Selling longer stays

As soon as you increase the number of nights on a Pacific holiday you're up for hundreds of dollars more for each person.

We emailed Holiday Shoppe about a 4-night deal listed on its website for $1449 per adult. Unfortunately that holiday was "no longer available to sell" the Holiday Shoppe told us - but our "family" of two adults and two children could have a 4-night stay at the same hotel for $1595 per adult and $553 per child, which added $300. This came to an all-up cost of $4296.

Curiously, to stay 8 nights (as recommended by Holiday Shoppe) we would have had to pay only $5180. That's just another $884 for doubling the stay of the holiday, thanks to a "free" fifth and sixth night.

When we rang Our Pacific about its Fiji On Sale deals, which were showing on its website at the time of the call, we were told that the 3 nights at the Sheraton Denarau Villas for $1099 per adult and $479 per child were no longer available. In place of this $3136 deal, we were offered a holiday priced at $1274 per adult and $615 per child - which added up to $3778.

The salesperson told us that most families went for 1 or 2 weeks, but that some did take shorter holidays. She quoted our family $4802 for a week (7 nights), which is around $1700 more than the 3-night holiday advertised on Our Pacific's website.

We noticed the same "deals" that were no longer available were still being promoted on the website 8 days later. We checked with the Commerce Commission, but Our Pacific probably wasn't breaking the Fair Trading Act, because the ad did state the date when the offer closed and had the words "more deals coming soon".

Once the travel agent's "teaser rate" has you committed psychologically, it's easy for the agent's sales staff to push you up into spending more - a few hundred dollars, or even a thousand or so. And the full rack rate for some of the hotel rooms can be very expensive. At the Shangri La, for example, the standard rate for its most basic rooms is NZ$633 a night.