You’re looking for a new holiday company to travel with. Perhaps you’re not happy with the company you’re currently using, or you fancy a change. Maybe this is your first foray into coach holidays and you don’t quite know what to expect.
You have a look through their brochure and you find that they do a wide selection of trips ranging from cheap getaways to luxury holidays. It all sounds great – but you don’t want to risk spending a lot of money straight away, because you don’t know how good the company is. You decide to book a cheap break to give them a try, because even if it’s rubbish at least you won’t have lost too much.
It makes sense, doesn’t it?
Although it makes sense why you might think this, actually the worst thing you can do is book a cheap holiday to try out a company.
To get a true and honest perspective on what you should expect from a coach company, choose a holiday that represents their typical quality and price, a holiday that is representative of their brochure programme as a whole.
While it’s attractive to think a cheap holiday is going to give you a good idea of what the company is like, this may not be the case.
If the holiday company you’re trying has a large programme of cheap holidays – for example the majority are priced between £100 and £250 – then the holiday you choose is likely to be a good reflection of the type of holiday and service you are going to get.
If, however, you’re trying a holiday company whose programme ranges from £150 budget breaks to £999 speciality tours, choosing a £150 holiday is simply not going to be representative of the service and quality they offer. Choosing a holiday in the £300 – £400 price range is going to be far more accurate than going for the cheapest option.
Our own programme of coach holidays ranges from our budget Mystery breaks, to our standard holidays and our high-end speciality tours. Our budget Mystery breaks are very popular and we do have people that book those cheap trips purely to see what our holidays are like.
We began offering mystery holidays as a way to capitalise on late availability deals from hotels, where they had space available from cancellations by other operators.
There can be good deals to be had, if a good quality hotel would rather have a full capacity at a lower rate rather than being empty.
But on the whole in this industry, as in life, you get what you pay for.
With our bargain mystery holidays, although we always strive to get the best hotel we can find, there is a budget we have to stick to and sometimes compromises have to be made.
For our main holiday brochure of named destinations, we pride ourselves on offering good quality holidays at a comfortable, well run hotels.
We put a lot of time and effort into working out our holiday itineraries so that we can include visits to stately homes, railways, museums, boat trips and other places of interest for you to discover on your holidays. And we’ve recently made changes to our coach, reducing the number of seats to make it more comfortable for our passengers on their journey.
Our over-riding belief is that we will not book a hotel for our clients that we would not be prepared to stay in ourselves. We spend time selecting the right hotels for their quality and experience in welcoming coach parties so that we can make sure our holiday programme offers excellent value and quality.
While we aim to get the best hotels we can for our budget breaks, they’re not always quite the same standard of hotels as we use in our main holiday programme, which is why we don’t recommend using these as a benchmark to judge our service.
If you want to try out our coach holidays for the first time – ask us what we’d recommend. We can talk you through the various options and help you choose the best holiday for you, not just the cheapest.
To find out more about booking an Exclusive Holiday, give us a call on 01858 469137 today!
Exclusive Holidays offers Market Harborough Coach Holidays and Kettering Coach Holidays. Pick up points throughout our local area for South Leicestershire Coach Holidays & Northamptonshire Coach Holidays. Coach Holidays depart from Kettering, Northampton, Wellingborough, Rushden, Market Harborough, Desborough, Rothwell and Lutterworth.