Invest less, travel more … right?! If you like to make your holiday travel dollar stretch, then like us, you may find yourself considering a trip package advertising deal. Know that these advertising vacation bundle companies are not at all equal.
After the let down of our recent stay at the Cancun all inclusive through Premier Travel Resorts, I just got off the phone from attempting to schedule the rest of our getaway package with them (a long time in Florida). Let’s just state that will not be occurring. We are simply going to eat the expense and forget about it.
From here on out, we will be reserving holiday plans through BookVIP. If you click over to their site, you will see that it is full of the cheapest vacation bundles to some of the most popular destinations.
Our very first all inclusive experience was with BookVIP and it was fantastic. Perhaps the Dreams spoiled us. This location was off-hook. It was everything we had actually hoped for and after that some.
One fast note … We have only used BookVIP one time, at one luxury resort in Cancun. Reasoning tells me that not every resort holiday package is going to offer a comparable experience. It actually is all going to boil down to the research you put in.
Is booking Very Important Person a timeshare?
Looking into the residential or commercial properties used on BookVIP can be a little bit of a challenge. They do not advertise the actual name of the resorts. Instead, they utilize fake names. If you actually want to sleuth out the place you will be staying a bit of investigative work on Google to match up the pictures will expose the true identity of the property you are considering. We didn’t trouble going that far. There was plenty of info on the BookVIP site to help us feel comfy with making our reservation.
What we like about reserving with BookVIP? You are on your own schedule. No sales calls, no pressure. When you have actually done your research study and you are ready, schedule. You will understand what you are getting. You know ahead of time if the dates you want to travel are available. There is time to compare the restaurants and features. This is a big contrast to the promotional holiday plan sales calls I will speak about in the next section.
Just be prepared for a few additional resort charges and taxes when you are ready to make your appointment with BookVIP. Our $599 for 5 days/4 nights at a Cancun all inclusive cost around $720 after everything was said and done. In our case, part of the surcharge was to cover suggestions for the resort personnel. After the experience we had, we discovered this to be well worth it.
OUR EXPERIENCE WITH PREMIER TRAVEL RESORTS Bookvip San Juan Puerto Rico
In contrast to BookVIP, our experience with Premier Travel Resorts (out of Florida) was not the best. We really likely would not have actually participated in another advertising deal if this had been our very first experience. It was that bad.
Are you on the calling lists? After our first promotional resort stay, we began getting phone calls providing vacation bundles to numerous destinations. That is how we ended up with a trip package including our newest Cancun all inclusive plus a couple brief remain in Florida and somewhere else.
These travel sales calls are always a high-pressure circumstance unless you simply hang up. State no enough times and they will keep dropping the price to where it really sounds like a great deal. There isn’t much time to investigate the holiday properties they are providing.
They drew us in with a remain in Cancun (which is convenient for us because of the distance to Belize) and a long time in Florida (hello, sailboat shopping!). So we shot and bought a bundle. But using it, that is an entire different story.
Premier Travel Resorts does not make it simple to in fact use the trip time. There is a lot of fine print that makes travel planning really difficult and possibly a lot more expensive. They do not expose these details throughout the sales call.
IF YOU BUY A TRIP BUNDLE WITH PREMIER TRAVEL RESORTS, THIS IS WHAT YOU MUST BE PREPARED FOR …
You can just reserve your dates 45-90 days ahead of time. Okay, reasonable enough.
When you call to ask for your preferred dates, they require you to fill out a long kind requiring all the details that they already have. You then need to wait about a week to see if your dates are even available. Unless your itinerary will only consist of your stay at their resort, this makes planning the rest of your travel very troublesome.
Planning affordable flights, or available Airbnb remains in conjunction with your Premier Travel Resorts trip package is very difficult. In our case, the Airbnb we wanted to stay at after our stay at the resort was booked by the time Premier Travel Resorts got back to us.
Our plan consisted of a stay in Orlando and a stay in Daytona Beach. Premier Travel Resorts requires that those stays be back to back or 1 month apart. So, in our case, utilizing them on either end of an organization journey we had actually prepared was not enabled.
We used the Cancun part of our trip plan, however we will not be using the rest of it.
THE BAIT AND SWITCH CANCUN ‘ALL INCLUSIVE’ THROUGH PREMIER TRAVEL RESORTS
You see, they put us up, not in one of the luxury homes that they wanted to offer us on, but rather at their ‘cemetary resort’. Seriously, that is what the people at the good property told us they called it.
Now, to be fair, Laguna Suites wasn’t all bad. The one restaurant that was consisted of in our ‘all inclusive’ (if you ignore the a/c dripping into our food) was really a great experience. They altered the menu every night, including foods from various parts of Mexico. And the personnel was incredible. Extremely friendly and accommodating. And really willing to assist us with our Spanish.
When over the shock of the difference in the kind of location we believed we would be remaining, we made the many of it. And chose up our rental automobile a couple days early to go off and check out the area.
THE SALES PITCH
Both BookVIP and Premier Travel Resorts need that you attend a 90-120 minute sales pitch to get their reduced prices. No biggie. We seem like that is worth it.
Premier Travel Resorts, however, needs that you attend an advertising presentation during each stay. This is various from what we were told when they sold us the package. A two-hour sales pitch when you are staying someplace for just 2 nights is a huge chunk of time. They offered us 4 different stays, that means approximately 8 hours of moderately high-pressure sales! No thanks.
OK, THAT’S IT FOR MY TIRADE