Why we at Favotrip deliberately do not offer flights

We hear it weekly: "Why don't you have flight deals?" Short version: because it does not fit us. We at Favotrip believe a good package starts where we would book ourselves, and flights are deliberately outside that. Below, why this is a fundamental choice about who we want to be, and what it means for you as a customer. UK travellers tend to be used to short-haul flying; we are not arguing against that, but we explain how we focus our packages around hotel plus arrival by car, train or onward connection from continental hubs.

We deliberately focus on short distance

Coupling a flight to a hotel sounds simple, but underneath it is a chain of six parties: airline, GDS system, hotel distributor, local transfer, insurance, and the confirmation-PDF maker. One link breaks and the customer gets a 3 a.m. call at the airport. We are a small team and we want to sleep at night, and so do our customers. What I see in our service tickets: for hotel-with-activity deals within four hours' drive, we get a handful of calls per hundred bookings. For flight packages it is a multiple of that, simply because more links can fail. We built Favotrip around exactly that difference.

The margin is not in the flight, and we do not believe in it

Intermediaries often sell flights at 0-2 percent margin, sometimes negative. The money is in the "ancillaries": baggage bundles, premium seats, lounge access, late checkout. That is a game large players run at huge scale. We would only pass on extra costs without keeping anything as a business, and that does not match how we want to sell. We want to quote a price that holds, with no in-flight upselling. The other thing many people miss: airline tickets trade like a market. Prices change hourly. If your booking arrives at 17:02 but the partner API returns confirmation at 17:14, the price can have moved up by £80 and a small agency like ours absorbs the difference. We do not want to build on risky prices that would force us to be stingy elsewhere.

We make packages for the trip you can take tomorrow

Roughly 70 percent of our bookings go to destinations reachable from London or the Home Counties within a Eurostar plus short onward journey: the Netherlands, Bruges, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Paris by Eurostar. We deliberately built our offer around that radius, because that is where a package adds genuine value. A flight to Amsterdam is technically possible but costs you another 30 minutes' transfer to the centre, plus two hours of check-in at Heathrow or Gatwick. Eurostar to Brussels and onward is then often quicker and calmer; with a car you stop in a village along the way because you brought your own. We make packages for travellers who want that freedom. For Seville or Marrakech we are not the right party; the large operators do that better. We focus on what we can do well, because "offer everything" and "be good" do not go together in this trade.

What we do, our editorial day

We seek out the good hotels, arrangements and wellness packages within reach of a tank of fuel or a single train ticket. We have done this since 2015, under the Favotrip name since 2024. We at Favotrip screen every offer before it goes live: photos checked for authenticity, discount substantiation (the "from £" must match the actually cheapest bookable date in our calendar), hotel reviews via two independent sources, and the small print (is tourist tax included? Is parking included? Does the breakfast arrangement cover children?). Only when all six elements check out does the deal go live. A new deal costs us four to six editorial hours before publication. That sounds like a lot, but it saves every customer hours of comparison and saves us return queries. No flights means more attention for the rest, and we make that trade-off consciously every month.

What I see in customer queries

Without flights in the line-up, our service tickets look fundamentally different. We get questions about hotel choice ("which hotel is closest to the brewery?"), about arrangement details ("is wellness access included in the room rate?"), about parking or pet admission. What we do not get: "my flight is cancelled", "my luggage is missing", "the hotel says there is no reservation because the GDS did not sync". That changes the work fundamentally. Our three-person service team can comfortably reply within four working hours, because there is almost never a now-or-never emergency. Selling flights makes 24/7 availability an operational necessity, and the customer ultimately pays for that. We believe our decision to skip flights indirectly keeps our prices low for you.

The sustainability side, honestly

I do not want to pretend at Favotrip that we are greener than we are. A drive to Bruges burns CO2; a Eurostar to Brussels burns less, but no trip is zero. What is true: a return London-Mallorca flight produces around 480 kg CO2-equivalent per person; a return London-Bruges by train for two is in the low double digits. A meaningful multiple. We do not carry a "green travel" badge, we feel green claims get thrown around too easily. But it is a side-effect of our scope. People who book with us do not fly, and over a year that adds up, even if we do not measure it explicitly.

Will there ever be flights?

Not within three years, and after that only if a scale or partner on our side made it workable. My personal forecast: never. In 2025 we seriously looked at a white-label flight partner, but the margin per booking landed at £10 with a return rate of 22 percent. Loss-making, and therefore not sustainable for our customers. Until then: train or car reach. That sounds modest but rules out an enormous amount of headache, for us and for you. For the customer who wants Tenerife: send them happily to a tour operator like TUI. We think it is more important to do something well than to do everything, and that is what makes Favotrip. Below the packages where our car-and-train approach comes into its own.