Holidays By Auction Is The Way To Go Says Governmentauctionsuk.com

Want to know how to make last-minute steals seem even more like burglary? governmentauctionsuk.com reports on a new way to bag a bargain holiday online

“I do lots of work at home on my computer, so it’s easy for me to keep tabs on the site,” says 60-year-old Ian Davies from Droylsden, near Manchester. “I note when the bidding is going to finish and, five minutes before the end, I’ll make my move.”

Ian is one of a growing number of people who purchase holidays by auction over the Internet, attracted by the cheap deals available and the buzz of bidding against others for packages. He buys holidays from Thomson on the site www.ebay.com.

“I’ve bought nine holidays by auction in the past two years and I wouldn’t do it any other way now,” he said. “I’m semi-retired, so we can travel at short notice and make use of the bargains. My wife and I have just had two weeks in Sorrento, half board, for a total of £180. You can’t get much better than that.”

Ian says he has a pretty good system for winning auctions. “I make my maximum bid five minutes before the auction closes,” he says. “Bids go up in units of £10 so if, for example, I bid £300 and it turns out that the next highest is £220, then the site will only take £230 off you.

“It works pretty well, although you can now buy software which will automatically lodge a bid 30 seconds before the end of the auction, which doesn’t give you any time to come back with a counter bid, so you miss a few as well.”

Travel companies use auctions to sell holidays that, for a variety of reasons, are difficult to offload via traditional methods. They often prefer selling so-called ‘distressed stock’ in this way, as offering discounts through travel agents can give the impression that everything is cheap and diminish the chances of selling anything at full price.

Auction buyers therefore find themselves staying in properties where operators have spaces to fill. All kinds of holidays are available on auction sites, but inevitably there are lots of last minute packages to Mediterranean destinations in the quiet months of May, June, September and October. Packages to popular hotels during the peak school holiday months of July and August are harder to find.

The standard of accommodation is stated on the website, but the name of the apartment or hotel will often be revealed only when holidaymakers arrive at the resort.

TUI, which owns Thomson, sells last-minute Mediterranean packages to Spain, Greece, Egypt, Turkey and Ibiza through its own websites.

Anyone wanting to bid for a holiday must lodge their credit card details and, in the event of their bid being successful, the money will be charged to their account.

Sometimes holidays have a reserve price and bidders can keep returning to the site to trump their rivals or lodge a ‘proxy bid’, which will keep increasing to beat anyone else’s offer, up to a maximum stated level.

Graham Donohue, the head of new media at TUI, said the auctions were attracting a loyal following.

“We’re probably selling about 200 holidays per week between the two sites and you can tell there are a lot of people who have bought many holidays on auction,” he said.

“When we sell holidays from £1, without a reserve price, it creates a bidding frenzy, but we don’t do that with all the holidays, because we have to make sure we can get a minimum price for some of them.

“Our auction holidays are distressed stock which is not selling well, but that doesn’t matter to people who are looking for a good deal. In September, we sold a two-week package to Corfu, with two star bed and breakfast accommodation and flights from Gatwick, on auction. Somebody picked it up the holiday, for two people, for a total of £80. I don’t think you’ll find anything as cheap as that in a travel agent.”

One Internet retailer uses auctions to sell luxury holidays. Seven night packages in five-star star resort in the Caribbean, which usually retail for around £2,000 per person, can be snapped up for half that price.

Daniel Britton, the auction manager at www.lastminute.com said: “Auctions also work well for very specialist products like this. A small number of people want these holidays and are prepared to bid against each other to get them.

“We have worked with an operator called Travel Luxury for the past four or five years selling these trips and it has been very successful. The whole auction business online has grown massively on the back of www.ebay.com and people are now much more comfortable about buying all sorts of products in this way.

“As far as the public is concerned, if you are prepared to be flexible and travel at short notice you can get a great deal and buying by auction can be a lot of fun.”

For more Information go to http://www.uk-government-auctions.com