![]() Then, when I was 12, my dreams came true – a holiday to Cyprus with my dad, courtesy of the trauma wrought by parental separation. I used to get them from travel agents on the high street and hoard them at home, spending hours flicking through them as I selected my perfect package holiday (always in the hotel with the most extensive and elaborate waterslide system). As a result, holiday brochures were like crack to me. Every summer, all my friends would go on package holidays to Spain and would come back bronzed and with brightly-coloured hair braids, speaking with worldly authority about paella and knowing all the words to Whigfield. We just didn’t have the money, and my brother is autistic so doesn’t travel well. Rhiannon snapped up a two-week package to Malia, Crete, for about £150. Two weeks on a Greek island for £150 including flights? Don’t mind if I do. The sort of people who rent cottages in Cornwall or large houses in the south of France are always asking me, in a slightly snide way, when I’m off on another one of my Teletext jaunts. There’s certainly a class element to these negative perceptions. As a result, the humble package holiday, which revolutionised foreign travel for millions of Brits in the 1960s and 70s, has become somewhat unfashionable and seen as, to use a horrible word,“common”. But my god, it is cheap.īudget airlines and accommodation websites such as Airbnb have transformed the way we travel. Granted, there’s nothing particularly edgy or intrepid about a taking a Thomas Cook flight, hopping on an airport transfer bus, and washing down an all-you-can-eat buffet with a pina colada, followed by a fag on a sun lounger. ![]() Bargains excite me, so naturally I love a package holiday, and go on at least two a year, usually from Teletext holidays, a website with which I have been having an obsessive affair for several years now. T here’s a certain type of person who is snobby about package holidays.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |