In my previous post about the art of cheap holidays I mentioned taking my daughter away in the peak holiday season.

Package holidays, and indeed, flights and hotel prices, are significantly inflated at this time of year. Finding a cheap holiday is not easy.

Yet I managed to save significantly, and still have a fabulous holiday.

I had an available date range of several weeks. I knew we wanted somewhere warm. I knew that we wanted a pool, and to be near a beach.

I also knew that we should find something self catering. Previous experience has taught me that my daughter is quite happy to wake up and play/draw for an hour or two before eating breakfast and wanting to go out to the pool/beach etc. I’m also no longer hungry first thing in the morning, so there’s absolutely no point having to get up early and rush to get to breakfast in a hotel serving at limited times. Similarly, hotel food is at best average, and I prefer the holiday atmosphere of going out in the evening for a meal. Having self catering facilities means we can save ourselves money on breakfast and lunch and eat when we want. If the evening eating out options also prove to be poor or expensive, we can also eat in on the occasional evening.

Think about what you really want for your holiday. Do you really need a pool? Are you going to eat out? Do you need to be on the beach? If you’re only going for a day or two, and staying in the town, do you need a car? Don’t spend extra money on a hotel with a pool if you’re going to be at the beach all day and not use it.

After scouring the web for flights, mainly using Skyscanner and checking the cheap airlines such as Ryanair, Flybe and Easyjet, I had found quite a few reasonably priced flights to various destinations in Portugal, Spain, the south of France, Italy, Turkey and Greece. Some I ruled out due to the flights out being from tricky to reach airports, or flying to destinations where I’d then have to travel for hours to get to the final destination. Others were ticked off because of inconvenient flight times; travelling with a six year old at 4am is a pain. Similarly the longer flights (4 hours to some Greek islands, Canaries etc) weren’t ideal, especially if they weren’t flying from a local airport.

Eventually I had a choice of 5 Spainish destinations, a Greek and a Turkish destination.

I started looking for hotels.

The Greek island hotels were few and far between; anything any good had already been booked up, long in advance (school holiday period remember!). The remaining hotels were shabby, miles from anywhere, or extortionately priced.

Next stop, Turkey. Hotels seemed to be very well priced. But I didn’t know much about the resorts and it wasn’t clear if there were in a reasonable location and easy to reach from the airport. More research would be required, but the flight times and flight prices weren’t great and I decided to put this on the back burner.

I decided to look at the Spanish options. This had the cheapest flight prices by far, but I soon discovered hotel prices were significantly more than in Turkey. However, I knew more about the region and where to look and with the cheaper flights managed to find something suitable at a similar total price.

There were 3 good flight options available to the Barcelona area; Barcelona’s direct airport; El Prat, Girona to the north, and Reus to the south. I didn’t know so much about the other airport options/areas, and a quick search didn’t yield many hotel options.

I decided to focus my hotel search on the Costa Brava, reachable from the 3 airports around Barcelona.

Normally I would book a minimum of a 3 star hotel and wouldn’t even consider a 1 or 2 star. When I travel with my girlfriend we tend to look for 4 stars to ensure we have the comfort of a double bed – there’s not many 3 stars with a ‘proper’ double bed we’ve found. With my daughter though obviously we were after two singles so I started checking the 3 stars and above hotels.

Due to the 3 airport options, I had a broad search area, but the summer holiday popularity had taken it’s toll on the accommodation available. Particularly as I was adamant on the self catering option.

There were plenty of hotels in Barcelona itself available for a good price. But most didn’t have a pool – essential for my daughter – or a balcony – essential for me in the evenings to escape to with a book and a glass of wine after she’d gone to bed. Nor were any self catering.

I found a few options in the coastal resorts but they were considerably expensive. I then found a handful of B&B or even half board hotel options that were a similar price, or not much more – especially when you considered the cost of the food.

I was tempted to book one of these, but I always like to check the reviews online first, such as via TripAdvisor.

Now, you have to read between the lines sometimes with these reviews. There’s always going to be some miserable sod that moans about everything. Or someone that sets their expectations too high, or complains for some reason that’s not relevant to yourself. But on reading these reviews, I was not convinced at all by the food offered at the hotels.

I did some more digging and tried a few more hotel websites. My favourites are Hotels.com, Venere.com, LastMinute.com, Expedia.com and LateRooms.com. You can usually get between 5 and 13 percent cashback from TopCashBack; Venere being one of the best recently.

Booking.com is also good but doesn’t tend to be on the cashback sites anymore, although you can sometimes found vouchers – another money saving tip; google ‘vouchers’ or ‘coupons’ for hotels (or any product you are planning to buy online) and you can often get a significant discount at the checkout.

Other popular sites are Expedia, ebookers, Hotels4U – most of which have cash-back offers on TopCashBack.

On one of my searches I forgot to tick the star rating.

A self catering hotel in Tossa De Mar, the GHT Tossa Apartments, showed up, at a reasonable price.

Why hadn’t I seen this one before?

Oh – because it’s a 2 star hotel.

But it looked nice… I read a little more.

It sounded ideal.

• Nice town: check (I would definitely visit Tossa De Mar again; great restaurants, beach, castle etc)
• Pool: check
• Close to airport: check (35 min drive from Girona airport)
• Close to beach: check (15 min walk, more or less flat)
• Self catering: check
• Balcony: check

Ok, so it’s only a 2 star hotel. What does that mean?

Often it means no pool, or no balcony, or a lack of facilities – for example, no ensuite bathroom.

This seemed to have everything. So perhaps it was tiny, or falling apart, or cockroach infested?

Nope.

According to the reviews, the vast majority of which were positive, it was a very good hotel, with a great pool and good facilities, and several people said they couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a 3 star. The main reason seemed to be the room cleaning service.

There wasn’t one.

Well, not as standard. If you stayed a week, the cleaners visited once – to replace the towels.

But not the bedding. Nor did they clean.

If you wanted the room cleaned, you had to pay extra.

Well… that’s fair enough. You don’t need new towels everyday, nor do you require the room cleaning so regularly. I was sure the bedding could last us one week. If we needed the service, we could pay for it; I can’t recall the cost exact now, but I do recall it being very reasonable.

I also find it quite annoying when the cleaners turn up and you’re still in your room, or when you come back from somewhere to find the cleaners half way through and you have to hang around.

So I could handle not having cleaners. Was that the only negative?

From the info I could find, yes.

I decided to book a week at the GHT Tossa Apartments.

And didn’t regret it! We had a great holiday. Ok, the room wasn’t huge – it was a studio rather than an apartment, so it was just two sofa beds – and a third could be pulled out from under one of them – but that was all we needed. There was a good size balcony with three chairs and a table and a nice pool view. The bathroom was nothing special but it was large enough with a decent bath, there was even a bidet. There was a brush and dustpan and mop and bucket so we were able to keep the room clean ourselves.

The room also had aircon!

I was expecting the kitchen facilities to be basic. They were; but better than some 3 or even 4 star self catering hotels I’ve stayed in. There was the usual basic two hob electric cooker; which took ages to warm up. Fair enough. But there was a full sized and well chilled fridge, a microwave, plenty of plates and cutlery including a chopping board and a juicer/squeezer. There was even a kettle in the cupboard!

There was no bottle opener, which was a shame, but I certainly hadn’t expected one.

The staff were friendly and helpful, the lifts worked, the place was clean and bright, the wi-fi connection was reasonable and at no extra charge, the pool was large and just about warm enough, and had a life guard on duty… perfect!

Ok, car parking was awful, I have to admit that. The whole of Tossa De Mar was just crammed with parked cars. The hotel did apparently offer car parking but I believe it was 15 Euro a day… no thanks. We spotted a car park down the road for 5 Euros a day. In the end we just drove around for 10 mins until we finally found somewhere; it was a good 20 mins walk back though! Still, can’t really blame the hotel for that.

So, my new money saving tip, which I hadn’t considered before: look at 2 star hotels too. You might just be pleasantly surprised.

Top money saving tip: Once you’ve found the ideal hotel to stay in, check it’s price on a few different websites; it can vary a lot. Even try the official hotel site – sometimes they have special offers. Don’t forget to check the cashback sites too such as TopCashBack or Quidco – you may find a hotel for £80 on one site but the more expensive site charging £85 is offering 15% cashback via TopCashBack, so it’s actually cheaper at just over £72.

Over time this can add up significantly – I’ve literally saved over a £1000 with TopCashBack over the years.

In my next post I will talk about airport car parking and other ways to save money on your holiday cost.