Last year we travelled to Orlando on a package deal with Monarch, so when we decided to return this year the first place to start was to contact them again.
The quote we obtained from them was so much higher than last year and they could not accommodate our plans for 16 nights. So after looking around at other websites and being horrified at the costs, we decided to take things into our own hands.
It's not as daunting as it first appears, but does require a fair amount of time and effort - not to mention the planning.
So I thought I would post about how we went about booking our DIY holiday this year.
I started by creating a spreadsheet that broke down all the costs from last year so I could use as a basis for comparison. You don't need to go to this extreme, I just find it easier than paper and pen, and it's easy to find in future years.
More importantly, you don't want to go through all that effort and realise it would have been cheaper and easier to book a package deal!
So where to start? It turned out to be like that great imponderable - which came first the chicken or the egg? Flights or villa? I'm not sure I did it the right way as I went for the villa first.
I know, I know, I can hear you shouting already... book the flights... but given that we couldn't change the dates I'm not really sure it made any difference... There are four of us going and having to target the school summer holidays and get holiday agreed by three other organisations is a bit of a challenge.
So based on that we already had our dates sorted. Booking the villa was fairly straight forward, at least for Windsor Palms it was. The villa owners have a web site which you can use to make booking enquiries. You select the number of bedrooms you need and your dates, and this request goes to all the owners with a villa to match, for them to respond.
I guess I should probably say that I have no links with Windsor Palms and that other gated communities are available...
Why Windsor Palms again? It's just that we really loved the location. It's really close to the major attractions and there are loads of restaurants and takeaways really conveniently located... not to mention a huge Super Target.
So back to the villa hunt. Having looked at all the responses and the villas we made our choice and after contacting the owner to confirm the dates we received a deposit request via HomeAway.
So accommodation - check.
Next up was flights... after the ease of booking the villa this was a bit of a challenge. So after a bit of research I decided to use the following sites, Momondo, Adioso and KAYAK. As previously stated other... you know the rest.
As we had no flexibility on our dates, direct flights were ruled out immediately due to the cost. We also discounted everything that had more than one stop. I know each to their own but this was our choice. We then ruled out any stopover that involved flying in the wrong direction. What I mean by that is, we could fly from London to Frankfurt and then direct to Orlando. It may have been cheaper but it just feels wrong to me...
To cut a long story short, there should really be an investigation into flight bookings... You select your flights and it warns you at the beginning that there are only, let's say 6 seats left. You get all the way to the end and then it tells you there are no seats available at this price. You can have the same seats and pay another thousand pounds plus... We also had the situation that we could have three tickets but would have to pay an obscene amount of money for the final ticket which they managed to conjure up from somewhere...
Anyway we finally received our confirmation and are flying from Heathrow to Atlanta and then onto Orlando International (with the same return route), on the dates we wanted, with only a wait of 1hr 55mins to get through immigration, through security and onto our domestic flight to MCO.
Flight - check.
So there you have it... The two key items checked off our list.
Villa - check.
Flights - check.
Travel insurance - to do.
Parking at airport - to do.
Theme Park tickets - to do.
Car Hire - to do.
Memory Maker - to do.
