5 top tips for booking holidays

As someone who went on an impressive 11 holidays last year and is currently looking to beat that this year, I'd say I'm pretty well equipped to be offering travel advice. You may think that I go on holiday so much because I have a job where I can go on holiday whenever I want or because I have ridiculous amounts of money. But you'd be wrong to think so - I've just learnt how to travel cleverly. So if you're looking at booking a holiday any time soon (it's finally been the long-awaited January payday, who in their right mind wouldn't be?) then I've got some tips for you!

Pick new places

Everyone's been on an amazing holiday before that's made them think "I'd love to come back here". But if you want to see the world (like I do) then try and venture into places unknown. Plus, picking new places could also save you money.

Instead of the tourist trap destinations (Paris, Amsterdam, Marbella), opt for less-explored options. Yes, I've been to all the "top" cities but they can often be expensive, both to travel to and while you're there. Whereas if you try slightly less popular destinations like Riga or Krakow, you can get yourself a real deal.

Compare, compare, compare

It always amazes me that companies like First Choice are still in business when they offer the same holiday destinations as budget websites but for twice the price. The first step in booking a holiday is to find the cheapest possible version of what you want.

A good place to start is wowcher. I haven't actually booked any holidays on there (apart from the mystery deal), but the destinations that they offer can give you a good insight into where you can go for a bargain. Airlines rarely offer special prices to budget companies (like hotels do) so if they can get it cheap, that means you can too. Side note: I don't avoid booking holidays on wowcher because I don't trust it, it's because your choice on flight times, hotels and fly-from airports are limited.

For flights, always use skyscanner. If you're simply looking for a bargain deal and don't have a specific place in mind then their 'search everywhere' function is amazing. It will pull up everywhere that flights go to on your selected dates (you can choose direct or include indirect too; I always do the former) and you can see the cheapest deals. And it's also a good idea to play around with the dates; sometimes there's no rhyme or reason and one particular day of the month will just be cheaper than the rest. Bear in mind that that price will be slightly higher by the time you purchase, once you've added on baggage etc.

For package holidays, I always use loveholidays.com. There's loads of budget sites out there (like lastminute.com and onthebeach.com) but loveholidays is the one I've found to be consistently the cheapest, nicest website and greatest choice. They also offer pay-in-installment options with low deposits (very handy for more expensive holidays) and their customer service is amazing. One time, I booked a holiday and before they confirmed it, they rang me up and asked me if I'd realised that the hotel was about 4 hours from the airport (which I hadn't), and then waited for me to pick a new one and booked it all for me. And I had a Thomas Cook holiday booked with them when the company went under and they emailed regular updates about what was happening then refunded me without me even having to ask. Above and beyond as far as I'm concerned.

Make your annual leave days work hard

I don't manage to go on so many holidays because I'm a freelancer or because my boss is very generous. Well he is very generous, but I still have a standard amount of annual leave days that you'd expect with a 9-5 job. I manage to go on so many holidays because I work the shit out of my annual leave days.

Don't let any bank holidays go to waste. Tag extra days on if you need to and always work around the weekend. I mostly do long weekends so play around with Thurs-Sun or Sat-Tues (usually friday to monday is the most expensive for some reason). On the occasions that I do go away for a whole week, it always has to be saturday to saturday or sunday to sunday. Going for a week on a weekday means using 6 annual leave days instead of 5 and ain't nobody got time fo' that. Not when I can get a whole extra holiday out of one extra day!

Weigh up the length of your trip carefully

Following on from that, it's important to think realistically about how long you want in your destination. Sure, we'd all like to go on holiday for 3 weeks at a time. But when that's not an option, would you rather have one big fortnight-long holiday that you wait all year for or 3, 4 or even 5 small weekend breaks that gives you something to look forward to every month?

I tend to avoid longer holidays because I like exploring new cities, ticking new places off my list and doing exciting new activities. Long holidays tend to be dedicated to sunbathing on a beach, which is fun but not worth sacrificing other holidays and trips for.

But even when thinking about a long weekend, think carefully about how much there is to do in your destination and what the flight times are like. If you can get an early outbound flight and a late inbound flight then you might only need 2 or 3 nights. Or in the case of when we did Krakow, only the one night was fine! If you plan your trip carefully, you can cram a lot in to less time than you might imagine so research, take into account your other plans and remember you can always plan another trip back there if you find you didn't have enough time.

Play to the airline money traps

It's so great that there are loads of budget airlines available now and with each of them competing with each other to be the cheapest out there, you can get yourself an absolute bargain (hello £25 return flight to Venice).

However, in a bid to appear the cheapest, they mostly stump you on other costs and rip you off in other ways. Ryanair is the best example because they're the most money-grabbing company I've ever known. And yet, they fly to loads of destinations, offer good flight times and are normally the cheapest, so I'll continue to use them (which I imagine is the stance that most people have).

One of their favourite ways to make more money off you is on the baggage (they now charge even for hand luggage) and unless you're happy to travel with nothing more than a handbag, you're going to have to give in to the cost. But make sure you're doing it cleverly. Ryanair flights always have 3 options; a bog-standard, a "premium" and an "all singing all dancing" version. Always get the bog standard; it works out cheaper to get that and add other stuff on than to choose their generous pre-put-together package. Then research which baggage option is cheapest. You may think that adding a small hand luggage suitcase will be cheapest but factoring in 2 (or however many) people, there and back, and it could be cheaper to just pay for a big suitcase.

Another classic place that Ryanair like to make money is on the seating. They'll charge a minimum of £7 (although it's usually more like £10) per seat, per flight so when you're paying as much for your seat as you are for your flight, it can feel like a sore subject. Top tip: when booking and/or checking in, always choose 'random allocation'. They deliberately put you as far away as possible to force you to pay to sit together, but doing it this way means you only have to pay one seat (each way) to move one person next to the other, rather than paying for two. That is of course, assuming you want to sit with who you're travelling with. You could save even more money if you fancy a couple of hours break from your travel companion!