The term "cottage holiday" is used somewhat freely, but in essence it means a holiday taken in a self catering accommodation where you have the sole use of the accommodation. Holiday cottages are marvellous for escaping from the stresses and strains of everyday life.
There are properties available to suit most people, including: families with children, pets, or elderly parents wanting to go away together; small groups of people wishing to celebrate on a holiday; or couples wanting some alone time.
Finding Properties
There are two primary methods for finding holiday cottages, via a travel consultant and via the Internet. The method you use will most likely be determined by the degree of detail and amount of effort you are prepared to be involved with during the process of selection process:
1 - Travel Consultants - A travel consultant should have good access to agents dealing in properties for self catering holidays. Should you already be using a travel agent for your holiday transport, it may be of benefit to also get them to find you appropriate accommodation as well. As long as you accurately define what you are looking for, using a travel consultant to do all the hard work of searching for and booking a holiday cottage could be a great advantage. On top of that, you would only need to make one payment to the travel consultant for both your accommodation and travel costs.
If the travel consultant provides it, an additional benefit may be that you could obtain a payment option so that your costs could be spread over a number of months.
2 - Internet - As for many things, the Internet and search engines are super tools to help you search for and find suitable holiday cottage accommodation. The advantages of searching online include:
Choice - With a wide selection of search results, searching online enable you to choose on the basis of your own criteria or preferences.
Viewing - Many websites provide photographs of properties so that you can view them and get a sense of how suitable they are for you. Some websites may even provide virtual tours of properties which let you do a virtual walk through of the property.
Tourist Information - Many websites will provide additional tourist information. This can help you make a decision on which property to book by identifying sights to see and activities of interest to you.
You can make use of search engines such as Google or any other and you will be presented with various options for finding holiday cottages. There are quite a few websites run by either agents or tour operators where you can find a holiday cottage. A number of them also enable owners of homes to place their properties on lists and hence offer them as available for hire. You can search the Internet for a holiday cottage in several ways as outlined here:
Nationally - You can search on a national basis for holiday cottages. If you want to find a cottage in the UK you could use terms "UK Cottage Holidays" or "UK self catering accommodation" or something similar. This should provide search results for a number of agents and tour operators that have a national property database. It may be that they also handle properties in a number of countries, including overseas.
Regionally - You can search on a regional basis for a holiday cottage if you use a county term like "Devon Cottage Holidays" or a popular holiday area such as "Gower Self Catering Cottage". You can also try a term that covers a broad sub region of a country such as "North East Holiday Cottages".
Locally - If you already know the name of a local agent or owner of holiday cottage, you may go direct to the website or search based that name. However, if you do not know of a local agent or owner you can search on a local basis for a holiday cottage using either: a city, town or village term like "Whitby Holiday Cottages"; or an area such as "South Devon Self Catering Cottage".
Whichever method you use, it is highly likely that you will receive a large number of search results from which to start your search for a holiday cottage. It ma be that each search you make will provide results which include national, regional and local providers of accommodation. This happens as the bigger national providers also market to the smaller local areas.
When I want to go on a cottage holiday I initially go to a bigger national holiday cottage provider with a good reputation. My favourite is Cottages4You. If I do not find an appropriate cottage with them that matches my criteria, I try other big providers or even smaller agents, depending on what is available for the area I want to visit.
