Trend on travel

The heat is on to book for autumn

Nick Trend

It was pretty hot out there last week. Probably the last thing you were thinking about was booking a holiday in the sun. A trip to Iceland or Antarctica might have appealed, but you were unlikely to be hitting our online heatseeker guide for holiday suggestions (telegraph. co.uk/tt-heatseeker).

That might have been a mistake. Come October, probably quite a lot earlier than that, the raw heat of the British summer will have faded, and you will surely find yourself pining for the sun again. There’s no rush you might think; plenty of time to think about booking in the autumn. But that, of course, is what everyone else is thinking too. Summer may be a busy time for travelling, but when the weather is like this it tends to be a very quiet time for advance bookings. Travel agents will be standing empty; online booking forms left unfilled; seat sales will be stagnant and plans will be on hold.

In other words, this is an excellent time to buy. Not only will you have the pick of the best hotels, rooms, tours and resorts, you stand a good chance of getting a decent deal, and agents and operators, keen to make a sale, are likely to invest much more time and energy in dealing with your inquiries.

So what should your strategy be, and are there still some bookings which are best left until the last minute? The simple rule of thumb is that if you want to travel at peak or even shoulder season, you’d do well to act sooner rather than later. Specifically, this includes the October half term (this year that’s the week beginning the 23rd for most schools); any destination, fights or accommodation from about December 15 to early January; and all sorts of holidays – whether ski or winter sun – during February. Book these now, and you will probably pay less and have much more choice: from the pick of the flight times to the best places to stay.

This is also the time to be thinking about autumn city breaks. As the annual fairs, conventions and fashion weeks do the rounds in September, hotels in cities like Paris, Amsterdam or London, especially the better ones, get very heavily booked. It’s a lovely time to visit, but tough to find decent accommodation and reasonable fares. Unless you do it now. Even in October there is strong demand – especially for cities a little further south, like Seville or Rome.

However, there is one important caveat to all this. If you are free and willing to travel during November and the first couple of weeks of December, then you can quite happily relax and return to your deckchair in the garden. That’s because those are the quietest six weeks of the year in travel, and almost wherever you want to go you will be able to find a low fare and a room in a decent hotel at a highly competitive price.

In fact, if you are flexible, as happy to go to Antigua as Barbados, or to Florence as Venice for example, you could leave things really late and pick up an excellent deal within a week or two of departure. (That said, even for low-season travel, if you are really particular, and know exactly what you want, it is still worth being ahead of the game and booking now.)

So if you are hoping to travel over the next nine months or so, my advice is to start planning now. It may feel counter-intuitive but when the heat is on at home, it is the best time to think about booking a holiday in the sun.

Nick Trend is Telegraph Travel’s consumer expert