El Al Has Launched a Comprehensive Website for Air-and-Land Packages to Israel

Starting around the time several years ago when U.S. travel to Israel was sharply reduced because of safety concerns, the budget-priced tour to Israel virtually disappeared from the repertoire of air-and-land packages offered by the major tour companies. Now that mass-volume tourism has returned to Israel, budget-priced packages have been slower to make a re-appearance, and the only companies to come close to offering low-cost trips there are Gate 1 Travel and Sunnyland Tours. From Gate 1, you can now buy an air-and-land package ("Israel on Sale") for as little as $1,449 to $1,599; and from Sunnyland there are five-night Jerusalem packages for $549 (not including airfare).

But we may now be witnessing the return of price competition to Israel with the announcement by El Al of vacation packages through a new, dedicated website EL AL Tourism ( tourism.elal.co.il ). It offers escorted tours, daily tours, hotel booking and car rentals, and build-it-yourself "Dynamic Packages" wherein you pick your dates and cities and it puts together a fairly comprehensive trip for you.

Some of El Al's splash-page prices for a flight plus five-night-hotel are:
$1,300 for Jerusalem$1,450 for Tel Aviv$1,500 for the Dead SeaHotels alone start in the $35 to $40 a night range, rental cars in the $29 to $42 per day range.

I tried building a sample, five-night air-and-hotel package in Jerusalem, and the El Al site returned a price of $2,572 for two (or $1,286 per person) for air from NYC and a room at a four-star hotel on Jaffa Street. A transfer to the hotel from Tel Aviv Airport was $103 more (for two), bringing the actual per-person cost to $1,338.

That's not exactly budget travel, but it's not too bad for Israel.