A confession before the argument: we hold approved affiliate agreements with several charter operators. If we filled this site with package deals, some of you would book them, and we would get paid. The code that renders these pages blocks those links by default. That's not a metaphor. There's a rule in the source that returns nothing when a charter link is requested, and an editor has to override it by hand, per link, with a written reason.

We built it that way because the charter package is the single biggest mismatch we know of between what travellers pay for and what they get back. And because in Norway, where this site is written, the package holiday is practically a family institution. Sydenturen. Questioning it feels like questioning the cabin trip. We're doing it anyway.

What you're actually buying

Strip the brochure language and a charter package is four things stapled together: a seat on a chartered plane, a room from a fixed pool of hotels, a transfer bus, and a rep with a clipboard somewhere in the lobby. The price of the staple is invisible. That invisibility is the business model.

The aircraft flies a fixed rotation — typically Saturday to Saturday, sometimes a midweek pair — so your dates are decided by an operations schedule in someone else's spreadsheet. The hotel pool is built on volume contracts: properties that can guarantee two hundred beds a week to one operator, every week, all season. Think about what kind of hotel can promise that, and what kind can't. The 14-room family place above the harbour can't. It's not in the catalogue. It was never going to be in the catalogue.

So the selection you browse isn't "the good hotels in Crete". It's "the hotels in Crete that signed a bulk deal". Sometimes those overlap. Often they don't.

Where the package genuinely wins

Honesty cuts both ways, so here's the other side, plainly.

If you're travelling with a toddler, the charter formula — one booking, checked transfer, kids' pool guaranteed, a rep who speaks Norwegian when the ear infection hits on day two — buys real peace for the money. We know families who tried DIY once, hated every minute of the logistics, and went back. Fair.

If you must travel in week 27 or the autumn half-term like everyone else with school kids, charter operators sometimes dump seats at prices scheduled airlines won't touch, because an empty charter seat earns exactly zero. The week before departure, a package can genuinely undercut anything you could assemble yourself.

And the EU package travel rules are real protection: if the operator collapses or the hotel turns out to be a building site, repatriation and refunds are their legal problem, not yours. Booking flight and hotel separately, you carry more of that risk.

That's the complete list. Notice what's not on it: price, most of the year. Hotel quality. Choosing when to fly.

What it costs you the rest of the year

This site exists because of one idea: pick the place after you've seen the forecast, not before. The two-week window where Crete is 27 degrees and cloudless doesn't start on a Saturday. Charter travel locks you to the rotation; the whole forecast-led approach dies right there.

Then there's the hotel. We list three hand-picked places per destination on this site — places we'd pay for ourselves, across three budgets. Almost none of them appear in any charter catalogue, for the volume reason above. Take Santorini: the trick that saves you a hundred euros a night is staying in Imerovigli instead of Oia, in guesthouses with eight or twelve rooms. No charter operator will ever sell you twelve rooms.

And the bundle hides the per-part price, which means you can't see what you're overpaying for. When flights are cheap and hotels expensive, or the reverse, the package price just sits there, smooth and unexplainable, usually somewhere above the sum of the parts outside school holidays.

What we do instead

Book the parts yourself, in the right order: forecast first, flights second, hotel third. It takes an evening the first time and about twenty minutes once you've done it twice. We wrote the whole method down, with the actual filters and the airport-hotel trick, in How to build a sun trip yourself.

If your situation is the toddler, the fixed school week, or the last-minute seat dump — book the package and enjoy the pool. We mean that. For every other trip, the staple is costing you money, choice, and the freedom to fly when the weather says go.

We earn a small commission when you book flights or hotels through links on this site, the price stays the same for you, and we'd rather earn it pointing you somewhere we'd go ourselves. The full arrangement is on the disclosure page.