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Here are tips on getting the best deal for your Hawaii vacation. You can book airline flights and hotel rooms separately or find a package deal. The key is to keep looking and not give up just because the prices look high on the day you looked. The internet makes searching for the best deals easy and checking often raises the odds that you will find a great deal.
Package Deals to Hawaii
Over the years we have taken many vacation packages to Hawaii. We find package deals from the airlines, hotels and companies like Pleasant Holidays. Packages usually include hotel stays and can include extras like breakfast and rental cars.
We have taken many package deals to Hawaii over Christmas in the past and found they were much cheaper than booking the air and hotel separately. Air fare at that time of year can be up quite a bit. The package deals work best for us when we want to stay in one location for the whole trip. We can often afford to stay in a much nicer hotel than we could if we were booking air and hotel separately and doing more inter-island touring.
Airline Deals to Hawaii
We use frequent flier miles to get the best airline deals to Hawaii. We have joined every airline frequent flyer club and receive their email on flight deals. We get free trips with miles we accumulate from flights and by using credit cards that give us frequent flyer miles for the airline that we use the most. By far, the cheapest flight we have had to Hawaii was from using our frequent flyer miles on American. The cost of the ticket was under $20.00 round trip.
We use to get cheap airfares to Hawaii by finding the airlines with the most direct flights from our area. Since so many airlines have gone out of business and cut back on their flights, there is less competition making it harder to find a deal.
We have found big differences in airfare prices for different days of the week in the same timeframe. The best prices are usually on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Around Christmas time, the difference between days can be many hundreds of dollars per ticket!
Sometimes the price is better if you fly at an inconvenient time, for instance, if the flight leaves at 6 or 7AM, requiring you be at the airport by 4:30 to 5:00AM. American airlines has flights that leave from the west coast late, after 7PM and though that may be an easy time to catch a flight it puts you into Hawaii after midnight west coast time. We struggle with staying awake while getting luggage, a rental car, and driving to the hotel.
Booking early can save money, but not always. Sometimes last minute reservations result in the best prices. Once we know our approximate travel dates, we start going to airline web sites and looking for travel deals around those times. We daily monitor the price and often find that a deal becomes available for a short time and we quickly take it.
Hotel Deals in Hawaii
Hotel prices remain high in Hawaii even on discount hotel sites like Expedia and Travelocity. However, the number of visitors to Hawaii is actually down so it does not make much sense. On the positive side we are seeing highly discounted room rates for some of the very expensive hotels (like the Hyatt in Waikiki) and good availability for the cheaper places to stay.
We use to go to Maui for all our vacations, but we have found the Big Island to be much more affordable for lodging and food. On the Big Island we like to stay in several hotels on each trip because each part of the island is so differnt, whereas in Maui we tended to stay in Kaanapali or Wailea the entire trip because the places never felt that different. Waikiki hotels on Oahu often have great special deals and packages.
If you are looking for a great deal on hotels it will take more work than usual, unless you have a large budget for the hotel part of your trip.The only beach front hotel we know of under $125 is the the King Kamehameha Hotel in Kona on the Big Island. It has rooms on Expedia for $105 for a garden view. We like its location by the pier because it has a great sunning and snorkeling beach and is close to all the resturants and stores on Ali'i drive. The hotel is currently being refurbished but still renting some of their rooms.
One of our favorite places on the Big Island is the Outrigger Keauhou Beach in Kona which has garden view rooms for as little as $125 a night. Our favorite rooms at this hotel are ocean front on the lower 2nd and 3rd floors so you can look out over your balcony and watch the turtles swim under you. The hotel is cantilevered over the ocean so the ocean facing rooms are actually over the water. When you consider that this hotel has a fantastic breakfast buffet, is walking distance to excellent snorkeling and swimming, has a wonderful lobby and bar built over the water so you can watch the sunset each day, you can see why we consider this one of the best hotel values on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Kona Islander Inn is $79 a night if you rent it for
a week. That is the best budget hotel deal anywhere in Hawaii; it has a great location right in the middle of everything on Ali'i Drive. You can walk to shops, night clubs, and restaurants. Our favorite unit in the Kona Islander is #126 with two queen sized beds near the pool and hot tub. You can check it out at Kona Islander.
Since most people take vacation at the same time and once there, they are a captive audience to
the hotels, Hawaii has a highly seasonal and volatile hotel market. Prices during high season can be five times what they are for off season. If you look for deals off season you can stay in a four star hotel for not much more than you would pay for a two star hotel during high season. It is worth the time to watch the prices and package deals that come and go.
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