Flight and hotel package holidays can be great value, but not always
As a travel writer I’m seeing travel deals go by me all day every day, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that the general public doesn’t spend their days like this too. I can glance at a “deal” and see if it’s a good bargain, a great bargain, or even a ripoff at just a glance. There are plenty of examples of all of these, so I’ll try to explain what you should look for when trying to find a good deal on a flight and hotel package.
Flights are barely discounted, if at all
The first thing to realize when comparing a flight and hotel package is that the discount will come almost 100% from the hotel side of the equation. Even when you shop at one of the airlines that offers packages on their own flights, they’ll generally charge almost exactly what they would for the flight as they would to the general public at that point.
In other words, if you are seeing a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to Hawaii with 6 nights at a hotel for $900 per person, and the flight itself is $500 per person alone, then it means that the flight it still $500 and the hotel portion is being knocked down to $400/person/night for a couple. Then check the hotel alone to see what the difference is. Paying $800 per couple for 6 nights at a hotel means you are paying $125/night for the room. If the hotel alone charges, say, $150 per night, then it’s a good deal. But it’s not quite so simple.
Check comparable hotels to check actual value
Here’s where it gets tricky. Using the Hawaii deal above, let’s say you can book that same hotel yourself for $150/night, so the $125/night seems like a good deal. You have to compare that hotel to others that cost $125/night in order to really see if it’s a good deal or not.
It happens sometimes when a hotel does perhaps 80% or more of its business through packages, so it doesn’t need to rely on walk-in business or individual bookings. In this case, the hotels sometimes inflate their normal rack rate to appear to be a much more expensive hotel than they actually are.
So let’s say two identical hotels along the beach are both 90% full. One of them might have sold their rooms individually on booking sites for $150/night, while the other has sold their rooms through package deals for $125/night. The second hotel can publish a room rate of $200 to make the package tourists think they’ve gotten a better deal, while the identical hotel next door is actually making more money with a lower published room rate.
So the bottom line when checking these flight and hotel deals is to check the price of the hotel portion on its own, but then compare your package price for the hotel to other hotels at that price. You might find that there are nicer hotels with similar prices to your package hotel price.