Which comes first ?

[e-richard]

For those of you renting in fly-in destinations has anyone else noticed any change in guest behaviour ?

I'm sure, but have no evidence, that 5 years ago, nearly every single enquiry I handled were from guests who booked accommodation then flights, whereas I seem to be getting more and more enquiries from guests who have already booked flights and thus their dates are inflexible.

[Mouse]

I voted flights first because the majority of people, even if they haven't bought flights yet, have at least checked them out.

In the main we have 2 types of booking: those who book well ahead because they can get good deals on budget flights and of course have the pick of accommodation.
Those that book later are usually trying to work around flights they've already booked.

I also know that new 'budget' routes attract people to new destinations. At the moment there is a new service out of London City airport to Ibiza...mondays, thursday and fridays. I wondered why I'd suddenly been inundated with odd arrival days - until someone put me wise.

Research:
The company I used to work for (they sell accommodation on the web to mainly Brits) were convinced that British people looked for their accommodation first and were flexible on dates, because of this they didn't have a 'search by date' option on their accommodation page.
I was trying to convince them that this facility was needed and so I researched it. The result was that 64% of their clients had fixed dates for their holiday and 82% of those surveyed had already bought (53%) or selected flights before booking accommodation.
Therefore most were prepared to compromise on accommodation but not flights/dates.

The other interesting thing was that this didn't apply to other nationalities (mainly German, Spanish and Dutch)...oh and I got confirmation that the Spanish don't plan at all.

Mouse
x

[Don Ciccio]

nine times out of ten, people ask us about the accommodation before they have the flights booked. We had a french lady last year who's dates were booked and a swedish family this year who had fixed flght dates. otherwise, neary all of the people who enquire about our properties seem to have a degree of flexibility worked into their dates.

This could be because Ryanair have daily flights from many European airports to Trapani and so people are comparing prices for flights on different days to get a deal.

We always advise them to secure the booking with us before they book any flights too - so that could be influential.

We dont tend to get many Palermo bound passengers anymore, but they still tended to contact us beforehand and we used to refer them to our Atol travel agent friend of the family who could offer discounted British Midland, Monarch and Alitalia tickets (in the days before Ryanair when all air fares were at least £300 each - remember those days?).

[kendalcottages]

Personally, I would make enquiries about (and book) accommodation first.

[pepsipuss]

Probably less than 50% of our guests come by air but they usually check on availability first. I would certainly do so myself.

[brenda]

Virtually all our Guests come by air - and most have already booked flights before enquiring about accommodation.

Those that haven´t yet booked flights often end up cancelling their provisional reservations.

[Mountain Goat]

Gusts usually do.

MG

[dublin13]

most of ours try to book flights 1st and then tell us the dates they want but during the summer more are willing to travel weekends

[The Olive Grove]

When we used to book villa holidays we always booked the flights first, on the basis that there was more accommodation available than flights.