Vacations

Package versus booking it yourself, costed properly, including the legal protection most people do not realise they are giving up.

Booking the flight and the hotel separately is usually cheaper on the day. What almost nobody prices in is what the saving costs: with a package, one company is liable for the whole trip, your money is protected if they collapse, and you get flown home if you are stranded. Booked separately, every failure is yours to chase, in the supplier’s jurisdiction, in their language.

That trade is answerable with arithmetic rather than instinct, and the answer changes with the trip. On a cheap short-haul weekend the protection is worth little. On a three thousand euro family holiday in hurricane season it is worth considerably more than the forty euro you saved by unbundling.

Start with the rights gap between a package and a DIY booking, which sets out exactly what the Package Travel Directive gives you and what you forfeit by splitting the booking.