A few months ago, my cousin Steven announced that he was planning to get married in Paphos in Cyprus this coming June. Never one to miss out on an excuse to go on holiday - and never having been to Cyprus - I jumped at the chance to help him celebrate his nuptials.

It was only later when I started being quoted prices of £800 and £900 by travel agents for a week's half-board in a four-star hotel that I realised something was not quite right - the day in question, June 1, was slap bang in the middle of May half term week.

For our whole group - my parents, another cousin, myself, my wife Clare, our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Lola and an as yet unnamed baby due to arrive any moment now - this would mean splashing out over four and a half grand. I'm sure Steven won't mind me mentioning that it's his second wedding either, which makes it seem even more expensive.

As someone who regularly books things independently, I knew that there were savings to be had from booking over the internet but I wondered whether this would still be the case for one of the busiest weeks of the holiday year. With a newborn baby with us, the brief was to find a clean, high quality hotel, preferably with the option of room service.

When booking a holiday independently, the first thing I do is go to see a travel agent. That might seem odd but it gives you a very good idea of the price you are looking to match or beat and you can effectively have your own researcher doing lots of legwork for you free of charge. They might get a little annoyed that they have done all that work for you but, hey, if they offer the service, why not use it? Our local MyTravel agent came up with the £4,500 figure as their best shot.

After walking up and down the high street, I turned to the internet. A quick check on the First Resort revealed that the same deal was available for around £4,100, a saving of £400 on the bricks and mortar travel agency price. It still wasn't enough of a saving so I started looking at putting my own package together independently, usually the way to reap the best savings.

When looking for short-haul flights, I always start at Skyscanner. This site brings together fares from hundreds of airlines, including all of the major no-frills carriers. Perhaps the most powerful feature of Skyscanner is the ability to see at a glance in graphical form the two cheapest fares on a specific route over the course of a whole month. If you are flexible about when you fly and just want the cheapest fare, this is gold dust.

The cheapest weekend flights found through Skyscanner came in at £326 including taxes, flying with First Choice Airways. Skyscanner isn't infallible. Rather than getting live fares every time you make a search, it only gets the very latest fares every now and again. This means that the fares quoted are sometimes out of date but in my experience, more often than not, the live fare is almost always the same as the most recently updated one.

The real beauty of going independently is that you are not quite as fixed into the Saturday to Saturday mentality of package holidays, although many hotel and property owners still try to get you to do the same to fit in with their package holiday guests. Since we were flexible to some extent - in that we only had to make sure we were in the resort on June 1 - we could change our dates of departure to get a cheaper flight. By travelling out on May 31 and returning on June 7, we could get flights for £204 including taxes, although these were in the middle of the night. In the end, I settled on a balance between price, flight timings and the ability to fly from our local airport, Luton, and found flights with Thomsonfly that would cost us £1,659 including taxes for the whole group.

Approaching hotels directly is often a good way of making savings or if not then perhaps getting an upgrade on your board. I have sometimes found the same price for half board on a hotel's own website as I could get for a brochure's B&B price.

In this case, for the hotels I was looking at in Paphos - the Elysium and the Amathus Beach - going direct was more expensive. I was beginning to think that this was a holiday that was going to be out of reach but another idea occurred to me. I had heard of the Aphrodite Hills development near Paphos - golf courses, shopping and a five-star InterContinental hotel - but the prices I had seen quoted seemed astronomical. However, my searches had started to show up villas that were in the same resort complex. The idea of having our own space but being able to use the resort facilities seemed very attractive - and the prices bore this out too.

My searches for villas nearly always start at the same website - Holiday Rentals. This is because I like its advanced search functionality, allowing you to search for properties near the sea, with private pools, and it shows their availability through an easy to understand calendar grid. The only thing that isn't so good is that some property owners don't always update their availability online, requiring you to send an email. The Holiday Rentals database includes more than 16,000 properties. Some of my favourites are the stunning La Lune d'Or villa in Marrakesh (property 6278), an 18th century farmhouse in Languedoc-Roussillon where you can take art and cookery classes (property 7394) and a lighthouse in Burnham-on-Sea (property 58944).

A keyword search on Aphrodite Hills yielded 127 properties but none provided the right combination of size, availability and - most importantly - cost.

Another favourite for finding self-catering property is Owners Direct, with a similar proposition to Holiday Rentals. It has around 7,000 properties in its database and you can search on location, property type and size, facilties such as swimming pool, wheelchair and pet-friendly and availability. Once you have found a property, there is tons of information such as bedroom sizes, layout of rooms, proximity to key attractions and contact details for the owner. The site has excellent quality photos of the properties too.

This had just seven properties available but one was just what I was looking for - an eight-person villa with luxury furnishings, its own private pool and a price tag of £1,500 for the week all-in (property CY286). Incredibly, when I contacted the owner by email he reduced the price to £1,200 without prompting. If anything, the villa looks even more luxurious than the hotels I had been looking at. The last piece of the jigsaw to take into account is transfers, which were included in the package price. A quick Google search for "aphrodite hills transfers" led me to Holiday Taxis and return minibus transfers for £192.

Summing up, our package now costs £1,200 for the villa, £1,660 for the flights and £192 for the transfers - £3,052 for the whole group. I haven't accounted for food here but with all you can eat meze at the Pithari restaurant in Aphrodite Hills for just £13, I don't think we'll be breaking the budget. For the group, I would say that booking DIY has saved us around £1,000 and we have a nicer place to stay as a result of my internet research.

When doing things this way, you always have to consider research time. I probably spent eight hours in total, organising searching for the right flights and a villa. If you are cash rich and time poor, doing it yourself is probably not worth it but if you can fit in a few hours of surfing then you are laughing. With that £1,000 saving, Steven and Tracey will now be getting a larger wedding present.

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