How to be holiday booker savvy?

[piddocktrumperiness]

Please teach me :)
I'll preface and say my hols are fixed due to school
I'd like to know:

• what times of year is best to start looking at flights? and which site- I always sky scan but am I missing others out there

-where do I start looking for accommodation? -all inclusive vs airbnb vs hotels -What should be an average price for a weekend city break say Edinburgh/Rome/Barcelona/Dublin? -What should an average price be for a week in the sun in the Med pp? I paid £600 exc food for 1 week Santorini flights with sleasyjet and v basic airbnb- Is that too much or not bad? -Should I get a card that has rewards like airmails/avios?

I'm guessing I am asking how would I know a good deal when I see one as I'd love to travel but don't want to get ripped off, and can't figure out how lots of people can afford and have already booked things for next year.

I can put £100 away a month for hols

Thank you so much

I’m no way an expert so looking forward to tips but the way I do it is to have some idea about what I want to do. Then I keep an eye on prices and so I know when there is a good deal. Since covid I’ve only booked package summer holidays so that narrows things down a bit. We find jet2 cheapest and reliable so look out for their free child places. They come and go for different locations so when one comes up for a location I’m interested in I grab it.

Similar for city breaks. I’ve always wanted to go to Rome but pre covid it was always too expensive in Easter holidays. I knew how much the flights usually costs so when this year the flights were dirt cheap I booked them.

I used my BA Amex card free companion flight and BA airmiles ( you can get them for things like Just Eat as well) to get free flights to Florence next June, so it's definitely worth looking at if BA flies anywhere decent from your local airport.

It's worth keeping an eye of Easyjet to see when they are going to release their Summer 23 flights. If you know exactly what you want and are signed up to get the emails, you can sometimes get a real bargain on flights, but you have to be prepared to get up early that day - 5am usually- and book straight away.

Your questions are a bit, how long is a piece of string. My top tip would be if you see a cheap flight to somewhere you fancy , go ahead and book it as I've ended up not doing trips through price rises because of my indecisiveness.

Following!

I follow some people on insta but they seem to thrive on hunting down point and upgrades and stuff. I just want to feel like I've got a bit of a bargain!

We lost a lot of money in 2020-21 when independently booked elements were cancelled - e.g. flight cancelled, but hotel still taking their money , pre-booked transfers & car hire refusing to refund...

We now only book packages through a specialist operator/agent, so we are fully covered for all costs. Might be a little more pricey, but worth it for the peace of mind.

Packages tend to me more expensive but the way the travel industry is at the moment I won’t book separates. Look carefully when your holiday/inset days come out as this can help shave money off. My children holidays this year start 24th Dec meaning we can have a January break.

Something that massively improved our holiday experience was spending some time after each holiday thinking about what we liked, what was meh and what we didn't like.

For us this has made us realise that a luxury 5* hotel is wasted on us - we don't care if there is a pool, spa or gym for example. It also made us realise where we like eating out which again turned out not to be the most expensive places.
However there were other things we did want to spend money on - DH finally admitted we needed a taxi from the airport for example.

After a while this turned our holiday planning into something much more successful.

In terms of city breaks - we never book all inclusive so can't advise on that. However when you start looking you quickly get an idea of whether you are looking at an AirBnB city or a hotel city - it varies so check both.

It's worth looking at bloggers for where you are planning to go as there will be people out there with specialist blogs on Rome, Greek Islands etc etc. They tend to be more useful than Tripadvisor where you have to filter out the mad reviews 'this 13th c castle didn't have aircon''best pizza ever!' as they are written by people who are genuinely obsessed with the area.

Finally I suggest looking at somewhere less popular if you are limited to school holidays. Santorini is always going to be top price. As is Barcelona. What about Northern Greece, somewhere in Eastern Europe, Northern Spain. There will still be loads to do but it will cost less and you won't be rammed in by other tourists in the same way as peak season Barcelona.

Good point @AnnaMagnani .
I used to maintain a spreadsheet where I put down total cost of each holiday and afterwards rated how enjoyable it was.
Hence we've decided skiing is not for us as a family, as even trying to do it cut price is expensive and DH doesn't really enjoy it.

Thanks, it was DH's idea! I am glad we are not the only ones with a holiday spreadsheet

I have everything down so we know what is open when - after the experience of arriving in Antwerp and everything is shut on a Monday. We did Florence this year and with Covid everything had v random opening hours, I had spend ages working out exactly what was open on what days and booking stuff in advance. I thought I'd gone nuts but it paid off on the holiday when we never queued and saw absolutely everything.

My other top tip is that some places are a lot cheaper for sightseeing than others.
For example Amsterdam/Netherlands - you could buy a museum card which then got you in to practically every museum in the country for free.
Liverpool - amazing city, only paid for one museum
Florence - you pay for every single museum and church separately. This was not a cheap holiday.

So this is worth checking out - we almost felt embarrassed by the Liverpool holiday as we had a great time and it was basically free apart from food and accommodation.