Cheap Airfare Step 7: Vacations All Wrapped up in a Bow

Air-hotel vacation packages are a simple concept for powerful savings: you buy your airfare and lodging together at a price much lower than you could get either separately

First things first: a vacation package is not an escorted tour, where they shuttle you around Europe in a hermetically sealed bus bubble of Americanism. With a packaged vacation, your trip is entirely your own—everything expect having to book a hotel seperately, that is.

Packages tend to last for a "week" (which might be anything from four to seven nights), and include round-trip airfare, your lodgings, daily breakfast, and sometimes transfers from the airport to the hotel and back.

The biggest drawback to a vacation package is that most of the hotels they offer for you to choose tend to be the huge, cookie-cutter international chains or bland "tourist class" properties, in many cases at the edge of the city center, generally near the train station (ugh!).

Sure, the price is great for that sort of four-star hotel, booking these big ticket items all at once can be convenient, and it saves money over buying the airfare and that hotel separately. However, with a bit of research—and the tools on this site—you can find an even lower airfare and book yourself into an even cheaper, more characterful little pensione in the heart of the historic district.

(I should point out that Go-Today.com has actually started finding a few charming hotels in historic or interesting parts of town on a few of its packages—a small inn installed in an 18th-century palazzo in the heart of Rome's Trastevere district, for example. This is an encouraging development.)

Besides the companies listed below (which really do tend to be the cheapest by a long shot), another great place to look for package tours is from the "Vacations" or "Holidays" subsidiaries of the major airlines themselves, though you should know that some of the European carriers sell packages that are far from bargains.

Also note that many of these "Vacations" divisions are actually managed by outside companies—for example, NorthWest uses a firm called Worry Free Vacations; Virgin Vacations is actually back-ended (industry term) by the folks at Go-Today.com—and the packages rarely even use flights on Virgin Atlantic Airways! Most search-engine sites offer DIY packages as well, allowing you to book airfare, hotels, and rental cars.

The best vacation packagers

Go-Today.com

(www.go-today.com) - Hands-down the cheapest and best packager of air-hotel vacations out there (along with fly-drive tours and some walking and biking tours). They seem to operate under a "we will not be undersold" attitude, and their exceptionally low rates on basic, (largely) six-night "City Breaks" reflect that. One drawback: it's Net-only; you have to pay extra for customer service on the phone.

Octopus Travel

(www.octopuspackages.com) - Competes with Go-Today.com in the how-low-can-they-go package vacations game. Though the company's been around a while, this incarnation only arrived in fall of 2003 (only to be bought by Cendant—the travel giant that owns Orbitz and CheapTickets.com—a year or so later). They seem finally to have outgrown the growing pains; while prices have remained excellent, and they no longer suffer from an urge to stick you in some hotel way out on the edge of town.

Gate1 Travel

(www.gate1travel.com) - One of the consistently cheapest tour providers around. They cover the entire world and offer a range of travel "products" from air-hotel packages to escorted tours. Also, they're based in Glenside, PA, a little over a mile from where I grew up (that's just a coincidence, but I think it's cool).

France Vacations

(www.francevacations.net) - Despite the name, does pacakges to Italy, Spain, Brussels, the Netherlands, the U.K., Prague in addition to France. West Coasters listen up: this outfit often has the best prices period on packages from L.A. to France. They also have spiffy chateaux-stay packages with rental cars that can be far cheaper than you might imagine.