A calendar, and one warning
Current Vacation Package Offers
No clock, no seat counter, no struck out figure. The months that genuinely cost less, and the one thing this site can tell you that others cannot: the cheap months are frequently the months when departures fall short.
What is not on this page
- A countdown clock
- none. Reload a page that carries one and the digits begin again from the top, which tells you exactly how much it meant
- Any tally of places remaining
- none. Operators do not feed this desk live availability, so a figure here would be fiction
- A figure with a line through it
- none. Somebody has to have actually sold at the higher number, routinely, over a real stretch. This desk keeps no such records
- An alert that somebody has just booked
- never
- A promotional code
- none. Codes imply the price is ours to set, and it is not
The connection nobody else prints
The months that cost less are frequently the months when small group departures do not fill.
That is not a coincidence. A shoulder date is cheaper because fewer people want it, and fewer people wanting it is exactly what a minimum-number departure cannot survive. On this site those two facts sit on the same page, because separating them is how travelers end up with a refunded tour and an unrefundable flight.
| Months | What falls | Read this twice. What it does to certainty |
|---|---|---|
| January and February | Nearly everything in Europe | Small group departures at their least likely to fill. The runs-regardless tier is where to look |
| March to early June | Southern Europe is excellent value | Improving through the period. April is still thin, late May is reliable |
| Late June to August | Nothing falls | Everything fills. Certainty at its highest and prices with it |
| September | Europe drops from the second week | Still filling. The best combination on the whole calendar |
| October into November | The strongest value anywhere on this list | Falling away by November. Check the tier before the price |
| December | Rises from mid month | The holiday fortnight fills; the first two weeks do not |
Where the low figure carries a risk
The smallest numbers on this sheet sit on shoulder dates in the bottom two tiers. On a trip like Patagonia that is a genuine chance of not going at all, and the saving is nowhere near the exposure if you have already bought a flight.
Two honest answers and no third: choose a guaranteed departure at the higher figure, or take the cheap date and wait for the decision before buying the flight.
Deadlines
Nothing here carries one set by us. Where an operator has pinned a rate to a date, the proposal names the date and names who pinned it. Decision dates are a different thing entirely and they are on the condition.