When citizen crusade for a fare or hotel, they commonly hunt colse to or use a comparison site to find the best deal for their trip. Obviously, it is wise to do this but there is other way to crusade that can furnish much greater savings.
Instead of searching for the cheapest prices on the dates you want to go, try searching for the cheapest dates. By this, we do not mean hunting colse to to survey that the cheapest time to visit Ibiza is in November: it may be cheap then but it is no good at all if you want to get an August tan. You do not need to crusade for months at a time, because you can save large sums just by shifting your plans by one day.
Some of this is fairly obvious. Most citizen know that a Monday morning or Friday evening flight to Europe will be high-priced and that a small recovery could be achieved by travelling on a Tuesday or Thursday. However, hotels have the biggest price swings, and many of these are hard to predict. Many hotel chains allow you to see an availability chart for each of their hotels with the bottom rate shown for each night. Here are some figures taken two weeks in advance:
Mercure Shakespeare Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon
Monday: £118
Tuesday: £59
Wednesday: £135
Thursday: £152
Prague Hilton
Monday: Czk8,250
Tuesday: Czk4,250
Wednesday: Czk4,250
Thursday: Czk4,800
Hilton Jumeirah Beach, Dubai
Monday: Aed900
Tuesday: Aed1,250
Wednesday: Aed1,100
Thursday: Aed1,050
There is no clear logic to these patterns. In some cases, the bottom midweek rates were lower than rates at the supposedly cheap weekend. You would expect the differences in the middle of nights to increase nearer to the arrival date, as the hotels get full for some dates, but this is not all the time the case. In October, we checked the Hilton Jumeirah Beach for a week in mid-January and found rates varying from Aed1,200 to Aed1,600 over four consecutive days.
There are some fairly clear lessons here:
· Hotel rates can vary by more than airfares so it makes sense to look at hotel pricing before booking a supposedly cheap airline ticket.
· Not all hotel chains or personel hotels have availability calendars on their booking pages. Accor (Sofitel, Novotel, Ibis etc.) and Hilton have them (click on the availability box for Accor and tick "flexible date" for Hilton). If you cannot find a calendar for the hotel you want, it could be an idea to go to whether of these sites to check its pricing. While personel hotels will have their own booking patterns, it is quite likely that a busy night for the Mercure in Stratford or the Hilton in Prague will be busy at neighbouring hotels. You can also use the booking chart at www.wotif.com, which lists all hotel rates for a month at a time so you can get a clear idea of which dates are best for your destination.
· Hotels vary about how they charge for longer stays. Some hotels will naturally add up the per-night rates but, on occasions, a hotel will let you stay on an high-priced night at a lower rate as long as your stay covers other economy days. This will commonly only work if your stay begins on a cheap night. Beginning a three-night stay on one of the most high-priced nights can lead to a high overall rate.
· You will save far more by searching for the best date than you will by searching through agents or hotels of the same kind to get the best deal. The Mercure in Stratford-upon-Avon goes from £59 to £152 in just two nights. The very most you are likely to save by shopping colse to is 30%, and so it is clear that shopping by date is the most sensible approach.
The Other Way To search For The Best Deal Interested This:
