OUR LAST TRIP (AS IN LAST ONE WE WENT ON – NEVER GOING TO BE A “LAST” TRIP)

Someone we asked to have a look our last blog (‘cos we’re still learning and interested in feedback) suggested we should post how we booked the last Orlando trip we went on and who we used. So as a follow on from the last blog we thought we’d do just that.

We booked a fly drive through Ocean Florida with the flight being a Virgin Atlantic flight and the car hire was with Dollar. Ocean Florida were very helpful and can be a great option if you are flexible about where you stay and where you fly to and from. They can arrange cheaper “packages” than some other tour operators but the best discounts are when you do a split flight, fly to Tampa rather than Orlando, and/or get your villa accommodation allocated on arrival. The main reason we used Ocean for our last trip was that there were 6 of us travelling and we all had the exact two weeks booked off from work with no wiggle room. Booking through Ocean allowed us to book a Virgin Atlantic scheduled flight more than a year in advance of our travel date. If we had booked with Virgin direct we would have had to wait until 11 months before the travel date. We obviously took a chance on the flight prices being either higher or lower when they were finally released but in our case we were happy to have booked it so we knew we had our dates secured. We generally book the flight and car separately but had a good deal through Ocean for a combined flight/car package.

We booked our accommodation ourselves through HomeAway (which used to be called Owners Direct). We know exactly the area we want to stay in, which is Davenport on the I27, so we use this site to look at villas in that area. Using OwnersDirect means you deal with payments etc through the site (so no chance of being conned by a bogus villa posting). We stayed at Calabay Parc. It was amazing – lovely community to stay in and the house we chose was fantastic. We have stayed at lots of the other communities in that area and have never yet stayed in a villa that was not perfect for our needs.

We booked our park tickets through http://www.orlandoattractiontickets.co.uk. You can book these for just a very small deposit with payment due nearer the travel date so this is a fabulous way to hold the ticket prices at the current rate, even if you are travelling in 18 months time. As mentioned in our previous posts – shop around, there are lots of ticket options available and booking them direct with Disney and Universal are also excellent options and are the same or very similar prices to the UK ticket agencies.

Some photos of our amazing Virgin Flight – featuring the mighty Twister ice cream!

A fabulous fun holiday we had – looking forward to booking our next trip – which will be a totally different adventure for us, partly due to us wanting to try new things for research so that we can honestly say we try lots of different options with regard to accommodation and flights, and partly because we just really fancy doing something different next time. Watch this space and we’ll keep you posted!