Booking a holiday years ago vs now

[Bananamilkshakewirthcream]

I hope no one minds me posting this here.

I was thinking about the way we book holidays these days. I do a lot of research, Google the area/resort, lots of photos of the hotel, read reviews, I even watch YouTube videos of the hotel and area to get a better feel for the place.

Years ago it was a case of just choosing from a brochure or in a travel agent. My first abroad holiday with dh was only a few hundred pounds we simply booked last minute in the travel agent , only looked at a couple of photos.

Can't imagine doing that now.

Also miss the fixed pricing of holidays and fares. There may have been sales and special offers at times, but not the horror of dynamic pricing, where prices change minute by minute. I don't want to try and scramble for a bargain which I probably won't get, I just want to see clearly what the price so I can decide without feeling rushed.

And looking at the back of the brochure for the different flight times and airports to see what the supplements were and where you could fly from

When I was a child /teenager we couldn't afford to go abroad on family holidays but we would go to somewhere in the UK self catering. Often it was booked from a 2 line advert in The Lady magazine - something like "Devon holiday cottage, sleeps 4, 400m to the beach from £X pw"! It was quite exciting if it was booked from a brochure - some had drawings with the blurb and occasionally a photo but only one per cottage!

You knew the price from a brochure. Could pick the first day of low season and cross fingers!

Ah I was a travel agent in the 80s/early 90s and it was fabulous!

later in early 2000s soon to be DH & I went to Skiathos on a £99 two week village rooms holiday - was fantastic.

I too miss those days!

I would love to book a holiday and not read a review. They are so mixed and personal opinions might not be the same as mine. Just dont have the guts to do it.

When we were kids we'd go to holiday cottages in the UK. My parents were on a really tight budget so we normally had to go to the cheapest ones. I'm pretty sure most of them would never pass any sort of tourist board standards now. We always wanted the ones that listed a video player but they were always out of budget! 🤣

I remember booking flights to go and visit a friend who was living in Austria 20 years ago. It was my first time flying by myself. I went to STA travel near my uni and they booked me onto Lufthansa flights with a change in Frankfurt.
Now I can't even imagine a) not booking Europe flights myself and b) not using a budget airline!

We used to have a book called the OHRG which was like a really early TripAdvisor but written by one bloke in disguise lol

It was used on a discretionary basis only 😂

I agree it was easier. I feel out of my depth trying to be a travel agent.
We still get brochures but they don't have prices in them anymore.
So many companies have gone/merged now that we used regularly Airtours, Funway, Ocean village, Thomson.

Ha, was just talking to DH and my mum about this yesterday! DH and I have spent the whole weekend trying to book our summer holiday - hours of trawling through Tripadvisor, AirBNB, and numerous sites to get flights.
Nearly fell out

posted too soon!
We nearly fell out over it all, as got totally bogged down trying to check out all the reviews, which airline was cheapest, how long it takes to get from each airport to each resort, arguing over the price per night, etc
Its been years since I did a package holiday, so decided to check them out on Jet2. Nearly fell off my chair when the cheapest option came up as £6.5k for 10 days in Mallorca!!

I remember my first holiday abroad by myself with friends when I was 17 - 2 weeks in Italy for £280! My Nana told me I had more money than sense for paying that much! 😀

I used to book B&Bs by rocking up to a town, going to the tourist information and getting them to call one for me for that night! And it worked. I never failed to find a place to stay.

Also teletext.

That phone call from the travel agent to say your tickets have arrived ......😎

I remember arriving into cities tourist info had lists of places with availability that night also people at train stations with signs.
The adventure and freedom arriving in a place not knowing what to do where to stay was great.
It lot more work now looking up website, review, maps, compare prices, verify booking, miss emails.....
Do know people who holiday this time year Spain drive about pick town to stay and get accommodation that afternoon but usually needs to be booked online.

Yes, I loved that sense of adventure that came with not knowing where you'd be staying.

Nowadays, I do similar with my campervan, but it's not quite the same.

Ceefax- last minute weeks holiday in an unknown shit hole for a week aged 18.
But still...
Bliss.

This thread made me remember my one and only teletext holiday in the late 90s. It was to Alcudia and it was such a shit hotel even the taxi driver asked us a few times if that was where we were going. The food was inedible. Honestly rank. Mystery meat swimming in some kind of gravy/fat. We'd booked half board and really regretted it. We ended up spending even more money on food out. The organised coach trips were with non-British people (quite a few po-faced Germans who slow-clapped us when we were late getting on the bus after one stop after misunderstanding the rep's instructions. He'd done them mostly in German with just the odd very short sentence in English for our benefit). It was just a lame holiday but we enjoyed being together, DH and me.

It was really hard to do your research pre-internet and you never really knew what you were going to get. Brochures made places look really good.

In contrast this year we went on a California road trip. I booked it all myself with lots of internet research including searching on forums. (I actually got the idea for the trip from a "longhaul holiday with teens" thread on here.) I spent months planning it so that it was almost like my hobby for a while! Was part of the whole experience. Anyway.....we had the best holiday of our lives, and everything was perfect. The internet made it really easy to know what I was actually booking, and what I should expect. Plus travel forums gave lots of little tips that I wouldn't have known about otherwise.

Planning a holiday is MUCH better now.

Just remembered when we used to go to the South of France in the 80s by car. My dad used to order a full route from the AA travel shop in town which was printed on a dot matrix printer on one of those folding zig zag printer paper pads (no idea what they were called). That's hilarious when I think of it now, it was a massive tome! My sister and I used to take it in turns to read out the bits of info about each little town we passed. I remember we had arguments about which Porte to take off the Peripherique in Paris. My mum flapping the dot matrix papers around the car frantically trying to figure out where we were up to. 😆

Dad used to make me check into our hotels on the way with my schoolgirl French. I remember the little Gem French dictionary very well!

I also remember knowing you were getting near Dover because you saw cars with foreign number plates on and it seemed very exotic. Makes me laugh cos we still live in the same part of the UK as we did then but see foreign number plates quite often!

My very first abroad holiday was 2 weeks in Lloret de Mar in 1979 with a girl I didn't know very well. It was supposed to be a group of us but gradually everyone else dropped out and I felt I couldn't let her down even though I had met my (now) DH a few weeks before and would rather have gone with him. Just looked at some tiny photos in the brochure and that was that. The hotel was miles away from all the fun, the nearest beach was just pebbles and she took up with a local bar manager on the first night and I barely saw her again 'til we went home.
I spend hours now checking reviews and room tips and street view.
I don't really know why I go, I never really enjoy it, being fat and ginger😃 I would rather be by myself in my garden.

Anytime we relied on old school agents and brochures, it was not what we wanted & were upsold on things we didn't need it want. I felt we had little control over our trip.

We enjoy doing the online trawl. DH & I spend hours checking out loose itineraries, best locations to stay, lesser known places/attractions to visit, those to avoid, how to save money, food, and travelling with kids etc. We like a little adventure and a lot of freedom.

Yes, that's what I miss, a lot easier when it is all written down in front of you rather than all the tooing and froing on websites, Tui is the worst for that.

Some of you have your rose-tinted specs on. You never quite knew if your hotel was going to be great or a total shit-hole! Also you usually only had the vaguest of ideas about where you were actually going, Its far better now that you can look up reviews and see if the place you are going is somewhere that you will actually like or not.

I used to love going through holiday brochures and picking something out, but I mush prefer doing a bit of googling and picking out a trip I know I'm going to love.

I do very little research for holidays as I'm not that fussy. Last summer we woke up on the first day of our annual leave, looked up where had the cheapest flights (Rome) booked them, got there that evening and found somewhere to stay on booking.com.

I enjoy investigating. But the old ways were so much better.