Florida flight prices have floored me!

[Abouttimemum]

Just priced up Florida for next year, cheapest flights are £3,500 or thereabouts for 4 adults and one child.

Care hire is £1500.

Complete with villa and tickets it’s going to be about £11k.

pre covid we probably paid about £7-8k and £500 quid ish and less each for flights.

I mean I feel like you only live once but I’ll be stopping in for a year to save ha!

Hold off for a few years. It’s so overrated when there are so many beautiful places to visit.

I'd do Disney Paris instead. Or Florida but not Orlando. Either way you would save thousands.

We're going next year for the first time in a few years.

Prices are ridiculous. Won't have change from £15k and that's staying in a moderate level hotel (we have always stayed in Deluxe hotels before for cheaper)

Flights we will book at 11 months from the day we fly home. Fingers crossed for less than £1k per person.

We don't hire a car as stay onsite at Universal and Disney as the car hire and parking costs are astronomical and we prefer to use their transport. I've often priced up villas but onsite always works out better value when you take into account the transport, extra park hours, front of line (Universal) dining credit (Disney)

Doesn't make the flights any cheaper, I know, but at least the holiday is less stressful once we're there.

This is really useful thank you.

i do appreciate what some other users are saying, and I’ve been to many, many beautiful places all over the world, but my parents really want to go with my son and they are getting on in age, so it’s really soonish or never. And after the past couple of years it’s not something I want to let pass by. But yeah still utterly eye watering!

We flew indirect via Atlanta and saved £800 each way, 2a, 1 c, 1 infant. That was with delta who basically give unlimited drinks. Think the guys in front made up some of their costs at 18, yes 18!!!!!! Drinks each!

Try and suggest somewhere more sensible that your parents would enjoy with grandchildren. My DC never went and they didn’t miss it. Plenty to see and do elsewhere. Just takes a bit of imagination.

After the current issues with holidays, the notion of cheap holidays has to be ditched. We need to pay staff better to recruit them. We have holiday companies selling dreams, not real holidays. Demand outstrips supply and the price goes up. It might mean fewer cancellations. But cheap holidays have gone for now.

You can save money on hire car by going through Turo, you can chose the specific car and depending on age of vehicle can save a lot of money!

Have you looked at Aer Lingus? They do direct from some airports but also do indirect via Dublin or New York. I found them half the price of Virgin.
We flew to Orlando with Aer Lingus in Feb. Went from Manchester to Dublin and then Dublin to Orlando. Was a longer day, but we did pre-clearance customs in Dublin which only took about 15 mins, and meant we could just walk off the plane in Orlando in the departure lounge instead of at arrivals and took the tram straight to baggage claim. Was a lot better than 2 hour queuing in customs that we did in 2019.
We then flew home direct. We would definitely do that journey again.

Also, I've read hire car prices shot up because a lot of companies had to sell off a lot of their cars.
We didn't use a car in Feb, we got a bus to Disney (Mears but wouldn't recommend them) and then used Disney transport.

Pointing out the obvious, fuel has gone up and planes use lots of it. My tiny car used to take £35 but last week cost £55.

I'm looking at a cruise and stay in Florida - the flights, 7 night cruise (ai) plus hotel (room only) was £1700 each in May. A week in Florida is plenty for parks, they are not relaxing. The hotel is on international drive with a shuttle bus

We paid similar traveling within Europe in November. Travel costs are insane right now.

We went this Easter and paid £3.5k for flights and car hire for 24 nights but we flew Heathrow to Miami, originally we wanted to fly Manchester to Orlando but it was £9k! Definitely shop around and check different airports.

I think they saw you coming re the Diet Coke prices. I live in the US and it’s $3.98 at Walmart for 6 of the 16.9 Oz bottles or 18 bottles for $10 at Safeway. I’ve never paid 5 bucks for a box of tampons either but I buy in bulk from Sam’s.

Just got back from the states and cost of wraps and other fast food items was through the roof.

I’ve just booked for two weeks in October school holidays for one adult and one teen (teacher here so can only do school hols).

I had a look at booking everything separately.

Return indirect flights from a choice of five UK airports (even including me making my own way right down to London) was at minimum 1.3k with 2 stops each way.

Rosen Inn 3 star hotel was the cheapest off-site accommodation in the middle of all the parks with decent reviews that I could find which was around 1.2k.

Then Disney and universal combo tickets were around 1.6k.

Total would have been around 4.1k.

I would still need to pay for airport transfers each way on top of that. Additionally, I was anxious about my holiday protection by booking everything separately.

Instead, I have gone with Tui package holidays. Direct flights from Manchester (which will still be a trek to get to!) to Florida Melbourne airport (with a 20kg bag each, meals and seat selection both ways) with 14 night stay at Rosen Inn hotel was 2.9k. This also includes airport transfers to/from hotel. So £400 more than had I booked everything individually but with package holiday protection, direct flights and transfers. Worth the higher peace of mind.

I looked into car hire but actually an Uber to the parks is far more cost effective as our hotel is between 5-15 mins drive from Seaworld, Universal and Disney. (The hotel runs a shuttle bus but at awkward times).

Still need to buy the combo tickets though. I don’t think those prices change much, sadly. I was looking at the Attraction Tickets website for these and need to get them by late September so we can start booking fast passes (off-site visitors can do this 30 days before arrival at the parks).

Does anyone know if there are usually sales or deals for the combo tickets between now and September?

I think we all need to ditch any ideas of anything we paid " before" , everything has rocketed in price including travel.
Plucking random prices from skyscanner is totally pointless because it's a search engine without live availability.

We have the BA Amex card and book our flights using airmiles and companion vouchers. No good for this holiday but it might be a good tip for future flights to keep the cost down (assuming you're happy using a credit card).

There's usually plenty of availability in economy, and some in business. We got 4 business class seats to Tampa (Orlando had gone) when we went to Disney World. You still have to pay the taxes though you can cancel the flights up to 24 hours before for a full refund.

@HollyDayDream fastpass doesn't exist anymore. Paid for genie+ has replaced it and that can only be bought on the day. You do need to reserve your park days ahead of time though.

Flights a year in advance are always super expensive! You need to book 3-6 months in advance.

I stand to be corrected here but I think that the conventional wisdom now is but when released (excepting those sales that BA and others do from time to time). I think it used to be the case that c.90 days was best but now the prices just go up and up. 11 months before return flight date is when I always look for scheduled flights as that's the first date they're available.

Oh thanks for this @blueyellowblack Most of my research is from pre covid times when we had originally hoped to go. Looks like I need to learn about genie plus.

I had a look at the park pass and so far our dates in October are all green. I’ll need to get a move on with tickets so I can start booking days.

We've gone for ten days instead, flying on a Monday and returning on a Thursday. Would have loved two weeks but couldn't justify to extra thousands to fly on weekends, which we'd have needed to do to fit in the dates we can go

We found it cheaper and it ended up being easier to fly out via New York with just a couple of hours stop over in New York. It ended up taking no longer than the direct Virgin flight because there were 3 hour delays in Orlando to get through immigration but we got through NY immigration very quickly. We enjoyed a nice lunch at the airport looking out over the NY Skyline and wished we had booked a proper stopover we so we could have gone and explored.

The cost of car hire is unreal at the moment. We've just had to pay £1200 for two weeks car hire in Sicily and that was for a really basic small car. We are going to try to find it cheaper nearer the date in case prices start to come down and if we do we can cancel the booking we have made.

I presume you've never been to Florida? It's a holiday of a lifetime.