When booking your holidays this year, stop for a moment and ask yourself how am I going to get the best deal for my family booking? Well there are a few options open to you to try, the first being the traditional method where you go into a travel agent and browse the brochure’s before then choosing your destination and hotel. This is normally sold as a package holiday and has the security for the consumer built into it. Another way is to contact hotel’s and airlines direct either by phone or online and make your booking. This could save you money, but does it give security, what if the hotel goes out of business or the airline has problems, do you know who to contact or where to go?
Booking online does not have to involve risks, certainly you can be reckless and fall foul of unscrupulous characters who only think of themselves, but if you book as brand orientated you will not came to any problems.
Covering the above and hopefully all that explained now, what type of holiday are you wanting? There are young and lively, bed and breakfast, beach holidays, family holidays, self-catering holidays, 3, 4 or 5 star, but the new favourite is all inclusive holidays where you can get all the pre mentioned ideas built into one great holiday. The idea of all inclusive holidays is to save you money by including as much in your holiday payment upfront. ‘All’ is the key word here, going all inclusive should include, all transfers, all food, all drinks, all entertainment, well all everything.
By choosing your holidays in this fashion, will tourism have to change? Certainly it will if the tourist is not encouraged to go into the resort and spend some money. Just imagine any resort, where nighttime entertainment is very much based around the bars, clubs and restaurants, if you have all food, all entertainment and all drinks included in your holiday then there will be no-one spending money in the resort. Resort shops and supermarkets will struggle to fine business and beach bars and cafes will have no customers. This is being bandied about as sustainable tourism.
All inclusive holidays do not mean an end tourism as we know it today. Everything has a life cycle and perhaps the old resort style holiday is dead. Going all inclusive will certainly save you money, money at the expense of the resort, but we support this type of holiday for the customer and always recommend that the resort take part in activities that include the all part of the holiday. The hotel can include a night in the resort at a bar, restaurant or club as part of the ALL in their holiday. This way resorts survive in harmony with this new breed of sustainable tourism.
