What you need to know to take tours cheaper: how it all works (and how to get a hotel in Sochi for 1,116 rubles for 5 nights)

A double room for 112 rubles per day per person will be something like this, it is 750 meters from the center of Krasnaya Polyana.

Last time there were a lot of questions about pricing, I will try to answer . I'll start with the basics. An independent traveler usually looks for tickets on the SkyScanner or AWAD. Then, taking the tickets, he chooses an apartment on AirB & B or a hotel on "Bucking". Then he goes and insures. Excursions are gaining on the spot according to the situation. A normal IT specialist, for example, orders tours only for parents who do not know the language.

The independent armor strategy is reasonable in 70–80% of cases. The most experienced travelers know that there are two more magic pieces:

- Take a ready-made tour (it can turn out to be one and a half times cheaper than buying tickets and a hotel on your own).
- Or take only the hotel from the finished tour (this is most often the wildest profit).

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

When traveling to Iceland, this will not work. But in popular areas there are options. For example, this morning you can live 5 nights in Sochi in a good double room, get a flight, breakfast and transfer for 12 thousand 35 rubles. This is for two, that is 6018 rubles per person. That's how much round-trip tickets cost if you take them in three weeks, and then there is 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 by answering the question, where is the catch.

Why is it cheaper, where's the catch?

It works like this: a package tour is usually formed by a major travel agency. They arrange a charter flight with the airline (that is, they pay very cheaply for tickets), then they negotiate with the hotel for six months or a year and redeem rooms for a penny (the usual discount for a major operator is 40-60% of Bookings), they select a car for transfer, guide, all that, agree with the insurance - and you get a finished product that you can trade.

Then the travel agency lays a profit and begins to give this tour to its offices, reseller partners and aggregators. We are an aggregator, and online, therefore, we do not pay for the same office rental in every city.

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

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

• They may tell you that you will depart from Istanbul at 19:00, and in fact at the beginning of the tour, they will warn you that the departure will be at 13:00. Of course, you will be taken, they will help you in everything, but you will lose almost the whole day. If it hurts the hotel or something else - they compensate you, but get ready 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 Rossiya Airlines) this is not a 100% guarantee of scheduled 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. Scheduled "Russia" is the most reliable on tourism, so most often they do it with it.
  
  
• If you are suddenly afraid to fly on a TU-214B-100 and specifically look out for Airbus, then a surprise may await you: the charter is rarely attached to the ship. Do not fly away on corn, but replacing the bead is quite normal.

What is the matter with the hotel?

The hotel for six months exposes its rooms with a very, very big discount. For example, in the same Beijing, you can take a fuss and take a five-star hotel for foreign diplomats for 3,000 rubles per night, which usually costs from 30,000 per day. At retail this price will never be shown to an ordinary client, but when buying a hundreds of rooms for half a year (money ahead) and at a time when the hotel is still not fully loaded when buying a large tour operator, please. It is very important for the tour operator to load the hotel according to the declared volume - even if it does not work, then it will not lose. Accordingly, in some tours there is a very successful feature of buying out only accommodation, and these are prices that are generally not found anywhere in principle.

On the other hand, since tour operators sometimes do overbooking (like the hotels themselves), that is, book based on statistics on missed, sick, canceled, visa-free travel, it may turn out that you have no place. If in the case of "Bookings" (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 then we will compensate you for the difference." That is where the tour operator will resolve the situation. This ends successfully in 85% of cases, but there are 15–20% when you have to settle on your own with your card and then shake the Moscow office after the trip. In our experience, the situation arises with a probability of approximately 1/450 and cannot be solved more or less successfully in about 1 out of 3,000 cases.

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. The usual does not suggest that if you are traveling together, but one could not, they will return the money to you. That is, if it is not about official relatives (for example, you live in a civil marriage without registration), or if you are just friends, and someone fell ill or did not get a visa, only one traveler will be returned. 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 convenient visas (for example, residents of St. Petersburg - Finnish) and do not enter according to the Schengen rules, then they will be surprised. Previously, you could be mildly scolded, but now any jamb (for example, they did a Finnish multivisa, and went to Spain) is a violation of the rules of entry. For this, they are now deported in about half the cases. Plus, for all such old shoals, now they issue visas like "Multivisa Greece without the right to visit France" - this is if in 2009 you did the same trick on the French border.

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

What about medical insurance?

Some visas require medical insurance, and in any case, the tour operator does not like to mess 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 on compensation for accommodation if the doctor forbade you to fly, but decided not to put him in the hospital. Normal conditions include hospitalization only.
• Usually the health insurance does not cover bad teeth. Check it out.
• The 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 “light” medical insurance built into the tour (as we call it “for repatriation”), we offer a fairly affordable option, where there are all three options: they treat teeth, do not pay attention to what they have drunk, and compensate for their forced departure.

How we manage to get fairly expensive insurance at market prices is a separate point. The fact is that, seeing the insurance for the tour, the insurance understands: the risks are lower than for an independent trip (such as a guide will not allow you to arrange debauchery and binge and make sure that you do not beat the locals).

How to take the option?

I advise you to look at the finished tour at the same time as searching for tickets in the direction. It usually includes two flights, a hotel, food, a transfer, insurance and a couple of excursions. More often than not, it turns out so cheaper that you can refuse to travel with a group without regrets and just walk alone while living in a hotel. Such travelers often take a car and drive around to different places, poorly represented in guidebooks.

Now such destinations, where 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), slip options in Greece at the end summer, herein Sochi. The hotel at the top of the post is called Bridge Mountain, it is still worth watching the Azimuth. Prices are updated every 15 minutes, so if something jumps - sorry. On the page you can also subscribe to great offers - just to catch all the sweetest things first.

If it’s interesting how we put it all together in terms of IT, here is the first story about what to do if tour reservation systems were developed according to the realities of the IT of the 90s.