Planing for school holidays

[pauli21]

Hi! I have a question about planing trips for school holidays. And I mean long, expensive trips. When do you start planing, how many months ahead? We are planing a sailing trip this summer, but are not shore if it's to early to plan, bc you never know with small kids, are they gonna be sick or not. Do plan trips that you can get refunded or not?

I only book if I also have travel insurance in place. If we self cater I start looking around 10 months in advance, I am very fussy with my requirements for a holiday let. I book flights whenever I can find a decent deal.

For long-haul we booked around 10 months, I get a bonus in April and that helps determin how much we can spend on top of what we have saved/budget anyway.

I'm ready to book for summer 2020 just waiting for flights to be released. I booked this years holidays last year

I have annual travel insurance but otherwise I'd always get travel insurance before booking a holiday. Never had kids be ill enough to cancel a holiday, touch wood.

I book nine to ten months in advance. I book hotels with booking.com and only those with free cancellation. Have never had to cancel due to illness. I book most of my flights with cathay pacific and can usually amend or cancel for a relatively small sum. We have world wide health insurance with my husband's job, including repatriation.

I own a gite in Brittany and we have bookings for summer 2020 and one week for 2021 already! Clearly some people are a lot more organised than me.

Hi @pauli21,
It depends on time of year, whether you're planning short haul (Europe or UK) or long haul (eg Far East, USA, etc). Depending on the itinerary, you may need to plan if you want to avoid higher prices later in the season.
As @hollowvictory said, it's worth getting an annual insurance policy to cover you for any cancellations.

Thank you all so much for your help!
@christravelwizard we would like to go in august, maybe cacht some last minute prices

Last minute prices in August don't exist!

Acutally they do in the sailing world, last two years August wasn't fully booked in Croatia ( where we wanna go ) so they didn't have any other option than to lower the prices. :D

You are brave going sailing with small kids!

Personally I would try and plan a couple of years in advance as so many places are booked up, something to look forward to

But if you are flying to Croatia in school hols then what you save on the sailing at the last minute you might well spend on booking a flight late.

If we are going to go overseas outside school summer hols (Easter/half term etc) I usually try to book when flights are realised as that tends to be the beat price and we only go away if we can find a bargain.

Summer hols the earliest I’ve booked some bits of accommodation is October. This year’s I everything in did in March. A couple of the places we wanted to stay were full by then but there was plenty of other options we could use.

We tend to book flights when they're released to get the best deals.