Travel question: Should I hold out for a late holiday deal this summer?

Have a question? Ask our expert Simon Calder

North Macedonia’s Lake Ohrid is a lovely spot for a cheap trip (Getty/iStock)

Q Any insight as to whether it’s going to be worth hanging on for late deals this summer, or should I bite the bullet and book now?

Liz

A The number of late holiday bargains in 2019 depends on three things: how you define “summer”; how flexible you are about departure points, destinations and departure dates; and how sunny it is in Britain.

If you can avoid the school holidays (usually in England and Wales, late July to early September; in Scotland and Northern Ireland, end of June to mid-August) then there will be plenty of late bargains. Just wait until a few days before departure for the best deals.

Let’s assume, though, that you are constrained to the school holidays. The range of deals will depend on several variables.

The easiest way to boost the odds on your behalf is to travel from a Scottish airport in late August (or an English airport in early July). A variant on this is to stretch the departure date to the earliest or latest possible. For example, my daughter returns to school in London on 30 August, which is frankly rubbish. But some other pupils go back as late as 5 September; a week’s holiday returning on 4 September is likely to be far cheaper than one coming back on 29 August.

If you couldn’t care where you go, from Portugal to Turkey, you can simply avail of the “bin-end” holidays that, every summer, travel firms struggle to sell.

Finally, the warm British summer of 2018 diminished demand for foreign holidays, leading to some extremely unusual bargains – below £200 for a week’s package holiday in August. A repeat is likely to have a similar effect. Conversely, if the UK summer is a washout, then demand will surge and prices will stay, from the travel firms’ perspective, very healthy.

Were this to happen, the standard options for a cheap summer trip come into play: if you have a car, take a ferry to France and go camping; find a cheap flight to a business city such as Milan or Madrid and then head for the beach; or travel to eastern Europe, either the Baltic coast of Poland or the shores of Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia.

Every day our travel correspondent Simon Calder tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder