Hi jcarey2536

I mentioned these price rises in some posts a few days ago in reply to somebody wanting to know if they should hang off booking a holiday until the prices drop, these 10% rises are on top of the 12% that TUI (Thomson, First Choice etc) have already increased their prices by in the last couple of months and Thomas Cook are not far behind with their total price increases

That combined with the huge reduction in capacity announced by travel operators will make it much harder and far more expensive to get the holiday you want

One thing to remember though with DIY is that if something goes wrong with one part of the holiday, then you have no comeback. See my post in the complaints forum. Basically booked a flight with Globespan to Gran Canaria, booked in Sept 08 for Feb 09. Held back from booking accommodation until last week. One week later email from Globespan advising they are cancelling the flights due to lack of demand. This now leaves me just short of £300 out of pocket as we are in to 50% cancellation charges with Tour Operator (Thomsons). This is a big risk you take when doing DIY.

There are some lovely private villas available and in some countries (Turkey in particular) some owners struggle to get many bookings. Why not contact some of them and ask if they would refund your deposit if your flight was cancelled through no fault of your own. I'm sure some of my villa owning friends would offer this as it's better than no booking at all and most probably the holiday would go ahead as planned anyway.