Self Serve Trip Planning

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

It has become quite popular over the past few years to book a vacation through a packaged deal which includes both fights and hotels. Typically such deals come out cheaper than booking your flight and hotels separately and they offer the convenience of a complete package deal. But the convenience of a complete package comes at the expense of flexibility. You are usually limited to specific dates and can only stay at certain hotels.

By booking online it is often possible to enjoy from both worlds and benefit from low prices while still keeping the option of choosing your own dates and hotels. With a little research you can also organize your complete itinerary including internal flights to match your schedule and at very attractive rates. For instance of you are traveling to Europe you can find some extremely cheap flights within Europe so you can enjoy more than one city during your trip.

A popular “self serve” trip that is easy to organize yourself is combining a trip to Berlin with a trip to Vienna. You can easily see both in less than one week and by booking online you can get extremely good rates on hotels in Berlin. Work with the online schedules to find a good flight before booking your hotels in Vienna for the second half of your trip. The hotel site also has a translated version of their website to make booking hotels in Berlin and hotels in Vienna easy for Europeans as well.