Financial & Travel Musings

We’re in the midst of selling our French property and planning major florida vacations as a celebration of the day we receive the cheque.

The only problem is that the sale is taking so darned long that I think the kids have given up hope of ever getting to Disneyworld. Not that it’s stopped them nagging us about it, of course!

Planning has even went so far as us getting one of those US$ prepaid cards for the initial expenses whilst we’re there. At the rate the sale is progressing though it’s likely to have expired before we get there

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Actually, there’s usually only one problem with orlando vacations and that’s simply that there’s just too much choice in terms of the activities available.

It’s an unusual problem in that most holiday destinations have a fairly tight focus on activities thus if you’re at a normal beach resort place there are, by and large, just beach type activities to do. In the Orlando area though there’s no such tight focus and you’ll find everything from the beach activities, through wilderness spots to the many theme parks dotted around the area.

You might think that too much choice isn’t a problem but it unless you’re going on holiday by yourself. Try it with a family and you can easily find that everyone wants to go somewhere different. Thus, unless your vacation time and budget is unlimited you’re best to plan out where you’ll be going in advance and avoid arguments about the selection of places when you get there.

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You’d think in these fairly dire economic days that people would be keeping close track of their holiday spending but in reality that’s not always what they do.

Just to give you an idea of how insensitive people generally are to holiday pricing, consider that a couple of years ago we accidently entered our prices in euros on one system when they were being processed in pounds on that system. The effect of that was to raise our prices by around 40% for about a month before we realised our mistake. You might think that doing so would have drastically reduced the bookings but in fact they were at pretty much the same level as they’d been the year before and the only real effect was that we made more money.

Even now, when we sometimes experiment with large drops in price over periods when we’ve not too many bookings. The overall effect is barely noticeable.

So overall people aren’t really that sensitive to price changes, even now. However, what low upfront pricing does is to bring us to the top of the searches in our area so those low prices get people to look at us but they generally book a more expensive room.

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