My advice would be to do as others have suggested and go to one of the vacation websites and price a sample itinerary for this October. I would then figure a slight increase in price for October 2008 and use that as a base price to compare a seperate booking. Then later on this year and into next year, I would check individual airlines and hotels for fares and room rates.

Sometimes some really good bargins pop up wrt airfare and hotel rates at the strangest times - especially hotels that might package a car and meals (breakfast usually) with the room rate. I have booked both ways over the years, but the last couple of trips have actually worked out cheaper to buy air and hotel seperately. You just never know. Come late this fall, I would start checking various hotel and airline websites often to see if anything especially good stands out, but hotels will not list most rates for 2008 until very late this year.