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The school summer holidays are upon us and you still haven’t booked a getaway? You are not alone, and you certainly haven’t left it too late.
While much emphasis is put on finding a holiday bargain in the January sales, you can find just as good savings (or sometimes, even better) if you book at the very last minute.
The question is, how do you find the best deals? Here are eight top tips.
1. Buy someone else’s holiday
Launched in 2018, Transfer Travel (nicknamed the “eBay of holidays”) offers a marketplace for people to buy and sell holidays, effectively changing the name on existing bookings rather than starting from scratch. The website takes a cut from the transaction and acts as an intermediary to ensure payments are processed safely.
2. Sign up to newsletters specialising in deals
A good, low-effort way to harvest last-minute travel deals is to sign up to newsletters which specialise in holiday deals. The best starting point, of course, being Telegraph Travel’s newsletter curated by Simon Calder.
Jack’s Flight Club is another good starting point for cheap flights. The founder writes: “I know not everyone has the time or know-how to dig out the cheapest flight deals, like Bali for £189 or Peru for £212. But hey, I do.”
A recent newsletter from July 2026 had return flights to Melbourne for £449, return, and premium economy flights to Mumbai from £410.
Other late deal newsletters include Holiday Pirates, Cheap Holiday Expert and Holiday Hypermarket, or – if you have a trusted tour operator, it’s worth signing up to their mailing list to be the first to receive their best last-minute deals.
3. Use a holiday comparison site
Holiday comparison sites mine the internet for live deals and list them, with links, so users can take their pick. Travel Supermarket and Kayak are the leaders in this world. Expedia also has a last-minute package holiday page for bookings, which you can claim if you become a member for free.
There are also Online Travel Agents (OTAs) specialising in hotel and flight deals, perhaps most famously lastminute.com. According to a study by the consumer watchdog, Which?, Travel Zoo and Luxury Escapes are among the most reliable sites for holiday deals. However, beware that some OTAs offer eye-catchingly low prices, only to charge excessive fees for add-ons, name changes or calling customer service lines.
Across the board, it is worth focusing on the price itself rather than the saving. Holidays are priced dynamically, so any claims that a holiday has been reduced by vast percentages should be taken with a pinch of salt.
4. Check traditional tour operators
All of the traditional package holiday tour operators have late deals. Why? They book up the airline seats and the beds in bulk, in advance, so they need to sell them off at some point. You will find savings on Tui’s late deals page, plus the last-minute offerings on Jet2Holidays and easyJet Holidays. BA Holidays also has a last-minute booking page, including a flights and hotel package for seven days in Tenerife, staying at the RF Astoria from £474 per person.
5. Consider what’s included
It’s all very well booking a week in Majorca for pennies, when you have to spend hundreds more on car rental, transfers, luggage and other add-ons. Make a checklist of what you need and tick them off as you go through the booking process, and always check the cost of essential add-ons before you commit to a holiday.
6. Be flexible with dates and destination
The more flexible you are with times, dates and destination, the better deals you will find. Skyscanner gives the option to search for “everywhere”, allowing you to find cheap deals on peak dates (we found, for example, return flights from London to Milan during the summer holidays for £32). Similarly, Airbnb has an “I’m Flexible” option which allows you to focus on the sort of property you are looking for (lakeside, with a hot tub, for a big group), rather than the destination.
7. Travel off peak (if you can)
You already know this by now. But it’s always worth remembering that if you aren’t tied to the school holidays, you will find vast savings by booking outside of the peak summer holiday period of late July to the end of August.
8. Look later in the summer for family deals
If you’re tied to the school calendar, the second half of August is nearly always cheaper than the beginning. Why? Most probably because people are impatient, and want to get away as soon as possible. It could also be that people don’t want to go abroad the week before schools go back, and perhaps want to make the most of the August Bank Holiday weekend on home soil.
“Having a little patience brings big dividends,” says the Telegraph’s senior writer, Nick Trend. “Book for the last week of August and you will most likely save several hundred pounds.”
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This article was first published in June 2024, and has been revised and updated.
