The Search Begins - 2016 Summer Holiday

Image credit: travelwithjoshcohen

Now that I have caught up with some of the things I needed to do for Christmas, I thought I'd take a break from looking at all the Christmassy things (not another toy! Please!) and start doing a bit of researching for our next holiday trip. This research has become an annual thing now, but this time it is more serious because it is time to visit our family and friends in Asia. It's been too long since I last saw my dearest parents in 2012/ 2013.

Looking back at our Hong Kong/ Taiwan holiday posts (the good thing about having a blog! It acts as my virtual diary, and with pictures too!), we had a really good time, but it was too short (in Hong Kong anyway) and I don't think we have spent enough time with my parents!

So we are thinking of visiting during the Summer holidays, which is kind of a bad time because of the extremely hot weather (comparatively), but also a good time because we have a longer school holiday, so we can see them for longer. And since air tickets are so extremely over priced, going there for longer means making the most of that money.

We did think of fitting a lovely beach holiday break in between as well, like, for example, a luxury retreat in Singapore where our friends are, or even somewhere like Thailand. I have been doing a research every year for a beach holiday after all, and we do want to make the most of the once in three years Asia trip. But that's probably going to bump our air ticket prices from around £850 per person to over a £1000 each, which doesn't even include our daily spendings. So we have to think carefully, and check prices around. First thing to do is to book our ticket from the UK to Asia.

At the moment just this part of the trip isn't looking very good already because August is peak time, so tickets are generally expensive. But what surprised me most is that a lot of tickets are already sold out? And it's not even the end of the year yet (shouldn't everyone be working on Christmas?). Things are very different in Asia because tickets and deals don't normally come out until 3 months before the date, but people here are already booking for their holiday 8 months prior. So I guess we better spend more time on this (we'll just have to have KFC for Christmas dinner), and hopefully by the time we have settled on a deal, it won't be gone right before we put our finger on it, which happens pretty often I must say!

What about you? Are you planning on your Summer holiday already? Or are you someone who like to decide closer to the time?