Booking beach holidays? Do you get the best deal online or not?

Fairmont Royal Pavilion Barbados, originally uploaded by garybembridge.

I have in previous posts been talking about how people go about booking travel.

It is interesting to me that, as an Internet junkie who will do everything I possibly can online, that all my recent holidays have not been booked online! I realized that I have shifted from booking holidays online to researching them and then speaking and working through an agent to book them.

Why? I found out, by comparing with other travellers, that although I had often paid the same price (although sometimes I had actually paid more as not got the extra discounts that travel agents seem to have the flexibility to offer), that those who had used agents who knew, or had been to the places, had got them better rooms allocated or advised which was the best floor or block to be in. It also seemed that they were the ones that had been offered extras or upgrades not me who had booked online. I guess this was through the clout that travel agents have with the chains and places they book.

I live in London UK, and had heard of the company called Dialaflight.com through seeing a lot of their advertising in the travel pages of newspapers. They usually advertise cheap flights and holiday offers. I had not realized though that the way that they work is they have a massive site with is sorted by flights, car hire, holiday and packages. You can search the site to get inspiration on that dream holiday, but then you actually call and speak to an agent who checks that you get the best price for the package you want – helping find any tweaks to your plans to get that best deal. I see on the site they say a real person will answer the call within 5 seconds!

Having just come back from Barbados, and thinking of where to next, I started to check out what they had on beach holidays, beach resort holidays and even exotic beach holidays! The site is split by region and you can get lists of holidays with prices for the dates and then you can check out the hotels in detail with photos to places that range from Antigua, Borneo, Grenada, Koh Samui, Sri Lanka through to Zanzibar!

Sounds like dialaflight.com is a good place to plan and book the next dream tropical holiday or exotic beach holiday!