The travel and tourism service providers, whether travel agencies or any other travel product supplier such as hotels and airlines, offer end-to-end holiday packages to people. While planning for holidays, it is quite natural for people to select those destinations which can bring them more overall savings rather than on any single travel product. People have a tendency to plan their holidays based on value-added services being provided and their cost-effectiveness. If any two destinations add same value, then tendency is to measure their cost-effectiveness and opt for the one which is bringing more savings. Often, there is a dilemma on whether to select for cheap air tickets or cheap holiday packages. While it is true that the overall savings can be more by opting for the cheap holiday packages, you need to dig deeper and find out what is being offered in the package.

Cheap flights may not be more attractive than cheap holidays but the kind of hotel you would be staying in or the nature of services being offered may not be satisfactory. This would mean that you end up paying more on flights and not getting satisfactory products or services in a complete package. So, the money that you might save on overall package might be lamented rather than appreciated. For this reason, it is important that you determine quality of product (hotel or car rental) being offered before making a selection solely on the criteria of overall cost-effectiveness.

One of the best ways of doing the analysis is to adopt a segmented approach and compare the cheap air tickets, hotels, car rentals and other products from various agencies and product owners. This comparison shall not be based solely on price criteria but also on service quality, customer feedback and other such parameters which you consider important for having a satisfactory journey.

Falling for cheap holidays without making a deeper analysis might deprive you of cheap air tickets even while you do not get a good overall travelling experience since the low-cost consolidated package might be charging more on flights and less on hotels or other travel products. While it is not necessary that the low overall costs are due to non-satisfactory travel products, there might be more revenue stream from overall package that could have led to reduction in margins and hence in overall profits. But, there is a definite need to know exact reasons and the best way is to do it is to make comparisons using a segmented approach to get the best deals.
Will the providers be willing to provide segmented rates of holiday packages? Even if they do not provide, you can seek quotations of individual products and services from different providers.