To feel this is a bit sneeky of the travel agent

[mayaknew]

Booked a family holiday via a popular online travel agent.

Board basis half board

I was looking through the booking to price adding extra luggage and I noticed that the information on meals was breakfast and lunch !!

I've never in my life heard of half board being lunch! I've looked it up and it apparently can be lunch but never would I have expected that. It didn't specify this at time of booking and I certainly wouldn't have paid what I paid for lunches.

I feel a bit ripped off if I'm honest. This is our first holiday in 9 years.

I have always understood half board to be breakfast and dinner, never lunch. Full board is all three meals.

pixie5121 They are an online travel agent, not one on a British high street. They cater to all sorts of nationalities. The info on board type is available. OP didn't bother to check and just made an assumption and now somehow the OTA is being 'sneaky'? It's just not true that half board is always dinner. It depends. And this has been the case for years. I remember getting lunch for half board in Fuerteventura in about 2006.

How do you know this? Most online travel agents have different websites for each customer base I thought. Mainly for language reasons but also because most businesses know that different nationalities respond to different things and have different preferences. A lot of hotels abroad are very popular with Germans for instance.

I personally prefer to self cater and use AirBnB or similar, and book my own, but if using a travel agent, I'd expect them to go to the effort of clarifying these things in return for the commission they will be charging over the base price.

Half board typically means breakfast and evening meal. Lunches you sort yourself because you're out and about anyway.

I would have assumed HB meant dinner as well.
Check on the hotels own website, or see what it says on Tripadvisor.

Because they usually offer whatever the default option for the hotel is. Hotels catering for mainly British and other northern European tourists will often have dinner as the default option, but others won't. It's generally up to the hotel, not the travel agent.

You're talking about the travel agent as if it's a human providing a face-to-face service to customers. They are just websites. They scrape data from the hotel website and sell you the rooms, which come with default board options. They are not doing any more than that.

I have never heard that.

The restaurants I have been to where we have sat outside with a cold drink are never full during the day time but in the evening especially after 9pm they are buzzing. We were leaving one restaurant at about 10.45pm and people were coming in with pushchairs and children for their meal.

We like Spain because it does seem to stay open later

I love France and many moons ago spent several weeks getting better and better at the language. But by 9pm it is shut and at that time I am just starting to go out.

No. Half Board is always breakfast and dinner.

Hi thanks for all the replies everyone.

Its Costa del sol and on the beach.

I'm in contact with their customer service via twitter DM. Its the only way I could get in contact with them.

It's worth asking if they'll swap but bear in mind lunches are traditionally bigger than dinners in Spain. If it's a traditional type hotel catering for locals, lunch might actually be the far better deal, and not sandwiches and salads as it would be here.

Not always. I haven’t had a package holiday for some years but always had the choice of lunch or dinner, and always chose the dinner as a scheduled lunch is inconvenient on holiday.

OP have you tried contacting the hotel or checking their website?
They may be perfectly happy to do dinner rather than lunch if you ask.

Or tell us the hotel and we can check.
OTB aren't jet2 or Tui I think you'll be lucky to get any response from them

From what I’ve seen on social media recently about On The Beach, you’d be much better contacting the hotel directly with questions.

It's pretty common for the big online travel agent platforms to have differences, i.e. you may not always get the same room size/meal deal if comparing the same holiday on different platforms. You really have to have your wits about you and check the detail. It's how they can make their "deal" look better than the competition, i.e. you don't get exactly the same.

We've learned to check the detail as there are often differences, i.e. for one hotel we were looking at booking, one online platform was offering a much lower price than another, but when we checked the detail, the room was smaller, there was no mini bar and only a shower instead of bath/shower. Even worse when the higher priced platform says things like "all rooms with Air Con", "all rooms with a balcony", etc., that give you the impression all rooms in the hotel have those features, but in reality, it's just the rooms on that platform that have them!

In "ye olde days", the old fashioned package holiday firms used to do the same in that the hotels allocated better rooms to the more expensive package firms like Hayes & Jarvis and cheaper rooms to the likes of Airtours.

Agree. I used to write the content for travel brochures for years and I’ve never come across this.

It is possibly either lunch or dinner. We have been on a few where you can choose. It's great because if you fancy a lazy day by the pool you can have lunch at the hotel that day. It also gives you the option of going out in the evening without feeling like you should eat at the hotel because you have already paid. Some Neilson holidays even do a mix of say 3 lunches and 4 dinners.

I would have assumed the same, people who will be out and about during the day go for half board, that's the point of it, I thought.

We've done it, had a big late breakfast in the bowl and then a snack while out and about at lunchtime and an earlier evening meal back at the hotel.

I'd never book breakfast and lunch as half board, I'd do B&B rather than breakfast and lunch.

@pixie5121 I'm not British or living in Britain and yes I'd still assume that the type of hotel that the Op is talking about would be breakfast and dinner. My parents have often gone half board and they are always hotels in the main tourist areas catering for Northern Europeans and lots of Brits and Irish. I think it's fairly obvious this is the type of hotel the OP means.

For half board you should be able to choose each day between lunch and dinner. That’s what has happened to us in the past anyway 🤷🏻‍♀️

I've never heard of this, I've done half board many times, and it's always breakfast and evening meal.

Only ever get breakfast as part of m holiday is going out to restaurants, couldn’t imagine eating in the same place every night.

We always went half board & it meant ‘bed, breakfast & evening meal’ but every hotel we’ve stayed in would swap the evening meal for lunch if we wanted to. As previously suggested, I would contact the hotel & ask if you can swap lunch for dinner.

Usually breakfast and dinner whenever we’ve looked

I’d assume breakfast and dinner. I’ve never heard of lunch being included in half board .

We always do half board when we go to Disney Paris. We have breakfast and then get the choice of having either dinner or tea. We switch it up depending on what we are up to.