What you need to know to take cheaper tours: how it all works (and how to get a hotel in Sochi for 1116 rubles for 5 nights)

Double room for 112 rubles per person per person will be approximately like this, it is 750 meters from the center of Krasnaya Polyana.

Last time there were many questions about pricing, I will try to answer . I'll start with the basics. An independent traveler is usually looking for tickets for Skyscanner or AWAD. Then, taking the tickets, chooses an apartment on AirB & B or a hotel on “Buckinge”. Then he goes and insured. Excursions picks up on the spot according to the situation. Tours are a normal IT specialist, for example, orders only for parents who do not know the language.

Self-booking strategy is reasonable in 70-80% of cases. The most experienced travelers know that there are two more magic pieces:
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- Take a ready-made tour (it can turn out to be one and a half times cheaper than self-purchase of tickets and a hotel).
- Or just take the hotel from the finished tour (this is usually the wildest profit).

At the point of arrival, check in and not go anywhere with the group, but simply live for your pleasure.

When traveling to Iceland it will not work. But in popular areas there are options. For example, this morning you can stay 5 nights in Sochi in a good double room, get a flight, breakfast and transfer for 12 35 thousand rubles. This is for two, that is 6018 rubles per person. Exactly so much are return tickets, if you take them for three weeks, and then there's a hotel, breakfast and transfer (a taxi from the airport to Sochi costs 850 rubles one way, a train - 150 rubles per adult). Below I will show more options for Turkey and Greece.

But I'll start with the answer to the question, where is the catch.

Why is it cheaper, where is the catch?

It works like this: a package tour is usually formed by a large travel agency. They negotiate with the airline for a charter flight (that is, they pay very cheaply for tickets), then for six months or a year they negotiate with the hotel and redeem the numbers for a penny (the usual discount for a large operator is 40–60% of “Bucking”), pick up a car for transfer, guide, all that, agree with the insurance - and it turns out the finished product, which can be traded.

Further, the travel agency lays a profit and begins to give this tour to its offices, dealers, partners and aggregators. We are an aggregator, moreover, online, so we do not pay for the same office rent in each city.

So, half the price goes to the charter. What could be the catch there?

Charter flights are usually purchased on popular destinations. A regular ticket or a block redemption on a regular flight is most often taken to Asia and long-haul flights. A regular is almost twice as expensive, but it’s a standard service: you just buy a ticket for the price of retail, in fact. The charter is very cheap, but it has a peculiarity: it is possible to change the flight time or airport of departure. Most often it is about merging two charters into one big one if they are not loaded enough. This means the following:

• You may be told that you depart at 19:00 from Istanbul, and in fact at the beginning of the tour you will be warned that the departure will be at 13:00. Of course, they will take you, they will help you in everything, but you will lose most of the day. If it hurts the hotel or something else - you compensate, but be prepared to lose half a day. The usual probability of such an outcome is about 7–8%.
  
  
• When fixing the flight number in the charter (most often by the “Russia” airline), this is not a 100% guarantee of departure, but close to it. You definitely will not change the airport, and this plane will definitely fly in good weather. But, as a rule, plus or minus two hours. According to the schedule, “Russia” is the most reliable on tourism, therefore it is most often done with it.
  
  
• If you are suddenly afraid to fly on the TU-214B-100 and specifically look out for Airbus, then a surprise may await you: a charter rarely attaches to a ship. Do not fly away on the corn duster, but replacing the bead is quite normal.

What about the hotel?

For half a year the hotel exhibits its rooms with a very, very expensive discount. For example, in the same Beijing, you can hurry up and for 3,000 rubles per night take a five-star hotel for foreign diplomats, which usually costs from 30 thousand per day. At retail, this price will never be shown to an ordinary customer, but a large tour operator, when buying out hundreds of rooms for six months (money in advance) and at a time when the hotel still doesn’t cost fully loaded, please. The tour operator is very important to load the hotel according to the declared amount - even if it does not earn anything, it will not lose. Accordingly, in some tours there is a very good buyback chip only for placement, and these are prices that cannot be found anywhere at all.

On the other hand, since tour operators sometimes do overbooking (like hotels themselves), that is, book taking into account statistics on unfinished-sick-canceled-visa-free, it may happen that you have no place. If in the case of “Bucking” (when booking through their system) it is enough to call support and they will say “find any convenient number in the city, send a check - and we will then compensate you for the difference”. That here the situation will be resolved by the tour operator. This ends successfully in 85% of cases, but there are 15–20% when you have to settle on your own from your card and then shake the Moscow office after the trip. In our experience, the situation arises approximately with a probability of 1/450 and is not solved more or less successfully in approximately 1 case out of 3,000.

What about the visa?

The tour operator usually makes sure that the tourist leaves because it is his money. Travel insurance is a very good idea, but there is a subtle point here. The usual does not imply that if you are traveling together, but one could not, you will get the money back. That is, if we are not talking about official relatives (for example, living in a civil marriage without registering), or if you are just friends and someone got sick or did not receive a visa, only one traveler will return. We offer our proven option, which is literally 100 rubles more expensive, but includes such cases.

Over the past year, another new Schengen chip has appeared. If tourists open comfortable visas (for example, residents of St. Petersburg - Finnish) and enter not according to the rules of "Schengen", then they will have a surprise. Previously, you could have been gently scolded, but now any school (for example, they made a Finnish multivisa, and went to Spain) is a violation of the rules of entry. For this, they are now deported in about half of the cases. Plus, for all the old similar jambs now issue visas like “Greece’s multi-entry visa without the right to visit France” - this is if in 2009 you did the same trick on the French border.

Another moment. No travel cancellation insurance will compensate you for visa costs (for example, consular fees). And, of course, the very cost of this insurance is also not compensated. Once it was hard to explain it to one of the buyers who was denied a visa.

What about medical insurance?

Some visas require medical insurance, and in any case, the tour operator does not like to tinker with the repatriation of the body, so it is done for any foreign destinations in the vast majority of cases. But there are features:

• Check the item about compensation for accommodation, if the doctor has forbidden you to fly, but decided not to put in the hospital. Normal conditions include hospitalization only.
• Medical insurance usually does not cover sore teeth. Check.
• Consequences of alcohol poisoning - your problems with standard insurance. If you drank and then ate the wrong fruit - you may not be compensated for the treatment.

In addition to the “health” medical insurance that is built into the tour (as we call it “for repatriation”), we offer a fairly affordable option, where all three options are available: treat teeth, do not pay attention to drinks and compensate for not leaving.

How we manage to get quite expensive insurance at market prices is a separate moment. The fact is that, seeing insurance for the tour, the insurance understands: the risks are lower than for independent travel (such as a guide, it will not allow you to arrange debauchery and jokes and ensure that you do not beat the locals).

As a result, take the option?

I advise simultaneously with the search for tickets in the direction to watch the finished tour. It usually includes two flights, a hotel, meals, transfer, insurance and a couple of excursions. Most often it turns out to be so cheaper that you can, without regrets, refuse to travel with a group and just walk alone while living in a hotel. Such travelers often take a car and drive around to various places that are poorly presented in guidebooks.

Now such areas, where the tours are obviously more profitable, are Bulgaria for July (can be found for two from 27 thousand for 7 nights in a decent hotel for 3-4 months), Turkey for the second half of May (for two), the options in Greece skip over Summer, here in Sochi. The hotel is on top of the post called Bridge Mountain, still worth watching Azimuth. Prices are updated every 15 minutes, so if something jumps - I'm sorry. You can also subscribe to great offers on the page - just to catch all the sweetest first.

If you are interested in how we collected all of this in one heap from an IT point of view, this is the first story about what to do if tour booking systems were developed based on the realities of the 90s IT.