It’s hard to believe but it seems that today, a number of people (especially the younger generations) don’t actually know what a package holiday is. It’s not that they’ve been living under a rock since they were born but more likely as a result that the package holiday has become so ubiquitous and some may suggest, a victim of its own success.

If you were to describe to someone what a package holiday was they would almost certainly recognise it and know what you were talking about however they would probably refer to it as just a standard “holiday”. This is because, most people when you go on holiday to Benidorm or even anywhere else abroad book the traditional package holiday without even realising it. Back in the day, the only way a lot of people could afford to go abroad would be through booking travel (usually bus and coach travel rather than by air) and accommodation separately and putting together their own itinerary, what many people would not refer to as a DIY holiday perhaps. In the 60’s and 70’s the concept of a package holiday really took hold of the British imagination and suddenly they had visions of holidaying not just in Benidorm, but in far flung resorts all over the Europe and indeed the World.

This phenomenon was due in part to the birth of low cost air travel and a change in social status for many people living in the UK. As working class people started to earn a good wage, they found themselves wanting, and being able to acquire the possessions and experiences previously only enjoyed by the middle classes. A Benidorm package holiday may have seen to the working classes like a fantasy in the 1940’s and 1950’s but when a number of holiday and travel firms started to put these offers together, at a price many could afford, the package holiday was born and Benidorm became the place to be seen.

It’s always funny how things change though, similar to how fashions come “back into style”. Like the 1980’s dog toothed blazer that sat in your wardrobe for years but you now feel comfortable wearing to the pub, the DIY holiday is back with a vengeance. When the credit crunch started to heat up in around 2008, a lot of people found that they were either watching their money more closely, or were unable to get finance (such as high credit card limits) to pay for luxurious package holiday to Benidorm. Rather than going without a holiday all year, people found other ways of getting away “on the cheap”. The biggest way of doing this proved to be the so-called “staycation” as it has been dubbed by the British press. The “staycation”, as you can probably guess or work out, it an amalgamation of the words “stay” (as in to not go anywhere) and the word “vacation” (as in going on holiday), quite literally this relates to having a holiday in the UK rather than going abroad as may have been the case in more prosperous times. People would load up their cars or people carriers and head off down the motorway to struggling seaside towns. It wasn’t unusual for hundreds of people from east Lancashire to suddenly pop up in old seafront hotels in Blackpool for example.

The “staycation” proved to be quite controversial with many seeing it as a throwback to the “bad old days” and saw a stigma attached to going on holiday in England. For these people, there was still one more option, this was to build themselves a DIY package holiday to Benidorm or another resort on the Spanish Costas. The DIY holiday involves searching the Internet for cheap flights from regional airports and then finding corresponding accommodation and booking it online. Apart from finding flights and hotels, there are a few other things commonly provided by a traditional package holiday that are easy to overlook when arranging your own getaway. The most important thing that needs to be booked separately is travel insurance. Even though Benidorm is in Spain, which is part of the European Union, it is still incredibly important to make sure, not just that you have travel insurance, but that you have a level of insurance that is appropriate for your circumstance and provides enough cover to pay for medical expenses and travel back to the UK should you be unfortunate enough to need it whilst on holiday on the Costa Blanca.

Aside from travel insurance, the other component of the package holiday that wouldn’t be included if booking everything separately, are the airport transfers. Although you would tend to make your own way to your local airport anyway (by taxi most probably), you probably take it for granted that when you arrive in Alicante, for example, that there will be a nice big coach waiting for you with Manuel behind the wheel ready to drive you in the resort and drop you right at your hotel or apartment. You could of course pay for a taxi to take you from the airport to your accommodation but not only will this be quite pricey (and presumably you are trying to save money by booking a DIY holiday rather than a package holiday) but you will also need to be transferred back to the airport then you reach the end of your holiday. Fortunately there are a number of specialist airport transfer service that have sprung up in recent years to provide a solution for this very problem. If you search on the Web, you’ll discover that for around ten or twenty Pounds, it is possibly to book a seat on a coach for one person and one suitcase, and the coach will take you both to and from the airport, in the same way that a transfer service provided by a package holiday would.

If you’ve been on a Benidorm package holiday in the past, you’ve probably heard all the jokes about the holiday reps that work over there. People tend to find them a bit annoying, always trying to sell you something you don’t want but there are certainly not as bad as telemarketers. In fact, they provide a valuable service and it’s something that we take for granted. If you have a problem during your holiday, your rep is usually the first port of call for either advice or to be put in contact with someone who can help. If you book a DIY holiday, rather than a package holiday, the holiday rep is something that will obviously be missing. You can’t really book an equivalent of a holiday rep online so if you don’t speak the language, you probably want to make sure that you have guide books, a phrase book and a list of emergency contact number just in case you find yourself in a sticky situation.