Pleasant Holidays adds hotel and air packages in California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida [Updated]

For more than 50 years, giant Pleasant Holidays has specialized in offering all-inclusive discount vacation packages to Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean, Costa Rica and the South Pacific. Now the Westlake Village-based company is expanding to destinations in Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida.

What does this mean for travelers? Pleasant Holidays is starting to offer deals on air-inclusive and hotel-only packages at 116 hotels and resorts in the four states.

In California, the company is beginning to market packages — particularly for group travel — to L.A. and Orange County beaches, Palm Springs, San Diego, San Francisco, and Monterey, as well as Napa Valley and Sonoma. Las Vegas also joins the lineup, along with Reno and Lake Tahoe.

In a news release, Pleasant Holidays President Jack E. Richards said this is the first phase of the company’s domestic expansion,  which will add more destinations in coming months.

The company waited out the worst of the economic downturn that hit the travel industry hard before making this move.

“We delayed the U.S. expansion until the economic recession and travel demand improved,” Richards said in a statement.  “We believe there is pent-up demand for vacation travel to these destinations.”

[For the record, added at 7:16 p.m. July 26: An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed  Richard's quote to company spokeswoman Wendy Gigliotti.]

— Mary Forgione, Los Angeles Times Daily Travel & Deal blogger

Image: Screengrab from Pleasant Holidays home page. Credit: www.pleasantholidays.com

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 26, 2010 at 5:24 pm by Mary Forgione and is filed under Airline travel, Arizona, Asia, Bay Area, California, California Wine country, Deals, Florida, Hawaii, Hotels, Islands & Beaches, Lake Tahoe & Eastern Sierra, Las Vegas, Latin America & Caribbean, Los Angeles, Mexico, Monterey Peninsula, News, Tips & Advice, Northern California, Orange County, Pacific & Australia, Palm Springs, San Diego, San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.