Last minute holidays?


With the advent of "low cost airlines" the tendency in Europe and particularly the UK has been for travellers to organise their own holidays with the expectation of picking up last minute bargains. This of course causes problems with activity holidays where a good deal of forward planning is required. It has become standard practice for major tour operators to cancel advertised holidays if minimum booking numbers have not been reached anything up to 8 weeks before a holiday is due to start.

Small locally based companies like mountainWALKS do not suffer the same problem and in our case we guarantee once you have booked a holiday it will run even if it means we have to offer individual service. At the moment anything up to 75% of reservations are being received 21 days or less before a holiday commences.

Where problems are arising now is with flight availability and prices particularly in periods like school holidays. Airlines have reduced their schedules from the UK into Alicante with about 30% less availability from the UK than 2009 which also saw a reduced capacity from 2008 figures.

We received a flurry of last minute enquires for our guided walking holiday during the Autumn Half Term School holidays, and although we have availability, flights at affordable prices were not. Prices as high as 450 Pounds return were asked of one person wishing to travel from the North of England and in another someone wishing to travel here by train could not get tickets as there were none available through the Channel Tunnel. So it does not always pay to be late.

Certainly booking your flights earlier now means you get the best prices and often you will get early booking discounts from your destination too.

In our view the last minute tendency in organised activity holidays has the end result of reducing consumer choice. A holiday is often booked because it is available and not on merit or choice.

Last minute ! You might be too late!