eyewatering 65p
per minute to get through to EasyJet.
Telephone booking fees are another ploy used by airlines to shunt us online.
Flybe (0871 522 6100, www.flybe.com
) and Thomsonfly (0870 1900 737, www.thomsonfly.com
) charge £5 per person per flight for those who insist on using the phone.
And it’s not just the cheapo outfits that are at it: British Airways (0870
850 9850, www.ba.com ) now
charges £15 per passenger for phone bookings.
Don’t think you can avoid those charges by popping in to your local branch of
Thomas Cook and asking them to book on your behalf. Because most short-haul
scheduled airlines, including BA, no longer pay commission to agents, Thomas
Cook will charge you a fee to book these flights, typically £10£15pp. It’s a
different story with charters and most long-haul flights — with those, the
agent gets a cut, so you don’t need to pay it a fee.
Even if you manage to buy tickets offline, you’ll still be at a disadvantage
without internet access. Now online check-in is the norm, if you check in at
the airport, you’ll be left with the worst seats on the plane. Verdict: get
online. If you don’t have internet access, you won’t even know about the
best fares.
SHORT-HAUL HOTELS
Ten years ago, you could have walked into any high-street travel agency and
pulled a dozen city-break brochures off the racks. Now you’ll struggle to
find more than a couple of operators. Virtually the whole business has
migrated online.
Today’s Euro-jetters book their no-frills flights, then search the web for
hotel deals. There is no shortage of offers from the likes of Lastminute.
com, Expedia.co.uk and Ebookers.com. Even package stalwarts such as Thomson (www.thomsoncities.co.uk
) and Airtours (www.mytravel.com
) now sell accommodation only.
Prices vary enormously. One website may have the lowest rate at one hotel, but
the highest at another. I compared prices for a Friday and Saturday night in
late March at the Hotel Barcino, in Barcelona’s gothic quarter. The lowest
quote I found was £150, at Hotelpronto.com. The highest, for the same room
on the same dates, was £232, at Totalstay.com.
To find the best deals, visit a price-comparison website such as
Travelsupermarket.com, Traveljungle.co.uk or Hotelscomparison.com. These
aren’t booking sites; they search other websites, comparing hundreds of
prices in a matter of seconds, then present you with the best deals and
links to sites where you can book them. Don’t forget to check the hotel’s
own site, too: some have a “best price promise” and claim not to be undercut
by the agencies.
Once you’ve found the best price, you will often have the choice of completing
the booking online or by phone. That’s because the sites have finally
realised that while many of their customers are happy to look online, they
prefer to book with a live agent. Even Lastminute.com, which was once
practically impossible to contact by phone, now has a call centre (0871 222
5969); and Expedia promises that customers who phone (0871 226 0808) won’t
pay any more than those who click. Verdict: find the best deals on the web,
then you can book either on the site or on the phone. If a website doesn’t
have a phone number, treat it with caution.
LONG-HAUL FLIGHTS AND HOTELS
If you’re heading beyond Europe, it’s worth looking at airlines and
accommodation together — that’s how you’ll get the best deals. But do you
dial or log on?
The first move is always to reach for the phone and call a consolidator such
as Trailfinders (0845 054 7777), Travelbag (0800 082 5000) or Expedia (0871
226 0808). That’s because these guys have a trick up their sleeves:
inclusive tour (IT) rates. These are cheap air fares negotiated between
consolidators and airlines — so cheap, in fact, that airlines don’t want to
make them public, insisting that they are sold only if packaged with a hotel
room or hire car.
For example, if you want to fly to Bangkok in March, Trailfinders has a direct
fare from London with Thai Airways for £669. Too pricey? Well, the company
also has an IT fare — the same flight with the same carrier, plus two nights
at the three-star Bel-Aire Princess hotel, for just £499. That’s £170 less,
with a hotel thrown in — not a bad deal. IT fares tend to come and go, which
is partly why they are rarely found online — you need to phone and ask.
Even if none of their IT deals appeals, consolidators can be a good bet for
both flights and accommodation, often beating website rates. Trailfinders
and Travelbag, for instance, are sufficiently powerful to negotiate low
prices with hotels and airlines, and both employ teams of well-travelled
consultants who can point you to the best deals.
I called Trailfinders and asked a consultant to recommend a Midtown hotel in
New York for less than £150. She suggested the Jolly Hotel Madison Towers,
on Madison Avenue and 38th Street — £104 per night for a double room in May.
To be honest, I thought that sounded a bit cheap, but I was assured the
hotel gets good reviews from customers.
Naturally, I compared prices online. First, the hotel’s own website (www.jollymadison.com
) quoted £165 a night. Then I used a couple of price-comparison sites.
Travelsupermarket.com came up with a rate of £125.47, with Hotelclub.net,
while Hotelscomparison.com got it down to £119 with Superbreak (0870 701
4444, www.superbreak.com
). Still some way short of the Trailfinders price.
The same strategy applies to long-haul flights. If you’re flying to a big city
such as Hong Kong, Bangkok, Los Angeles or Sydney, the consolidators are
pretty competitive — though it’s worth hitting the net after you’ve
called for a quote, to check that you can’t improve on their offer. (Some
airlines have online “best price” promises.) You’ll certainly need a
consolidator if you want to book a multi-stop round-the-world fare. Those
are so complex that websites can’t yet cope with them. Verdict: get on the
phone to a specialist, then check its offer against online rates, just in
case.
FIVE-STAR HOTELS
You may think that luxury hotels are out of your price range, but if you know
where to look, you can bag a room for up to 70% off the published rack rate.
Many five-star hotels are surprisingly flexible on price when business is
slow, but they don’t like to advertise the deals too widely. So you need to
hone your tactics.
Phone or web? Well, it depends. For late bookings, some fairly classy hotels
offload empty rooms at websites such as Laterooms.com and Wotif.com. At the
latter, where you can book up to 28 days ahead, I found the Great Eastern
Hotel, in London, down from £370 to £118; and — for stays of two nights or
more — the Villa Montparnasse, in Paris, reduced from £242 to £82.
Laterooms, which lets you book only seven days ahead, had the five-star
Hotel Palace Berlin down from £201 to £83.
The real Alist hotels don’t discount so brazenly, but you can sometimes cut a
deal by phoning up and haggling. The Metropolitan (020 7447 1000, www.metropolitan.co.uk
), on Park Lane, offered me a double room for £253, reduced from £429. When
I cheekily asked for an upgrade, too, I was told that was “very possible”.
The Ritz in London is a harder nut to crack. I once tried to blag a cheap room
by turning up at reception. Staff looked me up and down, quoted the rack
rate, then rather sniffily showed me the door. So I had a score to settle.
I called the switchboard (020 7493 8181) and, after seven minutes on hold,
listening to plinky piano music, got a lady in reservations. “Let me see,”
she said. “I can give you a veeery special rate in a king-size superior
room.” The price was £305.50, excluding breakfast. The published rate is
£493.50, so it looked good.
But was it? I cranked up the laptop, hit Google and typed in “Ritz London”. At
the top of the results page were sponsored links to the British Hotel
Reservation Centre (BHRC) (www.bhrconline.com
), and the hotel’s own website (www.theritzlondon.com
).
The Ritz website quoted the same “special” rate, £305.50, but the BHRC had a
king-size superior for £273.85 — a not-to-be-sniffed-at saving of £31.65.
Some Ritz guests might be wary of booking with a website they’ve not heard
of, but the BHRC seems reputable. Based in London, it’s been selling hotel
rooms since 1971, it publishes a phone number (020 7592 3055) — and my call
was answered immediately, so no plinky piano music. Verdict: well, it
varies. As a rule of thumb, go online for most poshies, but get on the phone
to the elite.
TAILOR-MADE LUXURY
Luxury travel tends to be tailor-made — you won’t find exact prices in
brochures or on the operator’s website. Instead, you need to phone a
consultant and discuss your itinerary. Would you like the junior suite or
the presidential? How about a private helicopter transfer? At the end of the
chat, you’re quoted a price.
If you’re a compliant sort of customer, you’ll recite your credit-card number
without a fuss. But increasing numbers of people are shopping around,
phoning rival operators to compare the prices of luxury holidays. Many have
learnt that if they go back to the first company to say they’ve got a
cheaper quote elsewhere, the consultant will offer to match it.
I tried this myself, collecting quotes for a fortnight for two in August at
Cobblers Cove, a five-star hotel in Barbados, with BA flights. I phoned 10
operators and got 10 different prices, between £3,790 and £4,652. When I
called some of them back to point out that their rivals were cheaper,
several were prepared to drop their prices — one by a whopping £350.
Verdict: the phone wins hands down. You won’t get a sniff of these deals
online.
HIGH-STREET PACKAGES
If you want an old-fashioned package to Spain or Greece this summer, you’re
likely to find yourself dealing with one of the big operators — Thomson,
MyTravel, Thomas Cook or First Choice. Are you better off booking online, or
through a travel agent or call centre? The answer is complicated. None of
the companies likes to admit that its internet prices are lower than those
in its shops, for fear of upsetting its agents and the hundreds of thousands
of customers who still use them. But some are.
The fact is, if you phone a call centre or visit a travel agent, you may not
be offered the cheapest available price. If you go online, you will.
Thomson, Thomas Cook and First Choice say that their agents will match a
price found on their websites. But here’s the catch: to find out the lowest
price, you need to go online. The difference might be only £20 or £50, but
it’s big enough to make logging on worth your while. Verdict: hit the web to
find the lowest prices; then, if you prefer to book by phone or in person,
you can demand the best deal.
CAR HIRE
Is it cheaper to hire a car online? Some companies, such as Avis, guarantee
that callers and surfers will pay the same; others, such as Hertz, concede
that “a number of discounts or promotional products are only available to
those customers who book online”.
But all this misses the point. The key to getting good car-hire rates is
shopping around: company X might have stonking deals in Malaga in May, but
astronomical prices in Athens over August. And you’re better off doing that
on the internet, with a broker such as Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk
) or Carrentals.co.uk (0845 225 0845, www.carrentals.co.uk
). Both have efficient websites that can weed out the best deals from dozens
of suppliers, and both say their prices are at least £10 cheaper online.
Here, too, it’s worth comparing prices at Travelsupermarket.com or
Traveljungle.co.uk. Verdict: go online to scout around for the best deals.
BOATS AND TRAINS
Like the airlines, rail companies are increasingly reluctant to pick up the
phone. Eurostar (0870 518 6186, www.eurostar. com), in a bid to persuade
customers to book online, now charges a £5 fee for telephone bookings. In
France, the new low-cost, high-speed iDTGV rail service has one-way fares
from Paris to the south of France from just £13.50, but these can be booked
only on its website (www.idtgv.com
).
As for the ferries, Stena Line (0870 570 7070, www.stenaline.co.uk
) charges a £10 phone-booking fee, while Brittany Ferries (0870 536 0360,
www.brittany-ferries. co.uk) offers a discount of up to £10 if you book
online. Others, including P&O (0870 520 2020, www.poferries.com) and
Seafrance (0870 571 1711, www.seafrance.com), charge the same for phone and
web bookings. But you don’t need to be a genius to see which way this is all
going. Verdict: options for phone bookings are running out. Time to log on.
Callers beware here
EVEN IF you aren’t being charged extra to book a holiday by phone, you may
still be paying over the odds for your call. Most airlines use 0871 numbers,
costing 10p per minute at any time.
A lot of tour operators, travel agents and ferry operators use 0870 numbers.
Those cost about 7p per minute at peak times and 4p per minute after 6pm,
but can be much dearer from mobiles. The less popular 0844 numbers cost 5p
per minute at any time, while 0845 numbers cost 3p per minute peak, 1p
off-peak.
To find alternative low-rate numbers, visit Saynoto0870.com. For instance, if
you need to call the lost-property office at Gatwick airport, you can ignore
the official 0870 number and call 01293 503162 instead; and you can avoid
paying £1 per minute to call Flybe’s information line by dialling 01392
268528.
