I have recently booked ours. Holidays in the Dominican Republic, for a family of 6, and while exploring prices with the major UK travel agencies online, I was amazed at how their prices would vary, even when looking at the same hotel! We saved almost £2000 in total. Read on and I hope I can help you do the same!
Start with printed brochures
While I always book my vacations online, there’s nothing better than flipping through tour operator brochure pages to select your preferred regions and hotels, and to see what early bird discounts are available to everyone (although in practice you can expect to save even more than this by booking online).
We find the brochures invaluable in helping us decide on a punta cana hoteland it was much easier to check individual hotel facilities this way instead of looking at the details of each hotel online.
For the Dominican Republic we reviewed brochures from Thomas Cook, First Direct, Cosmos, Airtours and Thomson.
Tip: At this stage, don’t rule out any Tour Operator based on price alone!
Go online to check availability and price
I was hoping Thomas Cook or First Choice would give us the best prices. For First Choice in particular, the prime price in the brochures looked incredible. So it was a real surprise to find that when I went through the entire booking process, with all the added supplements and extras, other companies were significantly cheaper.
Other ways we kept prices low
Check children’s prices versus adult prices – We detected this anomaly weeks before it appeared on television. Some of the online discounts only relate to adult pricing, and when occupancy supplements apply (since children don’t count toward occupancy levels), you may find that children pay a higher rate than adults. For example, we found that when we quoted a room for 2 adults and 1 child, it was significantly cheaper than when we quoted for 1 adult and 2 children. It may be the case in this situation that the first child receives the highest discount and the second child is more expensive than the adult.
I don’t think this is a deliberate attempt by any tour operator to discriminate against families, just a
accidental result of the complex pricing structure of many vacations. So we ‘upgraded’ our 11 year old to adult.
Divide the reservation in two – Since we needed two rooms, we saved even more money by splitting the reservation in two.
This was because there was a booking reduction at the time we made our reservation. Of course, we had to sacrifice any chance of the rooms being adjoining, but we were happy to do so for the added discount.
Who was cheaper for our vacation in the Dominican Republic?
We are going at the end of July to the Superclub Breezes hotel in Punta Cana, and both Thomson and Airtours offered us a really good price, and we chose one of these and saved almost £2000.
It’s also worth noting that Thomson has now announced that it will not charge fuel supplements on any of its holiday packages.
However, the cheapest tour operator for you will depend on your destination and date of travel. We think you’ll do better with Thomson or Airtours for hotels in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, but we recommend that you check prices with the major tour operators when you make your reservation to ensure you benefit from current offers and discounts.