GlynWe fly late September and come home in October. Nine nights. It is all paid for, and there is something slightly daft about the booking that I want to explain, because the daft part turns out to be the useful part.
We have booked an apartment and a hotel for the same holiday.
Five nights at Emily Suites, self-catering, at €114.75 a night. Then four nights at the H10 Porto Poniente, half board in a junior suite, at €255.85 a night. One trip, two completely different holidays, and one of them is more than twice the price of the other.
The cheap half is what makes the expensive half possible. Here is the whole thing, line by line, because I would rather show you a receipt than tell you a feeling.
The flights: £426.24 for two, and no say in the matter
Ryanair, Manchester to Alicante, late Friday evening, return. Two adults, seats booked together near the front, one 20kg hold bag between us. £426.24 all in, which is £213.12 each.
I should be straight with you about how we ended up at Manchester, because it was not the clever bit of shopping around it might look like.
I work full time and I have no annual leave left. None. So the holiday could not start until I had finished work on the Friday, which rules out every daytime departure in the timetable at a stroke. We needed a late Friday night flight, and Manchester was the only airport within reach of us flying one.
That is worth about a night of the holiday. Fly out late on the Friday and you wake up in Benidorm on the Saturday morning with the whole day in front of you. Wait for a Saturday flight and the first day is gone before you have unpacked. Same nine nights on the booking either way, but one version of it hands you a proper Saturday and the other hands you an afternoon and a queue at a supermarket.
So the airport chose us. What I did not expect was what happened when I priced up the alternative afterwards, out of East Midlands, which is our other realistic airport. Same airline, same route, same day, same two of us:
| Ryanair to Alicante | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| From Manchester | 2 adults return, seats, 20kg bag | £426.24 |
| From East Midlands | Fare only. No seats, no bag | £449.56 |
| From East Midlands | 2 adults return, seats, bag. Like for like | ~£600 |
Read the top two rows again. Manchester with the hold bag and the reserved seats already on it came in cheaper than East Midlands with neither. £426.24 against £449.56. Before a single extra had been added to the East Midlands booking, it was already £23 behind.
Add the bag and the seats to make it a fair fight and East Midlands lands somewhere near £600. Roughly £174 dearer, for an identical journey, on the identical airline, on the identical day. Manchester is five miles further from our front door and the parking costs about the same, so that gap is real money rather than a paper one.
The airport we were pushed into by a lack of annual leave turned out to be the cheaper one as well. I would love to tell you that was judgement. It was luck, and I only know about it because I checked afterwards out of curiosity.
Which brings me to the extras, because that is where the difference lives. A hold bag, and two seats booked together. I have long since stopped pretending the seats are optional. Two of us travelling out on holiday, not paying to sit together and taking our chances on where we are put, is not a gamble I fancy. It is a compulsory charge dressed up as a choice, and I would rather budget for it honestly than be surprised by it at the checkout.
So if you take one thing from this post, take this. Even when your hand is forced, price the other airport anyway. Same airline, same route, same day, and it still moved by £174 depending on which car park we drove to. The convenient option and the cheap option are not opposites as often as we all assume, and the only way to know which is which is to get a total out of both, with the bag and the seats already on it.
The parking, and a £57.50 decision
Everything else was paid for while I was still arguing with myself about this one. Here are the two quotes for our dates at Manchester:
| Where | Price |
|---|---|
| Cheapest on-airport parking | £116.00 |
| Offsite park and ride | £58.50 |
Almost exactly half. The convenience of parking on the airport itself costs £57.50, and what it buys is a shorter walk and no waiting about for a shuttle bus at the far end of a flight.
I have no useful precedent to lean on here, because last time was a different problem entirely. On our last trip out we flew from East Midlands and booked a stay and fly at the Radisson Blu, which bundles a night in a hotel and the parking into a single price. That is the sensible thing to do when you are flying out in the morning and the alternative is getting up at three.
That cost us £153, and for the money we got one night in the hotel and fifteen nights of parking.
Set £153 next to the £58.50 we are about to spend on parking alone and it looks dear. Look again at what is inside it. The extra £94.50 bought a hotel room the night before the flight and six more days of parking than we need this time. As a package that is not bad at all, and I would book it again tomorrow if we were flying in the morning. Different airport and a different length of stay, so I am not putting the two side by side and calling one a saving. They are not the same product.
And that is the part worth taking away, because it is not really about parking at all. A late flight does not just hand you an extra day at the far end. It removes the reason to buy an airport hotel at this end. Ours is quietly saving us a night’s accommodation we would otherwise have had to book, and nobody puts that in the column when they are weighing up a seven in the morning departure against a ten at night one.
So this time there is no hotel night to buy, which strips the decision back to something much simpler and much easier to get wrong: two car parks, one of them twice the price of the other, and nothing to separate them but a walk.
So we are going offsite. Fifty-seven pounds fifty is two very good dinners in the Old Town, or most of a night at the apartment, and I would rather have the dinners than the shorter walk. I will time the shuttle wait in both directions and photograph the receipt, and then I can tell you properly rather than guessing.
If you have a Manchester park and ride you actually rate, I would genuinely like to know which one before I book it.
The two beds
Both booked through Booking.com, both paid for. All figures in euros because that is what we were charged. The sterling conversions use £1 to €1.167, the mid-market rate I use throughout the money guide, and what your card charges on the day will differ slightly.
| Where | Nights | Board | Total | Per night |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emily Suites | 5 | Self-catering | €573.75 | €114.75 / £98.33 |
| H10 Porto Poniente, junior suite | 4 | Half board | €1,023.40 | €255.85 / £219.24 |
| Nine nights | 9 | €1,597.15 | £152.07 average |
How we ended up with two
This is our third trip out to Benidorm this year, and that matters, because the third trip in a year is not funded the way the first one is. We went in looking for a bargain in a way we would not normally bother to.
The trouble is that we are fussy about hotels. Not grand, just particular, and by now we know what we do and do not get on with. So we started where we always start, with the hotels, and every single one we actually wanted was priced higher than we were prepared to pay for late September.
The Alameda kept coming up, and it was the near miss. We like that hotel and the location is genuinely good, close to everything without being in the middle of the noise. But the food was the weak point when we were there, and nine nights of half board you are not enjoying is not a saving, it is a sentence. So we left it.
Then we found Emily Suites. Newly refurbished, and the reviews are the sort you actually believe rather than the sort that all arrived in the same week. At €114.75 a night it was less than half of anywhere we were seriously considering.
Which raised the obvious question: why not just book the apartment for all nine nights and pocket the difference?
Because we did not want the whole holiday to be self-catering. That is the honest answer. There is a point in any trip where you stop wanting to think about what is for breakfast, and we know roughly where ours is. So the apartment was never the destination. It was the funding. Five cheap nights so that four nights could be somewhere we would not otherwise have gone anywhere near.
Which is a nicer way of saying what the numbers say. And the numbers come down to two.
Nine nights at H10 rates would have been €2,302.65. We are paying €1,597.15. Doing five of the nine nights self-catering saves us €705.50, which is comfortably more than the flights cost.
Nine nights at Emily Suites rates would have been €1,032.75. So the four nights of hotel are costing us €564.40 more than the frugal version of this holiday.
That is the whole trade-off in two figures, and I find it clarifying. We are not saving money, exactly. We are buying four good nights with money we freed up by doing our own washing-up for five. Put like that it sounds obvious. It took us a while to arrive at it.
How we picked the hotel, which took a while
There were three hotels in this conversation and my wife and I did not start out agreeing on any of them.
She wanted the Madeira Centro, which is her go-to and has been for years. I will be honest about it, because she would be: the rooms are basic and they are starting to show their age. That is simply true. But it is a lovely hotel all the same. The staff are excellent, it is quiet, which counts for more in Benidorm than people admit, and the food is good. And there is a fresh orange juice machine at breakfast that she will not be talked out of, and after enough trips I have stopped trying.
I wanted to try the Venezia, mostly on the grounds that we had not.
The H10 Porto Poniente was not in the discussion at all, for the simple reason that it was not showing as available. You cannot argue about a hotel you cannot book.
Then it appeared. And that ended the debate quite quickly, because whatever else you say about the Porto Poniente, it is very hard to fault. The rooms are properly done, the staff are the best we have come across in the town, and the food is exceptional, which is not a word I hand out at a buffet. It is not a cheap hotel and I am not going to pretend it is. It is just extremely difficult to find anything wrong with it.
One thing to be clear about, because it matters to the price: we booked a junior suite. We did not want an internal room with no view, and at this hotel that is the difference between looking at the Mediterranean and looking at a corridor wall. So the figure below is not what a room at the H10 costs. It is what the H10 costs when you refuse to take the cheap room, and that was our choice rather than the hotel’s doing.
About that hotel figure
€255.85 a night is the most we have ever paid for a bed in Benidorm, and I want to sit with that rather than skate past it. Here is our own price history, every Benidorm bed we have paid for and kept the paperwork on:
| Where and when | Board | Per night |
|---|---|---|
| H10 Porto Poniente, Sept 2026 (junior suite) | Half board | £219.24 |
| Madeira Centro, Mar 2024 (Holy Week) | Half board | £194.00 |
| Madeira Centro, Jul 2026 (peak) | Half board | £127.54 |
| Barceló Benidorm Beach, Mar 2025 | Half board | £116.02 |
| Madeira Centro, Feb 2027 (winter) | Half board | £111.22 |
| Emily Suites, Sept 2026 | Self-catering | £98.33 |
Four nights in late September, which everyone will tell you is the quiet shoulder season, is costing us more per night than Holy Week did. Holy Week is the single most expensive week in the Benidorm calendar and I have written at length about avoiding it.
I am not going to pretend that is a like-for-like comparison, because it plainly is not, and it fails on two counts. The H10 is a different class of hotel from the Madeira Centro. And every other line in that table is a standard room, while ours at the H10 is a junior suite that we chose specifically so we would not be looking at a wall.
So it would be misleading to dress this up as a finding about September. It is not a story about the season being dear. It is a story about two people on their third trip of the year deciding, twice over, to spend the money: once on the hotel and again on the room inside it.
Note the other end of that table, though. Our self-catering apartment in late September, at £98.33, comes in under a half-board winter week at the Madeira Centro. Different board, so again not like for like, but it is a reminder that self-catering in the shoulder season is still where the value sits in this town.
We stayed at the Porto Poniente in the spring and I wrote at the time that it was the best hotel in Benidorm and that we would book longer next time. Frontline on Poniente, rooftop pools on the fifth and eighth floors, the spa included, and a breakfast where the eggs and the bacon are cooked in front of you rather than sat under a lamp going quietly grey. I meant every word of it.
And then we booked four nights. One fewer than last time.
How the nine nights actually run
Emily Suites first, for the five nights from the Friday. Then the move across to the H10 for the last four, finishing on the good one. That way the holiday improves as it goes rather than tailing off, and the last morning is at the hotel that lets you leave your cases, keep your key card and use the pool right up until you have to go.
The two halves are doing different jobs. The apartment is the frugal front end, where we shop for ourselves and keep a lid on it. The hotel is the back end, where we stop counting. Doing it in that order also means the expensive nights are the ones you are still thinking about on the flight home, which I suspect is less a plan than a bias, but there it is.
I should be honest about what this costs beyond money, because it is not all upside. You pack twice. There is a changeover morning where you are out of one place at ten and not into the other until three, and that is half a day of a nine-day holiday spent sat in a reception with your cases. Whether €705 is worth that faff is a genuinely open question, and I will tell you either way when we are back.
What the whole thing comes to
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Ryanair, Manchester–Alicante, 2 adults, seats and bag | £426.24 |
| Emily Suites, 5 nights self-catering (€573.75) | £491.65 |
| H10 Porto Poniente, 4 nights half board, junior suite (€1,023.40) | £876.95 |
| Airport parking, offsite | £58.50 |
| Total, two people, nine nights | £1,853.34 |
That is £926.67 each, or £102.96 per person per night, before we have bought so much as a coffee.
Strip the parking out and it is £99.71 a night each for the flight and the bed. I mention that only because just under a hundred pounds a night sounds a good deal more civilised than it has any right to, and the parking is what tips it over.
Spending money is a separate question and a bigger one, and I am not going to guess at it here. What I will do is come back and publish what we actually spent, with the receipts, once the statement lands. That follow-up goes to the newsletter first. It is free, and it lands on a Sunday.
What I will be checking while we are there
This trip is partly a working one. There are five figures in the money guide I have never been able to confirm from an official source, and I would rather photograph a price board than trust a website:
- The taxi tariff card at Alicante, which settles whether the 2026 rates I published are right
- The tram fares to Altea and to Calpe, both of which sit awkwardly on a zone boundary
- A supermarket shop, priced off the shelf-edge labels rather than remembered
- Six menú del día boards walking up through the Old Town, including the same dish priced on the square and one street back
- The rep’s excursion desk price list against booking the same thing on your phone
All of it goes into the October edition of the guide, and every figure in it will be a photograph of a real price on a real day rather than something I have taken on trust. That guide is Benidorm on the Cheap. It is £7.99, and every update to the 2027 edition is free to anyone who has bought it, including the October one this trip is being used to write.
The bit I am still not sure about
I wrote in May that we would book the Porto Poniente for longer next time. We have booked it for shorter, and the only reason is that I looked at the per-night figure and flinched.
I still do not know whether that was discipline or a mistake. Four nights somewhere genuinely lovely against nine nights somewhere perfectly fine is a choice with no right answer, and I have talked myself round both ways since we paid for it.
Which way would you have gone?
