UK and Europe Cheap Tickets

Late summer holidays are really getting cheap

If you were lucky enough to be able to take a holiday or break sometime other than July or August, then you will be happy to know that prices are really low once again: www.greatlatedeals.co.uk

Only suckers take their main yearly trip in August in particular, because prices are at their absolute maximum, and if you don’t book a year in advance you don’t get the best places anyway. Now you can book nearly anywhere in Spain, Turkey, or the Caribbean, and you’ll spend maybe half as much once you get there as you would last month.

Luxury hotels have never been so affordable

Well, that might be an exaggeration, but there are some really great deals you should consider if you are looking for an upcoming holiday: Latest deals on lastminute.com

Each travel company seems to approach this from a different angle, and lastminute.com chooses to offer 5-star hotels in the best destinations for 3-star prices. That really works for me, especially since it means you can book a 5-star resort in Spain including airfare from London starting at £329 per person, or a similar resort on Cyprus starting for only £10 more. Normally when I walk into any 5-star resort anywhere they alert security pretty much right away, so it would be great to actually have a room at one of them. Take that, overzealous security people!

Thomas Cook has great deals on short breaks

We all know Thomas Cook so well that it’s hard to believe he’s become so modest lately, but he actually has better deals than he admits to here: Flight and Hotel breaks starting from £129 only at thomascook.com

See, it says starting at £129, but once you click on this link you’ll see that they really start at £111! Specifically, you can book a 2-night trip to Prague from London for that price, as long as you leave on 15 September. You can go to Paris starting at £136 and Dublin starting at £146, but really Prague is your best bet because once the hotel is paid for everything there is quite cheap and really fun. You can get an excellent pint of beer there for like 50p, so if you are planning a weekend bender it’s an ideal place to do it.

Last minute flights can be very cheap

Here’s a new deal I’ve come across, and I’m very happy about this particular one. BMI, the low budget carrier, is now offering special last minute deals starting at £28 each way: bmi Special Offers.
View our special offers now. Low fares on many routes worldwide. Book now for competitive fares.

You are probably already well aware of BMI and their low fares, so all you need to know now is that by booking a flight that leaves in the next couple of weeks you can save even more money. Here’s one from Manchester to Chicago for £380 return. Or how about Heathrow to Amsterdam for £56 one way? You have to be crafty to get deals like this, but it’s worth a try if you are thinking about booking something soon.

Themed holidays are more interesting than just sitting on a beach

So many companies specialize in combining a cheap beach resort with a flight and calling it a package, but Isango goes a bit further and we like it: Looking for Culture & Sightseeing? Browse thousands of cultural tours and experiences around the globe and book online with isango!

Once you get to their site you’ll see they have quite a few options, one of which is Culture & Sightseeing. From there they offer trips to Edinburgh that include a Whiskey Tour or DaVinci Code sights plus several others. If you are in the mood to sit on a beach in Turkey, then be my guest, but trips like this will stay with you much longer since one day on the beach is almost indistinguishable from the next.

Thought a villa holiday was too dear? Maybe not!

Whenever I hear someone tell me they are “renting a villa” on their holiday, I assume they are rich or lying, but after seeing these deals I might have been wrong about that: Cheap Villa Holidays with Thomson

You can rent a villa through these people with prices starting at £115 per week. I’m guessing that one doesn’t have a big private pool overlooking the ocean, but that’s so cheap that as long as it has a roof of some kind it’s a good deal. You can’t even stay at one of the hostels in Paris for that price!

Luxury holidays are cheap at the last minute

Every once in a while I check out the deals on lastminute.com to see if things are getting more or less expensive, and perhaps it’s because the summer season is almost over, but the deals are looking really good at the moment: Latest deals on lastminute.com

The thing about these deals isn’t so much that they are the cheapest flight and hotel combinations you can find, it’s more that they have 5-star resorts for prices you’d expect to pay for 3-star resorts. For example, you can spend a week in Turkey at a 5-star place for a week starting at £359 per person, including airfare. You’d expect to pay almost that much for the flight itself, so to be able to spend a week at a luxurious resort for cheap because you waited until two weeks before to book, is a great bonus.

Save up to 70% on flights with these people

Do you know what I like more than saving up to 60%? Yes, the answer is saving up to 70%, which is why it’s always a treat to check for flights on the Airline Network: Save up to 70% off flights with Airline Network

To be perfectly honest, most of the prices I’m seeing don’t really appear to be 70% off, although they are very good deals. I think perhaps they came up with that number based on winter specials compared to peak summer prices. Nevertheless, they do offer some very competitive prices on flights, and I know because I do this kind of stuff all day every day. Finding the good deals is my job, not just a hobby!

Special offers from Air France are very helpful

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I like Air France because their prices are generally good, and their food tends to be much better than any other airline. So I’ve been scanning their “special offers” and I am seeing some really good deals at the moment: Air France special offers

They have some really cheap flights to the USA right now, and the exchange rate still makes the pound really valuable, so once you get there you can live almost like a king for what you’d spend on a “budget” trip to anywhere in the euro zone. But not everyone has enough time to fly all the way across the Atlantic, so their weekend breaks are good deals as well.

Free hotel nights are yours with British Airways Holidays

With airfares being higher than normal you might think getting good deals on holiday packages would be difficult, but British Airways is here to help with free hotel nights if you book through them: Special Offer hotels from British Airways Holidays

Since they can’t do anything about the flight prices it’s great that they are able to negotiate free hotel nights as part of your trip in order to keep the whole thing affordable. This is a tough summer for many travel businesses, so perhaps these hotels just have too many empty rooms and yet they don’t want to slash the price per night?