It’s time to take the final two steps in planning out your family travel this year: decide and book!
Hopefully, by now you are feeling a little less overwhelmed with the choices out there and are well on your way to make a decision.
Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash
Congratulations! You’ve done your research and its time to decide where you will spend your holidays this year! Are you getting excited?
Listen to your gut, have a family meeting and make a decision. Even if the decision is not specific—for example, you choose a general area like France—you’ll have narrowed down your possibilities.
I love to write my decisions into my planner. Even if I don’t know exactly where we will go, I know the dates we’ll be going and I reserve them in my planner. Having these decisions made early in the year helps us to keep our priority to travel and spend time together as a family in the forefront – it won’t get lost in the midst of a crazy schedule. And it makes us all excited to watch our holiday time drawing nearer!
Step 6: Book
Photo by Alexa Mazzarello on Unsplash
There are a lot of ways to save money but my biggest tip is to be organized.
If you know where you want to go and have specific dates, you are ready to look out for those good deals.
For example: When flying to Australia, we always fly with Singapore Airlines and are therefore signed up to their newsletter so that we can track airfare sales. We also pop into their online booking website once in a while to monitor prices. Because I know how much I’ve budgeted for flights I am ready to book when the price is just right. For our trip in 2018, we were able to book flights for under 5000 CHF return for all 5 of us. (Normally we usually pay around 7000chf – so we were very happy).
Here are some more tips:
- Sign up for email updates from the companies you plan on using
- Use Google Flights
- Delete your cookies in your browser. Companies keep your search history.
- Research what other bloggers suggest
- Look at online booking sites and then use that as a starting point. I like to go back to the company and book with them directly after our incident last summer with eBookers. There is nothing worth saving 100 CHF if you cannot be in direct contact with the airline or hotel.
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