The Unpackaged Holiday

Every now and then, one reads a human interest story in the papers about a couple who have taken their annual holiday at the same time, in the same place, for each of the last thirty, or forty, or even fifty years. The piece usually goes something like this; "George and Ida Bradley believe that familiarity breeds contentment. The couple have been married forty years and for each of those years they have taken their fortnight's summer holiday at The Seaview Guest House in sunny Skegness, just forty miles from their home up the coast at Grimsby. Said George, a sprightly 72-year old, "We've simple tastes so it suits us." Ida (68) added, "We tried Spain one year, but it wasn't for us; too many foreigners and you couldn't get a decent cup of tea for love nor money. We decided to stick with Skegness and have never regretted it."

The same resort, the same guest house, the same bench, year after year, after year. Photo: Alamy

Whenever I've seen a story like that I've marvelled at the lack of imagination that makes it possible for people to go on holiday to the same place year after year, after year, but now I'm wondering if I haven't started to fall into the same pattern of behaviour myself, since my wife and I have just returned from our sixth visit to the same hotel, in the same resort, albeit that we travelled a bit further than the mythical Mr & Mrs Bradley. Back in 2015, we went to Cyprus for the first time, to stay at The Annabelle Hotel in Paphos. We liked it so much that we went back in 2016...and 2017...2018...and 2019 (twice, and it's only May!)

View from our hotel room at The Annabelle; this was last year.

We like The Annabelle for its understated elegance, for the peace and tranquillity that it provides, for the marvellous restaurants and wonderful food, and for the staff, who -one gets the impression - are proud to work at the hotel; this is clear from the exceptional level of service that they deliver, and the relationship they have with their guests - many of whom are clearly repeat visitors. Over the years that we have been going to the Annabelle we have seen a few changes, none drastic, all subtle and clearly made with the intention of improving the visitor's experience. It is good to see that the hotel is not content to rest on its laurels, but is constantly improving, to maintain and surpass its very high standards and quality. The resort of Paphos is a place that suits us too; it is refreshingly peaceful. Although there are a number of bars and restaurants by the harbour, the atmosphere is never raucous. Paphos also benefits from a coastline that affords the opportunity for some nice walks, which Val and I enjoy, to the extent that on our last visit, we walked just over seventy-miles - along the coast, and up to the old town. One of our trips took us by bus to Coral Bay, from where we walked the eight-and -a-bit miles back to Paphos. Buses on Cyprus are cheap (€1.50 for a single trip, €5 for a day pass), and fairly frequent, well worth using to get around.

On the walk from Coral Bay

A cold beer after a long walk...bliss!

Unusually, we booked this trip to Cyprus through a travel company (TUI), our normal practice in recent years has been to book direct with the hotel and arrange flights and transfers ourselves. Back in the 1980s, when I took my first overseas holidays, there was little choice in how you arranged your holiday. The normal practice was to go to a travel agent, arm yourself with a pile of brochures, pick a resort and a hotel, then go back to the agents where you would try and shoe-horn your requirements into what was available, which normally meant compromising on which resort, which hotel, or when you could travel. Saturday to Saturday bookings were the norm; customising dates was tricky, choosing your flights nigh on impossible, and since all transfers seemed to be by coach, it could be a couple of hours or more between landing and reaching your hotel, even if it was only a few miles from the airport, after all the other holidaymakers had been dropped off at their accommodation. Then came the internet and the budget airlines and suddenly, the need to use a travel agent and fit in with what they wanted to sell you went by the wayside. Customising holidays and dealing direct with hotels and airlines became easier and more flexible than using a travel agent.

In the years since I retired and Val went part-time at work, we have been able to be much more flexible in when we travel, which means that booking holidays normally starts with finding when the cheapest flights are to wherever we want to go, then matching the dates with hotel availability. That is when the chicken and egg situation arises; which to book first, the flights or the hotel? Book the flights first and there is the chance the hotel won't have vacancies - or not in the class of room you want - between those dates; book the hotel first and there's a risk that the flights will either be unavailable or suddenly hideously expensive. There's always a frisson of excitement as having booked the flights (our normal practice), we then try to book the room that was available just a few minutes before we paid for the flights. While my first overseas holidays involved fitting in with what travel agents had on offer, today the travel agents offer much greater flexibility, and it is probably moot as to whether it is better to book oneself or use an agent. The greater purchasing power that travel companies have tends to drive prices down and our last trip to The Annabelle was, thanks to TUI, slightly cheaper than the last one we booked independently. Mind you, we could have saved ourselves a few bob when we went independently had we not made the basic error of paying our bill in Euros and paying a hefty Non-Sterling Transaction Fee to the credit card company.

The Annabelle is part of the Thanos Group...

...nothing to do with the Marvel Comics character!

The major advantage to booking independently however, has been that for two out of our last three trips to Cyprus, Val has travelled a day or two before me, something that it might be a little trickier to arrange through a travel company. Also - and this might just be a coincidence - all the times that we have travelled independently, our plane has been the only one on the tarmac when we have arrived, making it easy to get a cab, even if we haven't booked a transfer, and I haven't bothered the last couple of times I have travelled alone; this time however six planes had landed in a short period of time and the arrivals hall was bedlam.

 

View from the Mediterraneo restaurant at The Annabelle

I have no doubt that at some point in the not too distant future we will be planning another trip to The Annabelle, and no doubt this will involve comparing the benefits of the package holiday v the unpackaged holiday; it's the sort of thing that spreadsheets were made for!

The Holiday Planner

They say that holidays are a major cause of stress, along with moving house or divorce, so by the time you read this I may well have been fairly stressed, since I will have just returned from a short break with some of my family. If the holiday proves to be as stressful as the process we went through booking it, then I may be very stressed indeed, although I hope not.

Someone has to stay to look after the hamster...

A few weeks ago we decided to book a short break since Val had some leave to take and Sarah had finished her exams. Rebecca could not get time off work and had a dressage competition at her riding school anyway, so was deputed to stay at home and mind the hamster. Our destination of choice was The Canary Islands, selected on the basis of our preconception that the weather is always decent there. It is one of those places that we instinctively feel will have good weather all year round, so we looked at hotels and flights to Tenerife. One of the great advances in booking holidays these days is the internet. Unlike years ago when booking holidays, and particularly booking flights, had to be done through a travel agent, at whose mercy one largely was, booking a flight and a hotel independently is just a few clicks away. This is both a blessing and a curse. The trade off is between the ease and speed and the sometimes impetuous nature of one's booking. We congratulated ourselves that within a matter of minutes we had booked a hotel in Tenerife and flights from Stansted with Ryanair.[1] We congratulated ourselves for the efficient and stress free experience of booking our holiday and sat back and began to start thinking about what we would do once we got to the resort, which is when things began to go awry.

Sarah, who is rarely without a laptop, smartphone or tablet to hand, looked at the weather forecast for Tenerife for the duration of our trip, something that perhaps we ought to have done before clicking away at airline and hotel websites in such a cavalier fashion. She reported that the weather was going to be, how can I put this, indifferent during our break, that is to say overcast with some rain and temperatures no higher than at home. Doubts set in. Were we doing the right thing? Should we have looked at other resorts? Should be cancel or change our plans? Indeed, could be cancel or change our plans? Why was the weather not as good as we expected? That last question could be answered by looking at historical weather statistics for Tenerife, which showed that in winter there was a big difference between there and home, but as the summer approached the difference was less marked and in June not much different at all, and given the respective forecasts for home and our destination this week, actually better at home.

Faced with the prospect of this...

...we chose somewhere that hopefully will look like this.

This was when serious doubts set in and we began to consider alternatives, if indeed there were any. Which in itself is something that one probably would not have contemplated in pre-internet days. I cannot imagine even considering going back to a travel agent less than a week before the departure date to try and change one's holiday, but now it is doable, albeit at a cost. In fact pre-internet one would not even have thought of it because either one would not have known about or even have tried to find out about the weather and would have arrived in the resort and made the best of whatever the weather was; I know I have had to do that many times in years gone by.

So, to the alternatives and much of it depended on what Ryanair would do and particularly if they flew to whichever destination we chose as an alternative to Tenerife. I cannot begin to describe the convoluted conversations, considerations of alternatives and sometimes outlandish different solutions we chewed over, which included Greece, Egypt and Dubai to name but three. In the end we found that Ryanair had flights available to Cyprus for the period we wanted to travel. Next we located a hotel in Paphos that fitted the bill. Now came the tricky bit. Obviously one doesn't want to book the flights and then find that the hotel is fully booked; equally one doesn't want to book the hotel and find that there are no flights available. As it transpired, we managed to book both and cancel our original hotel booking with only a minimal charge. The new flights cost a little more than the originals and of course Ryanair added their admin fee, a fee which many people complain about. The popular press and their websites abound with people complaining about being  "ripped off"  by Ryanair when the fact is that the company are quite upfront about the fact that they charge low fares and high prices for extras or amendments.

The budget airlines and the internet have been responsible for majors changes to the way we take holidays. No longer are holiday makers at the mercy of the travel agents; being able to book direct with hotels and airlines has revolutionised holidaymaking and it is now the norm (on short haul flights at least) for passengers to take only hand luggage. There is of course always that air of tension when approaching check in with hand luggage: will it fit the airline's restrictions? Yes, you measured and weighed it before you left home but somehow the airline's measure often seems a bit stingier. On more than one occasion I have seen passengers reconfiguring their luggage at the gate!

Recent news suggests that our hand luggage may have to shrink in future, however. Currently there is quite a variation in the sizes airlines will accept, from BA's 56 x 45 x 25cm to Ryanair's 55 x 40 x 20cm or Wizz Air's 42 x 32 x 25cm. Now the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has come up with an "optimum" for cabin luggage of  55 x 35 x 20cm, which it says will mean that "theoretically everyone should have a chance to store their carry-on bags on board aircraft of 120 seats or larger". Good on the one hand that regardless of airline one would know what size bag one can take and good that you would know it could be stored in the overhead locker but not so good if your currently valid luggage is all too big. IATA cannot enforce the changes but I imagine that luggage makers and retailers would welcome the move and would be rubbing their hands together thinking about extra sales and extra profits.

I'm off to find a bag that meets Ryanair's size restrictions and to pack it. Hopefully this holiday won't be as stressful as the booking process. I'll let you know in a week or so!

NB: This blog was first published 16th June 2015

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[1] I know a lot of people can scarcely find a good word to say for Ryanair, but (touch wood) our experiences have been universally positive.