Bargainistas - would you mind sharing your holiday booking tips?

[MrsCocoa]

Am newly separated and wanting to take DC on a decent break in August (7 days in Europe), needs to be reasonably low stress as we're all a bit frazzled but the budget is modest.

Any advice where to look for bargains - am spending hours trawling on-line but not very effectively....

Thanks in advance

How old is your DC. Maybe look into a city break or doing a couple of European cities. It's easy to travel between countries like Germany, Prague, Vienna, Budapest using trains. Check out sky scanner for cheap flights

Where do you want to fly from? What are the ages of your children, budget and what's the board and dates you're interested in?

Poland

Gdansk then nice beach (sopot)

www.holidaypirates.com is a good site to have a look at.

Thanks All - think a child friendly beach/pool needs to be involved - kids 5 and 13. Flying from Stanstead/Luton/Midlands/north of England. Possibly half board. Needs to be around £1000 all in, ideally less. Open to most things - but struggle a bit with huge high rise developments (so probably not Benidorm?).

Check flights on Skyscanner - but then double check on the airlines own site that they're not selling them cheaper (which has worked for me before). Accomadation - try Airbnb. Apartments are usually cheaper than hotels - booking.com & Expedia also will have them. Double check all accomodation on Tripadvisor. Get the largest hand luggage you can with your allowance & cut down on the number of suitcases you need to take.

Have a look at the late deals section of jet2holidays (fly from East Midlands, Leeds or Manchester), or other package holiday providers and go as late as possible in August, which is cheaper than start of school holidays.

Turkey is very cheap but a lot of people don't want to go there - I think the western beach resorts are probably low risk, but things may change and other people have different opinions.

Lots of places in Spain, Greece, Canaries or Cyprus will also be lovely - tick the 'suitable for families' filter to exclude the 'young and lively' resorts - good luck!

even last minute you may struggle to get 3 people for £1000 in august. There are some great all inclusive deals on Thomson for around £1600 (which would require hardly anything more in spending money) but these are almost exclusively to Turkey.

I took 2 of my DC interrailing - you can get a cabin to sleep 3 and pick your cities. It costs 203 euros for one adult and 2 children for 3 days' rail travel in France (in any one month). For accommodation I'd look at Air BnB - late booking is good on there as people reduce their prices as you get closer to arrival date for better accommodation so you can get something very nice quite reasonably.

Are you prepared to Eurocamp or similar? There are some good deals on if so, you just need to watch your flight prices.

Thanks everyone. It's taken three days of my life, and I'm a shade over budget, but I've booked, using Skyscanner and Trivago, local flights to a 4* half board in a nice bit of Greece.

(Didn't use them in the end. but found Olympic good for self catering Greek bargains if anyone is looking).

Excellent MrsCocoa that sounds lovely. I've never been to Greece but really fancy it, we've just got quite a long list of other places to visit in Spain too.

If you have a really good breakfast in the hotel, you might sometimes get away with not having much for lunch, before going back for dinner, to help with budgeting. sometimes we just have an ice cream for lunch on holiday between late huge breakfast and dinner.

Glad it's not just me who does that Barbara .