Travel with Katie Butler: Jet2holidays launch their 2024 programme

Katie Butler writes: We have, between us, seen a wide range of hotels and resorts over the last few weeks – arming us with lots of knowledge to pass onto our customers.

We are always grateful to hoteliers, airlines and suppliers for offering us opportunities to visit new hotels and destinations. ‘Seeing’ is certainly the best way of getting first-hand experience to pass on to our customers and it’s always great to mingle with like-minded travel agencies from across the UK.

We are still nice and busy with new bookings and busier than usual for this time of year. City breaks and particularly Christmas markets are selling really well, along with late deals to the Canary Islands and Turkey.

There is still a huge demand for summer 2023 and last week we also started to make booking as far ahead as summer 2024. This was helped by the early launch from Jet2holidays of their 2024 programme.

The Leeds company have announced the 2024 programme as the largest ever summer sun operation.

Jet2holidays said the launch had been put on sale in advance in response to customers wanting to book early.

This allows cutomers to lock in the price of their holiday and spread the cost.

It confirmed that more aircraft would come into operation across several airports including Leeds Bradford.

Jet2.com and Jet2holidays chief executive Steve Heapy said: “We know from our independent travel agent partners that their customers are looking to book in advance. In response to this demand, we have put a huge programme on sale nice and early.”

He added: “The scale and size of our programme, combined with our track record of looking after customers and getting them away on their holidays, means we are looking forward to a huge summer 2024 – and we know that the programme will be enormously popular with independent travel agents.”

Will I be booking my own holiday early?

Absolutely! Most of our staff have booked for next year and have had their holidays booked a good while.

Being able to pay monthly or even weekly makes it much easier to budget and is much better than being landed with a large bill when the balance is due.

Also, most tour operators have guaranteed that if the price of fuel increases further they will honour the price agreed at the booking. So, even if fuel costs increase the cost of your holiday won’t.

It’s important to check when you book your holiday what the cancellation terms are too and how easy it is to postpone if your circumstances change.

Most travel agencies will offer this advice as part of their service and can offer payment schemes and plans, so do your research before you book.

It’s coming to the time of year when traditionally we do start to quieten down in store as we all start to concentrate on Christmas, we are not seeing this just yet as it continues to be a year like no other and we are excited to see the full year results.