Budget breaks

Posted by Anita Brook at 12:26 on 16 Jun 2010

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Booking a holiday used to involve visiting your local travel agent, looking through a glossy brochure and then choosing a package, with flights, hotels and even luminous coloured drinks included. While these last bastions of customer interaction still exist, most of us now use the Internet to trawl through potential vacation destinations and, according to a recent survey by Top CashBack, not only are we turning our backs on the high street, but also the package holiday.

Of those surveyed, less than 10% would use a travel agent, with almost 80% booking their holiday themselves as separate components online. The reason being, that for astute shoppers, some serious savings can be made by putting together your own package. Here's my guide to going away for less this summer.

Cash back
Top CashBack, is just one example of a number of sites that give cash back for buying stuff - including flights, hotels and many of the other components you need to have a great holiday. A marvellous proposition for the consumer, retailers pay a referral commission for any purchase made on the cash back website, all, or some of which is then passed back to the customer.

Let's go to the zoo
Delivering amazing deals straight to your in-box is Travel Zoo. Packages still feature, but flights, train tickets and mini-breaks in luxury hotels are also the order of the day. Every week Travel Zoo sends out an e-newsletter, with its top 20 deals, available on a first come, first serve basis.

Holiday for free
For a truly budget trip, it is possible to get away for practically nothing. Work Away, offers free, or heavily discounted, trips abroad. There's no such thing as a free lunch however - food and accommodation is ‘paid for' in exchange for a few hours work. Current examples on the site include, helping out at an eco-friendly retreat in Costa Rica, or cooking and cleaning at holiday lodges in Austria.

With all these fantastic options available thanks to our good friend the internet, trips abroad have changed and if travel agents and the package holiday want to survive, they need to get with the times. Think outside the box this summer and find yourself a low-cost holiday of a lifetime.

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