WHY Did My Price Go Up?

So you’ve chosen the dates of your vacation.  You’ve called us and priced what you’re considering.  Great…you’re closing in on finalizing your plans.  BUT, maybe you have to wait for your next paycheck, or you have to wait to make sure your vacation time will be approved.  Maybe you have to wait for your traveling companion to confirm that they’re able to go with you.

Whatever the reason, you can’t confirm your vacation.

Then, finally, the last detail is in place.  You’re ready to confirm.  So you call us and, HORRORS, your trip has gone up in price.

What happened?

The simple fact is that prices just aren’t guaranteed until deposit is made on a reservation.  Airfare tends to be the most volatile, but hotel prices can certainly vary as well.  Not only can things sell out, but even if the hotel or flight is still available the prices can change at any time.

So, if you can’t quite confirm your trip yet, keep in mind that waiting is like playing the stock market.  You could win..but you could also lose.

WHY Is My Trip So Expensive?

Once people find our you’re a travel agent, two questions are sure to come up.  The first one is “Where is your favorite place to travel?”  The second one is “How do I get a great deal on a trip?”

The answer to the second question is “Be willing to do what other don’t want to do.”  What I mean by that is that to get a good price, you need to travel at the times when others don’t.

What this means is that (as an extreme example), if you go to Walt Disney World at Christmas time, you are going to pay top dollar (not to mention that it is going to be more crowded and harder to get around than at any other time).

Basically, if the dates you’re looking at are more expensive than other dates, it’s because either more people have actually booked for those dates or the airline / hotel / tour operator believe that more people WILL book on those dates.

It might not be a major holiday, it may just be that some random group is booking on the particular day that you’re considering.

Oh, and the answer to the first question?  Home, at the end of every trip.

Why Can’t You Guarantee (a Certain Bed Size, a Certain Location, Connecting Rooms)?

You are uniquely you.  You have likes, dislikes and needs.  This uniqueness extends to your vacation.  You want specific things.  Perhaps you need a king sized bed, perhaps you prefer two double beds.  Maybe being near the restaurants is important to you, or maybe you prefer being close to the ocean.

When you imagine your vacation in your mind, the picture contains the perfect fulfillment of each of these requests.  What is so hard about making that reality match that picture?

Each hotel designates categories of rooms.  For the purpose of this discussion, let’s say that our hotel has roomtypes called “Garden View”, “Ocean View”, and “Ocean Front”.  Very simple, just three room types.

So, when someone buys a room at our fictional hotel, it will be one of these three types of rooms.  Within each roomtype, there are some with 2 double beds and some with king beds.  AND there are a few pairs of rooms in each roomtype that have a door connecting two rooms.  Our hotel is pretty well equipped to handle any sort of request situation.

Now, let’s say that we have a few nights where the hotel is just about full.  We have guests in every room.  Every day we have people checking in and checking out.

On this particular day we have 5 rooms checking out and 5 rooms checking in.  The 5 rooms checking in each have specific requests.  Two of them want to be adjoined to each other.  Two more want king beds because it is their honeymoon.  The other one wants to be near the pool.

Great.  The only problem is that the 5 rooms checking out contain no adjoining rooms.  They also all have double beds.  AND, none of them are near the pool.  None of the rooms we have becoming available meet the requests of the people checking in.  They’re the only rooms we have coming open!

Now, this example is simplified for the purposes of this blog post.  The reality of people checking in and out of hotels is a much more intense logic puzzle each and every day.  If you choose a great hotel, the people there very much want to give you exactly what you want.  They do, however, have to work within the limits of what is available to them to give.

Some hotels do designate specific bedding in roomtypes.  Also, some hotels sell connecting rooms as a specific roomtypes.  (And charge quite a premium too!)  If your request is something that will really make or break your vacation, you should be sure to tell your agent during the booking process so that our suggestions will only be hotels where we are able to guarantee such a request.  You should also be ready to pay what it will take to stay at a hotel that will fulfill what you’re wanting.

Isn’t that part of life though?  Balancing what we want with the resources we have available to us?

WHY Is My Price Different?

The short answer is: prices constantly change.

Now for the longer answer.

The biggest cause of price volatility is airfare.  Airlines have large departments completely dedicated to seat inventory control.  They are charged with the task of selling every airline seat on every plane, at the highest possible price.  In order to do this, these wizards designate what I look at as “buckets” of seats on each flight.  Each “bucket” is a different price.  The lowest price seats, of course, sell first.  Each “bucket” also has unique rules that apply to that particular price.

When your friend booked that package, they may have taken the last seats in one lower priced bucket, leaving higher priced seats for you.

Those same wizards of airline pricing are constantly changing fares. They can completely change the fare structure without notice and at any time.  When your friend booked, one fare structure may have been in place, then an altogether different one was filed by the time you booked, even if your friend booked just a few minutes before.

The hotel in your package could also have caused the price difference.  While less volatile than airline seats, hotel rates are subject to change at any time as well.  Not only that, but hotels have different types of rooms, each with a different price.  If your friend booked the last standard room, and you are left with the higher priced junior suite (for example), that could account for the price difference as well.

Other, optional, items could also cause a price difference.  Upgraded airport transfers, travel insurance and optional excursions are just three possibilities.

Besides all of that, are you sure that your friend booked the very same package?  You’d be surprised how often we get this question when the two packages in question are for different numbers of nights, from different cities, even at different hotels.

WHY Do You Say the Hotel is Sold Out? (It’s available on their website!)

This is a first in a series of “WHY” posts.  Travel is a complicated subject, so we spend a lot of our time explaining things to people.  This series will attempt to explain some of the most puzzling subjects we tackle.

To start with, we’ll start with the question, “Why are you telling me my hotel is sold out when I can see on their website that they are showing availability?”

Good question, and thank you for it.

Filling up a hotel each and every night is quite the daunting task.  Each night, every empty hotel room is gone forever.  The hotel can never go back and make up that revenue.  So, the hotel wants very badly to come as close as possible to filling up every room, every night.  In fact, many nights they actually oversell the hotel (just like airlines do to flights). They know that there will be some “shrinkage” of cancellations and no shows and they still want to have a full hotel.

Most hoteliers work with a variety of wholesalers and also take direct bookings.  Each wholesaler/tour operator the hotelier works with represents a large number of room nights.  So, think of these tour operators (and the major travel agencies who work with them) as BIG “customers” of the hotel.  These agencies and tour operators sell hundreds and thousands of “room nights” for the hotel.  The hotel couldn’t be successful without these room nights.

As you can imagine, the relationships between the hotels, the tour operators and the major travel agencies are very important.  From the hotel’s perspective, they need the tour operators and travel agencies to fill their hotels.  From the perspective of the tour operators and travel agencies, they need the hotel to have a product to sell and they also need the relationship with the hotel so that they can be sure that their clients will be well cared for and have a great experience.

These relationships are the key to the answer to this question.

Hotels are going to be really sure to cut off availability to the tour wholesalers / travel agencies when the hotel is very nearly or completely full.  On their own website, they will keep selling rooms.

In the hotel world there is a thing called “walking” a guest.  It means that when a guest checks in and the hotel is full, the hotel will provide accommodations at another hotel until the original hotel has space (maybe the next day when people check out).  This means that you could make your confirmed reservation at one hotel and when you arrive they don’t have a room for you and you end up at another hotel.

When the hotel has to decide who to “walk”, who do you think they will choose?  Do you think they will choose the guest who made their reservation through the tour operator or travel agency who represents hundreds or thousands of room nights per year, without whom they would have many many empty rooms?  Or, do you think they’re going to walk the guest who booked themselves on the hotel’s own website and has very little recourse?

So, yes, you may see that the hotel is still taking bookings for a particular night when we say the hotel is full.  Do you really want to take that chance?