citro

Hi im newbie here so please forgive me if.. Im in the wrong area of the forum to ask this question

I want to make my trip to Europe from Australia. What is the most important part when dealing this online bookings, Should i look at the hotel availability first before dealing a airline ticket or airline ticket first and worry about the hotel accommodation later ?

I want to make my trip in a few months time. So pretty long yet to wait. I know the hotel i want i can book it in and pay when i get there. Or pay now and don't need to pay when i arrive.

Can this aloud the same thing for airline tickets or its a must to pay straight away online ?

thank you

Gamecock

You are indeed in the wrong place, but welcome to FT!

Most often if you prepay you will lock yourself in and have no hope for a refund if your plans change. Typically I will book a flight and hotel at the same time, pay on check in. I will then recheck hotels periodically for a drop in rates.

Ocn Vw 1K

citro, welcome to FlyerTalk!

To keep threads on topic, I moved your post and a reply to its own thread, within the TravelBuzz forum. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator, TravelBuzz.

Dianne47

Welcome to FlyerTalk. Always book flights first, then hotels. You have many many hotel choices, not so many airline and airfare choices.

tom911

I always take a quick look at sites like booking.com to get a general feel if I'm running up against at event that might have high hotel occupancy rates. I ran up against this last year in Sydney where there was a huge Rotary International convention that pretty much blocked any affordable hotels in the city center, forcing me to stay out at the airport.

In places like Dublin, Ireland, football matches on the weekend will cause a surge in hotel prices, and that will be pretty evident at booking.com if it shows a high percentage of their hotels already sold out. I've also ran across this with a trade fair in Dusseldorf and juggled my travel dates around to not be in the city during that event when hotel prices were very high.

I'm in Dublin for St Patrick's Day this year and my usual hotels there were triple the normal price, so there I was sure to have other hotel options before locking in air fare (have a 119 euro rate at a newish hotel off the city center).

You're probably not going to run into these types of issues in places like London or Paris, but if you're heading somewhere with limited hotel options you really do need to check both airfares and hotel prices before committing.

citro

Hey. Thanks everyone and the moderator. All this has helped. Yes airline and hotel same time bookings may be more smarter then not.

I end up doing hotel for booking.com
And airline ticket with Expedia.

This is what i did last time and it worked. First time i did so online. I was only skeptical this may never work well. So i did the airline booking and 30minutes later hotel booking. But it seems smooth as if i was to deal with at a travel agency.

wharvey

What made you choose Expedia vs the airline directly?

Was there a major price difference?

Mwenenzi

Or are you the same person as mandraskim (and other user names)?

citro

Well i did went to the airline directly bu the price was more then 1,000 dollars higher then expedia. So i chooses expedia instead. It just gave me a more in dept details with hours and choose more then what the airline directly did.

I think the cost of the airline something was 1800.00 with expedia but if i was to check out the airline website itself to buy the tickets it shows prices much higher some where between 2,800 to anything upto 7.000 So expedia made it much cheaper and it again should not cost me more then 2000.00 from oz to europe during a low season.