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Great service and help during booking process. The entire trip went like clockwork. Many thanks to Jason.
Stevie was amazing. Very knowledgeable, friendly, prompt and called me when she said she would. Highly recommend
Very helpful and friendly staff and app kept us informed of delays. Excellent service - felt valued as a customer
No issues, all went ahead as planned. Jane did a really good job
Nothing was too much bother. Excellent communication..
All that you promised you provided. Many thanks
Excellent communications and what feels like personal support gives you confidence that DialAFlight are genuinely there to help you get the best from your trip.
Cameron was just wonderful answering all my questions and putting me at ease with follow up calls. Great company and have passed on the wonderful service to friends Thank you for helping to make my holiday amazing!
Very helpful and friendly service. Great to be able to actually talk to someone! Many thanks to Reagan who was extremely helpful when I had a problem checking in online. Very reassuring and nothing too much trouble. Will definitely use DialAFlight in the future.
Harriet was very helpful and kept us updated all the time. We had a fabulous holiday and loved the app.
Brilliant service from Lloyd, Jack and their team. Thank you!
Courtney arranged everything for us and we felt we were in excellent hands throughout. It was very helpful to be able to ask questions regarding seat allocation on Qatar
Usual excellent service. Had a great time. Would go nowhere else to book my Australian holidays. Well done Ralph. DialAFlight is the best
Thank you so much, your customer service is excellent.
Very smooth trip. Thanks so much for all your help arranging flights. Kids first time in Australia and had a blast, really enjoyed the variety of places we travelled to.
You have been just brilliant and your assistance was invaluable. Staff polite, friendly and knowledgeable and great in an emergency situation.
Excellent trip, unfortunately luggage lost on return and still not received!
Gordon goes way and beyond every time
Very helpful indeed. Great organisation to deal with
I would not recommend breakfast at the Crowne Promenade Melbourne. Zero star rating from us.
The help was there when needed. All the information was well presented and given in plenty of time. It made this first time, flying solo on a long trip, feel very confident.
Daniel was very helpful when we needed to change our bookings to return to the UK. It was over the Easter weekend but he still kept communication going. Thanks for that
Everything OK till Dubai airport on way back. Total mess, no organisation, no help. The airport can’t deal with a crisis. Just pathetic.
Can’t fault the service I received by Graham and everything went according to plan. It was great to get a pre-flight call from him to ensure we had everything in place that we would need. As it happened, we hadn’t so it enabled us to get the missing documents. But I would not choose to fly Air Malaysia again. On the other hand, New Zealand Airways was outstanding. Probably the best flight I’ve ever had and I’ve had a lot.
Yet again excellent service from the team at DialAFlight. Will definitely use again.
As always, DialAFlight have been excellent in organising our flights to Australia. Jordan Fell has usually been our contact and is professional and friendly but all agents we have spoken to have been great AND the phone is answered within seconds….always a bonus.
As always Chloe and Lloyd were there to advise and reassure us when our original plans changed on our flights back from Australia
Just keep up the good work. Impossible to fault you.
All went very smoothly. When I phoned Ruby from Brisbane with a query about my flight home, she checked immediately and phoned me back and confirmed that all was in order. Very reassuring. I will definitely use DialAFlight again. Very grateful.
To ride the Blue Train between Pretoria and Cape Town is to travel along part of Britain's imperial history; a journey that is at once luxurious, breathtakingly beautiful and thought-provoking.
The railway heading north from the Cape was part of Cecil Rhodes's grand colonial vision: the 19th-century mining magnate, today the focus of intense political controversy, imagined a trans-port network from one end of Africa to the other to enable British trade and political dominion. It didn't happen but this remarkable train is part of his legacy.
After a night in Fairlawns in Johannesburg, a chic boutique hotel and spa set inside a former country estate, my companion and I head to Pretoria station and enter an older, genteel world, with a nostalgic colonial twist.
We board the bright blue train, with some 80 other passengers, and enter a world of wood-panelled comfort, with brass fittings, crisp linen and low golden lighting. The Blue Train is the Orient Express of Africa.
Once offering an overnight journey to the Cape, the Blue Train is now a deliberately slower experience, taking two nights for the 997-mile trip.
Our charming butler, Angela, has brought a bottle of South African spark-ling wine. The compartments are roomy, about 8m2, each with an Italian marble bathroom.
The train feels venerable and experi-enced, adding to the feeling one is riding a bit of history. I couldn't be happier.
A cocooned quiet pervades the cabin, just a faint rumble of the tracks audible through the wide picture window - double-glazed for tranquillity.
It's time to dress for dinner; dress code is 'elegant' for ladies and jacket and tie for gentlemen. I've opted for the linen suit with leather waistcoat, as worn by Robert Redford in Out of Africa.
The dining car is a vision in starched white tablecloths and heavy cutlery. Our waiter, Collen, has a deep sonorous delivery and virtually sings the menu. The food is delicious - seared scallops, cured salmon, duck breast, South African cheeses. The list of South African wines is positively tidal.
Collen is explaining that he once met the Queen. For a glorious moment I think he may be referring to Queen Victoria.
We totter back down the corridor, the sway only partly induced by the train's movement. You can sense the vastness outside; not a single light is visible, save a flutter of stars.
In the 1920s, steam locomotives plied the line between Cape Town and Johannesburg. After the war, the Blue Train service was launched, named after the blue steel trains introduced a few years earlier.
Rhodes died in 1902, but countless colonists still took this route north for the diamond and gold fields. Rhodes even had his own private carriage; his body was transported along this very line, stopping at every station for mourners to pay their respects.
In the morning, a blinding African sun slices through the blinds, which lift to reveal the plains stretching into the distance. We eat eggs benedict and fresh fruit and watch herds of tiny antelope flickering through the scrub.
Watching Africa glide past at a stately 30mph is mesmerising.
At mid-morning we pull into Kimberley, where diamonds were discovered on the farm belonging to the De Beer brothers in 1871, prompting the greatest diamond rush the world has seen. Here, until 1914, some 50,000 miners using picks and shovels extracted 6,000lb of diamonds.
We are driven to The Big Hole museum - exactly what the name indicates, a pit 460m wide and 240m deep, the largest hand-dug hole in the world, a testament to human ingenuity and man's hunger for gems. Now it's a ghostly place.
At Kimberley station, the station-master hands out South African sherry in tiny glasses engraved with the Blue Train logo.
The train sets off into the Great Karoo desert, the vast plateau the size of Germany whose name comes from a Khoi tribal word meaning 'land of great thirst'.
I sit in the observation car at the rear, watching the vast bushveld drift by, an undulating tableau of rock, semi-desert and sparse scrub. High tea is served in the lounge car, with cake and scones; another extravaganza is staged in the dining car in the evening, to the accompaniment of Collen's echoing baritone.
We awake descending towards the Cape, with vineyards stretching away under high granite outcrops, as our journey on this historical artefact rolls to a close. And our holiday is rounded off in wine country, with a few days in Majeka House, a delightful boutique hotel just outside Stellenbosch.
First published in The Times - May 2019
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