does a hotel night make flights cheaper?

[THAIPHUKET]

last year, thanks to some valuable info from this board, I learned to use http://matrix.itasoftware.com , it found the cheapest combination for a predefined schedule,

Wonderful tool!

Frankfurt- Mexico- New York- Frankfurt

My travel agent would not believe the price. however, she felt challenged and came up with an even better price. She added only 1 night hotel stay on a 4 weeks trip. The consequence=

It made the trip a package tour. Minus 5% on the flight cost.

Coincidence?

[IsaanAndy]

No, I've done this before and the combination of flight and hotel seems to get you a better deal.

Often it is the hotel which is cheaper, e.g. I looked a flight BKK-LON-BKK and was quoted around 34000 THB but If I included a hotel for 7 nights the price was 50000 THB, try getting a 3-4 star hotel in central London for a week for 16000 THB ...

[craigt3365]

Not sure if it was just the hotel stay or if it was a better fare one day latter. I just bough tickets to Europe for September. Just by changing the dates a day or so saved me a lot of money. At times, up to 30%.

With that being said, travel agents have more tools at their disposal than we do. If they are good, they should be able to get a better price. Unfortunately, not all spend much time trying to get you the absolute best price.

[Ricardo]

It was certainly true at one point, that adding accomodation to a flight-ticket, meant that different rules (from IATA ?) allowed a cheaper flight.

In the 1970, running youth-hostels in London, we saw a wave of travellers from Australia on cheap-tickets on BA/Qantas (I think), which were cheaper because they included a voucher for the first night's accomodation with us, not sue what percentage of those vouchers were ever actually used !

That was in the days when Laker Airways and others were just starting to break down the legacy-carriers' hold on the scheduled-market, in the charter airlines we always had included the accomodation, because we were selling a package-holiday and not just the flight.

Affinity-groups like special-interest clubs were another early way to get round the 'official' rules. Your cheap ticket to the USA might include a membership-card for some organisation in which you had little or no interest, or of which you'd never even heard, but they chartered the whole plane & so could on-sell the seats more cheaply !

[davejones]

Travel agents make so much money on hotels, that they can afford to give you an extra discount. Flight & Hotel bookings are always cheaper than booking the two separately.

But here's something to remember. With companies like Expedia, and probably others, it's possible to get a full refund on a hotel if you need to cancel for some reason. If you book a package of flight and hotel, then you may lose the whole amount. So you need point saving a few $s if there's any possibility that you may need to cancel. This is one reason they can afford discounts - they make up the money from the cancelled booking where they get to keep all your money. This is how it was a few years ago, and I don't think it's changed. Read the small print.