Virgin Holidays - How competitive are they?

Just had two experiences over the last three months when booking two forthcoming holidays.

The first one was with Virgin Cruises, flying UCS with a full suite on board the 15 night Panama Canal cruise with Princess Cruises. On Princess website they were charging me £11500 - Virgin originally quoted me like for like £15300 and after me sounding astounded at the difference, she went away to come back and offer me a slightly discounted £14700, still some £3000 more expensive.

For another 'hotel' only jaunt, I wanted to be quoted for 5 nights in NY Renaissance, and 5 nights in Vegas, Bellagio, Penthouse suite. VH quoted me £4932, but on checking on the individual web sites for like for like quotes, including all taxes and resort fees etc., it was still over £1000 cheaper on an exchange rate of 1.59 - a huge difference.

Are other people finding this typical, or am I just unlucky picking my destinations and types of holiday? It is making me thinking of not to bother with VH anymore and after 15 odd years of travelling with them, that seems a shame.

[Nottingham Nick]

Having taken well over 100 flights with VS, I have never used VH.

Having said that, I have found that it is wrong to generalise in any way when booking travel. You can't say, 'it is always best to book early / late' and equally you can't say - always book via xxxx, as that is the cheapest.

Things change, what is best for one route / time of year / type of holiday may not be the same next time you look.

I have always found VH very expensive, but I do know people who have had bargains with them. They also came into their own during the volcanic dust debacle - people who had booked packages were (generally) better of than those of us in the DIY brigade who had made all of our arrangements separately.

It is always a bit of a gamble - part of the extra you pay is to cover the ABTA bond, VH reps and other guarantees that are built into VH packages.

We all make our own choices at the end of the day, but it is ALWAYS advisable to shop around, so you can make a more informed choice.

Nick

Wot Nıck saıd!

Personally I've always found VH to be sıgnıfıcantly overprıced versus the Carıbbean or Mıddle East holıdays I book (thıs ıs goıng back 10 or so years now). My observatıon ıs that there are a handful of very prıce competıtıve TAs out there that you can play off agaınst one another to see who has the best deal at any gıven tıme. But for other locatıons... Could be that VH has better prıces.

On several occasions, we have found when adding in the 10% FVC discount, that VH came out cheaper, by well over £2,000. But on other occasions, it has been cheaper to book separately.

You just have to crunch the numbers and see.

We nearly always use VH, mainly because we cash miles for VH vouchers - probably not the most efficient, but better than taking flights you don't want or upgrades you don't need.
They have nearly always matched prices from the cheapest equivalent and then taken off the vouchers (£50 per 10k.) Forget upgrades and discounts, just look at the cabin/holiday you want and the bottom line. Just a couple of occasions in the last 10 years they didn't want to play, so we just voted with our feet, once independently and once to the dark side(not too bad but just not the same.....

We wanted to go to a particular hotel in Barbados in March and only Virgin Holidays and Kuoni go there. Our travel agent was convinced that VH would be the cheapest and was surprised that in fact Kuoni were by about £200(but still flying with Virgin). She thought that VH would match the price before making the booking but after a couple of hours they called back and flatly refused. We would have to book with Kuoni first, they would then match the price and we would have to cancel with Kuoni. A complete waste of time so we've stayed with Kuoni. Not good PR for VH.

We went to South Africa with VH a few years ago and they gave us a really good deal but things have changed.

Interesting thread, as I am looking at this exact situation right now.

Looking at ANU or BGI with an AI resort and UC flights and VH is coming out cheaper than nearly everywhere I have looked, including direct booking flights/hotels.

I've never booked a trip with a travel agent and have been travelling without my folks for 10 years now.

Right now for a trip I'm looking to book, VH are not particularly competitive. They cost 12% more in fact.

I need to go to Dubai on business for 4 days in January and comparing identical trips staying in the same hotel (Hilton Dubai Creek) VH is offering at £1209 whereas BA Holidays is offering it at just £1078. I hope the VH sale on boxing day brings it down or I fear I may have to go over to the dark side. v(

We have always travelled with VH.

For example this years trip to Dubai we had booked with Kuoni and economy flights with Emirates but then Kuoni wanted to changed our hotel but we didn't like what they were offering so we suggested a different one but the price was pretty shocking on a B&B basis we priced the same holiday with VH with PE flights (same dates) and it was £700 cheaper and we got free upgrade to HB. So cancelled Kuoni and booked with VH.

I don't ever feel we've paid over the odds with VH. We've shopped about for the Caribbean before but always come back to VH as they've been very competitive they price matched BA holidays as well for us once.

Ok, as ANU, BGI and DXB (3 of my favourites) were mentioned... For Dubai, I've generally found BestAtTravel to come out the best, but Letsgo2 and The Holiday Place are also in the mix. For the Caribbean, Barbados Ambassadors, TropicalSky, Southall Travel are all worth a look.

I find the trick is to identify where the best priced flights are within the period you want to travel, and then work them in terms of what they can offer around accommodation, as that's where the price differentiation really happens. And some of them really don't like being beaten on price because they have good relationships with individual resorts - you get a lot less of the VH style runaround on what you need to do before they will match or beat a quote.

As always YMMV, and this does require a bit of work, but generally for the sake of a few hours ringing around and haggling, I've managed to knock £1k or more off the 'starting' quote for my Easter holidays.

That said, there simply were no decent priced VS flights to ANU next Easter - nothing under £1100, and that's economy :0 versus this year where I got PE for £800 y) hence I'm going with the dark side. The current sale hasn't improved things there at all.

Happy hunting, and please don't get ripped off!

RC

Thanks ratechaser for that info.

I've emailed a couple of quote requests and initially the one from bestattravel is £1k cheaper but they also have a quote for accommodation which better suits us and which VH don't offer. We are taking a mate for our teenage son, so accommodation configuration is key, but price still matters as another UC bumps up the price significantly.

Hubby is going into our usual VH girl today to see if they can get us the same accommodation with a similar price.

We've booked with High Street/online TA and direct before, but never with an online third party like this, so I am a little wary but can't see why.....

Glad if I was able to help Marshy. And as long as you get an ATOL certificate, you've really got nothing to worry about. I was even able to book for Antigua next year on a credit card with no surcharge, so that's another 2% effective discount with the cashback factored in...

No credit card fee is also a big bonus.

I also want to say thanks for that info I am going to look around too as VH have come out expensive when we have been looking for next year but then we're struggling to justify a holiday when we've just renovated our kitchen and bathroom at the same time and did say holidays in 2014 will be in these rooms :0 but if they are cheaper than VH maybe I can persuade hubby ):

I found them to be around 15% more expensive when we booked our trip for April 2014 GLA to MCO for the three of us comparing flight,car, hotel holidays, Thomas cook were around £850 less like for like, however the flight is really quite poor even by charter standards so we elected to pay the extra, that difference is now growing by a further £150 if we want to still book seats even though we were told at the time of the t-90 seat booking availability.
My first impressions are not great, I was expecting so very much more.

Hmmm interesting. It seems that it is still obviously prudent to shop around and explore all options open, and sometimes VH is the better option, but perhaps more and more it may not be the first choice if their competitive edge appears to be eroding, as some of you have observed. This is the third year I have gone elsewhere, and as such I have lost my FVC status that I have held for almost 13 years (which is another shame), but overall I think I am still better off.

Thanks all, interesting....

Having tried to get VH to price match today, we are making progress. They have dropped £600 and to offer some negotiation we have added Travelbag into the equation, who are a bricks and mortar TA.

The call back will be tomorrow.

Whilst we always ask VH to price match, they usually offer a meagre halfway house and tbh it is nearly always with BA or Kuoni etc.....we normally always accept but in the past it has been 100's rather than - 1000's. If this goes ahead it will be £200 more than Bestattravel but almost £1000 less than our normal match aim.

FWIW we do normally book direct for other hols (MCO, NYC etc) but for BGI and ANU we've never found a difference worthy of the leg work, until now.

Ratechaser, we owe you.

Good to see it worked for you Marshy. Was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me 10 years back when I realised just how much price competition there was in this market.