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We are possibly looking to head off on a big holiday next year, likely New Zealand as I’ve wanted to visit for years and years. It might be four weeks duration and I’ve been using some basic ChatGPT and online information to come up with an itinerary of sorts to include what we want to see and other interesting options.
Would it be easier and potentially cheaper to get all the flights travel and hotels via a specialist travel company, Trailfinders etc, or is this easily doable sat in front of my computer with Skyscanner\Air BnB etc? Someone like Trailfinders do seem/appear to know their stuff.
I don’t think we are yet at the stage of needing a group tour, and these are mighty expensive.
If you know where you want to go it's easily doable yourself
I'm just come back from a month in Indonesia and was all self-booked. One internal flight was a pain but got sorted in the end. As IHN said if you know your itinerary then self-booking is simple - just takes time and research. which I find adds to the fun/excitement. We found that self-booking allowed detours and changes to the initial plan that only appeared as the arranging of things happened.
We went to NZ last December to Jan this year. We used Trailfinders for flights, stop over hotel and first days/last days hotels in NZ. The flights were more expensive with Trailfinders than going direct but got reduced hotel rates when booked with flights so worked out the same. The big thing for us was the airline wanted payment in full when booking where as Trailfinders you can pay instalments so the extra tens of pounds was worth it. I found hotels to be way more expensive than AirBNB so went that way and we only pre booked our xmas/new year accommodation as we knew where we wanted to be. The rest we just did on the hoof via the Airbnb app. We have a rough itinerary. but it allowed us be more flexible and stay longer were we liked and vice verse. Let me know if you want our itinerary.
We did five weeks in Japan this year, it was all self booked.
We made up a spreadsheet listing all the hotels, flights and trains etc and used mainly booking dot com for lodgings.
Im not sure what, of benefit, a travel agent would add to the process and the planning was part of the fun. It also allowed us to factor in dead time to do whatever caught our fancy at the time but we had the knowledge of how all the transport portals worked etc. Obviously in a country which only has sheep in it this may not be such an issue.
I've not been for a while but NZ was one of the easiest places to just book things a day or two ahead. We had a plan for the first couple of days, a few things that we wanted to see/do but certainly not a complete itinerary. The only things we (self) booked in advance were flights hotel in Auckland and car hire.
Cheers all, food for thought there. Just been looking at flights and it’s a ruddy long way!
@leonthepro, thanks, yes, I’d be interested to see what you got up to, it might be a good start to nail some details down.
Just been looking at flights and it’s a ruddy long way!
If you've only just worked out that it is a long way, then yes, I think external help may benefit you 😂 As above, Trailfinders are excellent.
FWIW, when we did NZ, we had a brief stop-over in Singapore, then a few days in Sydney/Blue Mountains before travelling on – just to break things up a bit.
Book it yourself. Start with the big rocks (flights, car), then the stones (must stay / hard to book) and lots of the gravel (tours, restaurants) will sort itself when you’re on the ground.
From my experience whodathunk that to get from Tahiti to Chile could involve a stop in Easter Island? Going to NZ opens up a whole load of Pacific possibilities.
Book yourself.
But my tip would be book (particularly) flights and hotels direct with the carrier or hotel. Too many issues of some cheapy re-seller of tickets or bookings saving you £10 and then not having a call centre when you have an issue / delay / something the other side of the world....
What scuttler said worked for us (family of 5, Australia this summer).
We had fixed things we wanted to do, and arranged the rest around that. Some booked, some not.
Ended up doing some things we'd not thought of, and staying in some fabulous places. I would say that we went in their winter, so there was a lot of availability.
So, don't over plan. Just go with whatever level of planning you're happy with. Pick your fixed points, and improv everything in-between.
Oh, and start a thread on here for things to do, and see what happens. The tips were mostly very useful, even if a bunch of responses were about going somewhere completely different than our outline plan!
Personally get someone else who is an expert to at least book the outline stuff. I used a travel agent to get my flights to the antipodes and he got me a much better routing than i could find myself.
Book yourself.
But my tip would be book (particularly) flights and hotels direct with the carrier or hotel. Too many issues of some cheapy re-seller of tickets or bookings saving you £10 and then not having a call centre when you have an issue / delay / something the other side of the world....
Yeah flights direct 100%. Hotels maybe but if you make a booking via a third-party, ideally that is cancellable, call the hotel direct to confirm they have it.
Booking through an agent can have benefits. It takes some of the planning away from you, so for time-poor people or those who are happy with a ticklist of 'best of' places it can be exactly what they want. The booking would also be covered by The Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018.
If you have the time and enjoy planning yourselves, that is also a perfectly good option. If you buy flights with a car or hotel for part of the trip, that can also come under the package travel regs. Paying by credit card does give you Section 75 protection, even outside the UK.
Understand different airline ticket conditions of carriage and protections under UK261. If you might want domestic flights, look at multi city flights under one ticket so connections are protected and your luggage allowance carries, i e. don't book the international until you've got a rough idea of arrival and departure (and stopovers). Or a real travel agent can walk you through the options - do not use online only travel.agents to book flights! Do be aware if a travel agent books your flights you have less control until a day before you fly, you have to work through the TA if anything needs changing.
A few years ago, AirNZ gave different pricing on domestic flights on different domain names (.co.uk, .com, .co.nz). Don't know if that's atill the case. Use the local NZ website.
NZ is great is you like outdoors, but it is big and you'll only scratch the surface in 4 weeks. Don't go in UK summer and check when snow melts / trails open if you are heading south.
Oh and don't trust ChatGPT for any logistics or timings / transport. It is a language model that scrapes the internet. So it regurgitates the most likely words in a sentence. i e. it will suggest places most often written about. It cannot do maths or numerics or logic, so it makes up sentences, it can't tell you transport options or how long it takes to get from A to B. Google maps is a good starting point for that.
Blend - Trailfinders for flights (they recently navigated a way through the BA system for a long haul flight which had defeated me) and possibly a couple of hotel nights. They might also be useful for ideas if you want to break the flight half way. AirNZ used to virtually give away internal flights if you flew to/from NZ with them, but that was a while ago and probably came with business class (when it didn’t require a mortgage). Having been to NZ both over Christmas and in March I would lean towards going in the early months of the year ie later Summer NZ-wise.
Set up alerts on Google Flights for your departure dates. I got a great deal to Australia that way; it would ping me every couple of days to say prices going up or down and what they were predicted to do.
Also it found a route I'd not have considered before. If you're relatively flexible about how you get there (is you don't have a desire to stop in any one place en route), it's worth considering.
Fixed destinations (like if you want to go via Singapore for example) will cut down on the cheap flight options.
Just booked a 3 weeks trip to NZ myself and like @leonthepro we used Trailfinders for flights and a few hotels then did/are doing the rest ourselves. (also happy to share our itinerary if you DM me).
We found the flight prices Trailfinders offered were very competitive and the lack of faff was worth the small bit extra that we paid. The advice they gave on stopovers and the hotels was also really useful and worth a couple of quid. We've used a combination of AirBnB's and smaller hotels booked direct to do the rest with a bit off flex built in too. We also used them for hire cars, and again, we paid a little more but the lack of faff was worth it.
It can be quite a lot of time and effort sorting everything separately, there's potentially a lot of plates to spin (flights, accommodation, car, excursions, whatever else) and having a single point of contact for a chunk of those is useful if cost isn't your only (main?) consideration.
I also think there's some value in the reassurance of having a company behind you in case things go wrong. We had an issue on a trip to Sri Lanka that we booked through Trailfinders and they sorted it out brilliantly.
DIY via Expedia for hotels plus a few other direct bookings worked out well for me recently.
It's easy enough to do a quick comparison of booking direct Vs Expedia or other similar site - usually there's not much difference but Expedia did have the occasion deal/promo.
Flights booked direct with the airline.
Plus use Quidco for some cashback too.
For NZ you have flight options heading East or West - going via the US used to be a good bet because of increased baggage allowance but the downside was always ejtry/exit in the US. That's probably more of a consideration these days, especially if you've not been complementary to the bigliest and best leader the US has ever had (according to him anyway).
Does AirNZ offer flights via Canada? Irrespective of the Orange Shitgibbon that clearing immigration and customs faff, just to head straight out again is a massive pain.
For NZ you have flight options heading East or West - going via the US used to be a good bet because of increased baggage allowance but the downside was always ejtry/exit in the US. That's probably more of a consideration these days, especially if you've not been complementary to the bigliest and best leader the US has ever had (according to him anyway
I looked at the USA route and everyone I consulted said don't even think about it. The airports on the Easterly route, whether it's Singapore, Dubai or Abu Dhabi, are really well geared up for people passing through and using it as a stopover and so make the process as easy and slick as they can. The USA however seems to actively try to make it a pain in the backside.
There is of course a 3rd option, which is the 18 hour flight to Perth and then another 7 hours to Auckland.
Yep. We did it nearly twenty years ago, and at least on the leg out there we got to step outside the terminal, smell LA, see Mustangs, Crown Vics, and white L322s all wearing those funky California 'lipstick' plates cruise past the terminal, occasionally disgorging people. Then we had to climb the stairs to one level up to go through security to get to the gate to get back on the same plane and into the same seats. On the way back we had to wait in a queue for nearly two hours to clear immigration to *sit in a room* directly opposite our plane, to then get back on it and sit in the same seats. The orange shitgibbon notwithstanding, I'd still never transit through the States again.
We are going to NZ in January for 6 weeks. We have booked the flights direct as this was the cheapest option.
Need to start working on the itinerary once we get back from this trip.
Will be booking it ourselves then it's just us to blame if it goes wrong
FWIW since I used to stay away a lot in the UK, I've always always booked direct with hotels. The number of times I've stood at receptions and heard some story about Bookingdotyeah "bookings" not being on the hotel system is many. Oh, and the hotel is full, so you can't check in. Perhaps trying ringing the agent? Yes I know it's late at night, but meh.
I'm more interested in making the hotel stay easy, not chasing the lowest price. YMMV.
We used https://www.flightcentre.co.uk/ for flights on a complex itinerary recently and were pleased with results. Almost everything dealt with via email (I think our consultant phoned to take the payment); resulting routing was perfect; and it was cheaper than me buying direct from airline.
The orange shitgibbon notwithstanding, I'd still never transit through the States again.
FWIW, my transit through the US (in 2022) was astonishingly smooth. Like, worryingly easy. I was sure there must have been some mistake, something was about to go wrong but no!
Although as you say, I'd not remotely consider it while Trumpty Dumpty is in power.
we had to wait in a queue for nearly two hours to clear immigration to *sit in a room* directly opposite our plane, to then get back on it and sit in the same seats.
that was our experience too, in 2002, to NZ via LAX, not fun.
we did use Trailfinders for booking our flights and car hire back then, though did accommodation ourselves online, even in 2002!!
For NZ you have flight options heading East or West - going via the US used to be a good bet because of increased baggage allowance but the downside was always ejtry/exit in the US. That's probably more of a consideration these days, especially if you've not been complementary to the bigliest and best leader the US has ever had (according to him anyway).
I read the obvious typo as "eejitry... in the US"
Book it yourself. But do your research. If you're going to use Chat GPT, then also use Gemini, CoPilot or any other AI to compare. We went a couple of years ago out of Manchester, couple of days in Singapore and then down to Auckland. ........ It's worth delving into prices. We checked the flight price direct with Singapore Airlines. It was expensive but affordable. I then checked if it were possible to do a similar journey via Air New Zealand. I didn't realise at the time but they code share. For a lot less we went through Air NZ on a Singapore Airlines flight. Saved ourselves hundreds of pounds (Though the baggage allowance wasn't as good and we sat at the back of the plane).
The benefit of travel agents is that if something unexpected crops up they deal with it. Last year we went to Canada and booked through our local travel agent (Deva Travel) after trying Trailfinders who just fobbed us off with a brochure. Shortly before we travelled there was a bad fire in Jasper which closed the town and was where we were going to stay before picking up the train to Vancouver. Deva sorted out cancelling our accommodation in Jasper, booking alternative accommodation in Canmore, rebooking the train so we boarded in Edmonton and changing car hire company so we could drop off in Edmonton.
Probably could have done that all myself if I was DIY but it would have been a major ballache.
Used a local TA recently for a multi destination trip and they were price competitive with booking ourselves but we were sisnt have to do any of the leg work. I would certainly use them again and think it's worth checking them out for options & ideas.
I think everyone knows this but just in case
Start with insurance
Pay by credit card
Be wary of cheap third party flight resellers
My sister in law booked a flight to Perth. The flight number was rerouted to Darwin permanently and no one told her. She only found out as she was checking in online. Reseller blamed the airline, airline blamed the reseller. It was never fully resolved
In the 90s we cycled in NZ, undoubtedly the easiest place to travel I’ve been to.
However you bike start by deciding what you want to do. Kayak in Abel Tasmin National Park, rafting, Milford Sound boat trip, glacier hike etc. All of these were are still really clear memories 30 years later and life time high lights . For me no large town or city in NZ was memorable or special