Financial & Travel Musings

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.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Although many of us would like to take a cruise holiday of some kind hardly anyone really puts any thought into what would make it an ideal trip for them.

That’s a shame really as there are so many cruise trips on offer these days that it’s easy to pick the “wrong” one when you could equally easily have the one that was just perfect for you. But what would make it perfect?

For me it would need to be a cruise that included stops in a lot of different places. So, no long cross Atlantic cruises for me. Instead my ideal is probably something along the lines of some of the Caribbean cruises. There you’ve got the chance to have a selection of different islands even on the shortest of trips and with something more than a couple of weeks long you’ve an enormous range of choice.

However, there’s also the business of what to do on board. It takes a while to travel between ports even in the Caribbean so you want decent accommodation, a good variety of entertainment and a wide selection of meals. After all, aside from it being a cruise the boat is going to be your holiday resort for a good part of the time too.

Finally, there’s the price or rather the value for money aspect. Sure, you can go to the five star end of things with your room, but I think it’s better to have a cruise company that allocates the largest proportion of your money to things outside the room.

Popularity: 13% [?]