Personally Chosen

Probably the worst aspect of relocating is actually doing the relocation itself ie getting yourself and your stuff from where it is now to where it needs to be.

There’s no really easy way out of this as the house removals company simply can’t do all the work for you and what the various companies offer is basically along a range from complete DIY through to them doing nearly all of it. Where you choose along that continuum is down to your wants and resources although do bear in mind that the complete DIY approach isn’t necessarily cheaper than some of the options that provide you with a lot of assistance.

At the extreme DIY end you can potentially move all the stuff yourself using only your own transport. That’s an option that’s really only viable for moves involving a fairly small amount of stuff and/or over fairly short distances. It is definitely the cheapest option and not too tiring if you can stage it over an appropriate period of time. In practical terms most people can’t do that though and they generally need to hire a van. These two aren’t mutually exclusive as you could move all but the larger items of furniture yourself, using the van just for those larger items.

Moving up you’re into getting people to do some or most of the move for you. That generally doesn’t get you out of packing (unless you want a serious bill, of course) but does ease the move considerable as you’re not lugging boxes out of your current house and into the new one.

 
You’d think that travel agents would be able to cope with people who pop in and want to go somewhere but haven’t really set their mind on anywhere in particular, wouldn’t you?

Well, I’ve tried that and I’ve yet to find one that can come up with a suggestion that is outside the standard off the cuff ideas that anyone could reel off. Until now that is.

Holiday.co.uk aren’t quite there yet but are definitely heading in the right direction I think. For a start they have loads of information on places that really are all over the world which isn’t always so easy to come by if you’re aiming for somewhere that’s truly out of the ordinary. A less obvious difference is that you can actually book the flights online to really exotic places which you can’t do on most normal travel sites.

Now, to be fair, you can’t always get hotels in the more exotic places. However, that’s something that’s commonplace across the majority of travel sites. For instance, although I could have booked a flight to Quito in Ecuador, they didn’t have a hotel listed there although you could call them for a hotel as, unlike most online places, they have real people on the phones which is something that you usually need for really out of the way places.

From all that you’d think that they only had exotic destinations but, of course, that’s far from the case. They’ve the usual beach, ski and city break options but even there they tend to offer that little bit more than you find on most travel sites. Not only that, but you can be considerably more flexible with your search options than on any other travel site that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a LOT). Normally, you’d need to say at least where and when you’d like to go but you can leave out the where and the when can be up to seven days different from the date you give which lets their system come up with some ideas that you might not have thought of.

An excellent site with the information that you need to plan even the most exotic trip but which retains the ability to offer you holidays at the ordinary end of the scale too and with the flexibility that people are looking for these days. Of course, in many ways this should be no surprise as they’re ABTA’s very first online travel agency, dating way back to 1994.
 
 

I’m terribly stingy when it comes to hiring a car. Whenever I can, I spend the time to go through all the car hire companies operating in the airport that I’m flying to because their deals change at different times.

Yet, every single time that I’ve done that recently I’ve ended up with Holiday Autos.

They’re not really a “proper” car rental firm in that you won’t find a sign in the airport saying “Holiday Autos desk” and that’s what keeps their prices low. Whereas Hertz, Avis, Europcar and the rest are paying for people to staff their offices (and each one has thousands of offices) and to buy enough cars to be able to offer you things like a guarantee of having a car, all that Holiday Autos do is negotiate a bulk hire rate and pass the savings on to you. I say “all” but, of course, that’s hard enough I’m sure.

One of the interesting things I found is that although Europcar are normally the outfit that supplies their cars around Europe, it costs more to hire the same car directly from Europcar and the terms of the rental aren’t as good either. For example, I wanted to do a one way drop off once: the Holiday Autos price was 30€/day for the car whilst the Europcar rate was 50€/day AND there was a 100€ dropoff charge from Europcar vs none from Holiday Autos.

Anyway, save yourself both time and money and just book with Holiday Autos. Just be sure to book well in advance as they do sell out of the very best offers quite early.