There’s no shortage of websites offering last minute travel deals. The idea behind these deals is that if a hotel is going to have a room empty or a flight is going to have an empty seat, it’s better for them to offer it to you at the last minute for a steep discount than it is to just let that spare capacity go to waste.
The big contradiction of last minute travel, however, is that while the places with a lot of spare capacity get cheaper, the places with very little get much more expensive. Booking Christmas flights at the last minute, for example, will never get you a good deal, simply because so many people want those flights. Instead, you will probably end up paying much more than you would have if you had booked early.
As last minute travel deals are for the least in-demand places, you can end up with places that no-one wanted for a reason. Some of the hotels on offer can’t attract any customers because they’re truly dire. The flights on offer are often in the middle of the night, at times when it’s very difficult to even get to the airport without a car because the public transport links are closed. There are all sorts of gotchas waiting with cheap last minute travel.
But it is cheap, and, as ever, that makes up for all sorts of sins. If you’re willing to be flexible about when you fly and where you go, you can still get some very good deals – you’ll probably end up with the all-round budget experience, but what do you expect? To avoid the very worst holidays, though, you should at least take the time to look up a review of the hotel you’re going to stay in before you commit to booking it, no matter how good the deal seems, to make sure that you’re not getting yourself into anything truly terrible.
International Last Minute Travel
The growth of the Internet and budget airlines has turned last-minute flights into a huge industry – you can just be surfing around, and then, right there, there’s a flight cheap enough for you to buy on impulse and go away this weekend. If you’re thinking about booking last minute flights, however, there are a few things you need to know.
An important point to make is that you can’t trust the prices you see quoted in advertising for last minute flights. This is because of the common practice of excluding booking fees, airport taxes and all sorts of other little extras from the price – these all get added on just when you’ve got your card out and you’re ready to pay, in the hope that by then you won’t want to back out.
Also, you should realise that just because a flight says it goes to a big city like London or Paris, it doesn’t mean that the airport is actually anywhere near. Budget airlines use smaller airports to avoid paying the higher airport charges at the larger ones, and these smaller airports can be as much as two hours away from the city centre by often unreliable public transport. In some cases, you can end up paying as much as you did for your plane tickets just to get a train to the place you thought was your destination.
On airlines that take bookings for seats, it is also worth noting that last minute flights will only have the seats that no-one else wanted, which usually means the ones in the middle of the row. This can be very important if you get airsick, or if you really want to sit together as a couple or family.
The biggest gotcha is that last-minute flights are always non-refundable. If you are going to buy one on impulse, make sure you can actually make it first, as there won’t be any backing out of the deal afterwards.
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