What you need to know about free holiday competitions

What are the best “Win a holiday” competitions?

How do you select your competitions to win a holiday?

It is essential to understand the purpose of the “win a holiday competition” in order to determine the odds of winning that competitions or free prize draw. One must pay attention to the way the winner is determined, as not all holiday competitions are equal. The winner selection process of these prize draws can be random, hand picked or based on a test of skill depending on the end goal of the holiday competition promoter. So here are the 3 main types of win a holiday competitions you need to look out for.

Free Holiday prize draws from prize draw websites:

Typing “Win a holiday” in Google will yield a first page full of prize draw websites, and since I do not want to single out a specific business you will need to find the mentioned websites yourself.

So what is the objective of free prize draw websites? Well they are generally called lead generation websites. Leads are in essence the contact details and personal information of an individual. In other words that would be YOU, the personal and contact details of people that have entered these free holiday competitions, and in doing so, have agreed to give away their personal information. Nothing is free. Always remember this fact, nothing is free.

The various prizes and notably the most popular win a holiday competitions are the carrot in the lead generation process. “For a chance to win a holiday” customers and punters are incentivized to part with personal information, lots of very personal information, as well as asked to answer surveys, notably when car insurance or home insurance expires, how many kids in the family and many other personal questions, let alone their mobile number. This is called qualifying a lead, or determining waht that person is likely to buy.

So for a flimsy chance to win a holiday for 2, be it winning a holiday in the Caribbean or just in the country side, you part with your personal information. Your personal details are then sold as qualified leads to a variety of businesses such as insurance companies, car companies, email list companies, etc. A profile will be sold anywhere between £1 to £15.

What are your chances of winning a free prize draw or Holiday competition?
Competitions to win a holiday can run for up to 6 months or longer. Every competition entry is pooled from a variety of websites and offline entry sources. Compounded, the sum of travel competition entries can often exceed 500,000 to well over 1,000,000, some of the most popular travel competitions have exceeded 2,000,000 entries. So ask yourself:

Is your personal info worth a chance of winning of
1 in 2,000,000 for a mediocre holiday?

Travel company sponsored holiday competitions:

The other type is the travel company sponsored holiday competition. These travel competitions are the fruit of a partnership between a media partner such as a newspaper and a travel company such as a holiday package tour operator or a hotel company.

What are the objectives of these sponsored competitions to win a holiday?

For the media company the “Win a holiday” competitions allow it to offer its reader new and exciting competitions, it is value added content, or what I would call perceived added value content.

For the travel company, partnering with a media company gives their brand significant reach. The travel company will provide the travel prize for the Holiday competition in exchange for distribution and reach to the audience of that media company. The key to sponsored travel competitions from holiday providers and hotel companies is also for lead generation. But the only chucks of information the travel sponsor is really interested in is your name and email address for future marketing messages. You will generally only receive the email messages from that company and it is less likely that your details are passed on.

Winner selection and odds of winning a travel prize draw:
The first point is that the sponsored travel competitions have less entries then the massive free to enter holiday competitions. Depending on the selected media partner and validity period of the holiday competitions the total number of entries can vary between 20,000 and 250,000 depending on the holiday. It is common sense that prize draws and competitions to “Win a Caribbean holiday for 2” or “Win a holiday in the Maldives for 2” will get more registrations than a “Win a free city break for 2 in Birmingham”.

Who and How is the winner selected?
Because these sponsored travel related holiday competitions are freebies and free to enter, little do people know how the winner is selected. Most would think that it is random and in a list of over 250,000 it generally is. But many times the winner is hand picked according to certain criteria. For example, the winner needs to be from a certain city, a specific gender or social class. Or the worse situation… well the exact person is hand picked because the business wants to reward a commercial partner… This happens more often than you think. So maybe your chances of winning appear greater due to the smaller number of travel competition entries. That is if you consider a chance in 200,000 a small chance for a week end break in Manchester.

Skill based competitions to win a holiday:

Skill based entry process include such things as Spot the Ball competitions and other games of skill as the method of determining the winner. Competitions to win a holiday from promoters that ask a fee to enter are far different. The business model of such competition promoters is to make a financial margin on the entry fees with the price of the holiday prize.

The great benefit is that these forms of competitions to win a holiday are not lead generation based. Your data is often protected by far stricter privacy polices and stricter terms and conditions. The only objective is to sell the entries to the competition. In general the advertised holiday prize is the one that you will receive. There are no hidden agendas, no last minute product replacements and the prize that is show is the prize the entrant will will.

The odds of winning pay to play skill based competitions have significantly less entries due to the fact that they are Pay to play. So in effect your chances of winning are greater. The winning result is either generated by the skill based game or is filtered randomly. The travel competition promoter does not have any particular interests in who wins his travel competition prize, so it is far more likely that the winner of the competition will be a legitimate winner.