Holiday prices in overdrive!?

[BigCheese24]

For the last few years myself, DH and DS have went for a week in Fuertaventura to the same hotel. We went October 2022, and June 2023. All inclusive. Both school holidays (here in Scotland.)

This year I'm browsing again for when we can go, to the same hotel we love so much, and blimey it's nearly double the price, no matter what month I choose!!

So I've expanded my search to other hotels, other bits of the island, and even other bits of Spain altogether! Is it just me or are holidays through the roof this year!?!

What the hell :( !!

The minority who own most of the world are absolutely content to spread their tentacles to holidays abroad!

We are getting rinsed in the U.K. from every angle!

My tip is price it up on the hotels own website (you never know!) and book flights separately

I despise the way holidays are priced now. Years ago pre internet you looked through a printed holiday brochure. The prices were the prices. There may have been a later edition of the brochure but generally what you saw in the brochure was the price you paid. Any holidays that didn't sell very well were discounted nearer the flight time and you could get some great bargains.

Fast forward 30 years and dynamic pricing has pissed all over people's attempts at joy. 😢

God I miss holiday brochures

I'd forgotten all about brochures with fixed prices on 😱 we'd go to Thomas Cook and Holiday Hypermarket and First Choice and get all the brochures and choose something, then sit with a real person and book it. God I feel old 🤣

Spain is getting more expensive partly because its government has raised the minimum wage by quite a bit more than the rate of inflation for several years in the trot. This is good for the workers but less good for people who want the cheap products of those workers' labour. But then that is is one of the fundamental contradictions of the consumer society, just as we enjoy cheap clothes or phones but then fret, not unreasonably, about the conditions under which those are made. (Those wage rises haven't hurt the Spanish economy, either. It's one of the fastest-growing in the EU.)

Another thing causing increases in the cost of holidays to desirable destinations is the rise in the spending power of people from what used to be called Eastern Europe. There are only so many hotels, and people from Czechia and Poland and Slovenia with well-paid jobs also want to stay in them, whereas before you would hardly hear any languages apart from English or German or Swedish in some resorts. Again, this is great for those people, and great for Europe as a whole, but it means scarcity of places, and that means prices are going to go up.

@CurlyhairedAssassin Those were the days. Though actually in relative terms they weren't cheap. In the 80s we would go to a different Greek island every year. Accommodation picked out of a brochure and it was often expensive and atrocious.
In real terms family holidays went down and down in price from the 90s onwards.
I'm a bit sad as I keep notes about where we went and what it cost over the years. 25 years ago a very basic apartment holiday in Greece came to £2600 for a family of 4 so I don't think things have gone up in proportion.

However dynamic pricing is ruthless.