Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Air India, despite its quite recent privatisation, is simply awful in every way. I was at Gatwick for 11 hours , with zero information about what was happening. Apparently the previous two Air India flights to Kochi were cancelled. All very stressful, but no fault of DAF!
There is a great deal of reassurance in knowing that your trip has been arranged by people who really know what they are doing. And that you are not just abandoned to the anonymous machinery of an airline that doesn't really care, in spite of all their rubbish claims about caring! Also that if something goes wrong you can get advice with a telephone call that is actually answered!
Although my baggage was lost from Dubai to London Gatwick I was able to speak to DialAFlight and ask for guidance on how to process the forms to reclaim my baggage. This they did readily which was a comfort at the time. You'll be glad to hear I now have my lost baggage!
Archie was brilliant - sorted everything out. Will definitely be using you guys and recommending to friends
Great service, especially from Ray Taylor.
Zoe Lane is an excellent travel agent.
It's not until something goes wrong with your travel plans that you realise the benefits of booking with them. After sitting on the plane at Gatwick for a couple of hours our flight was cancelled due to a technical issue. At 11pm there aren't that many people in the airport to help. Fortunately a call to DialAFlight's emergency phone line had me talking to Korinna within seconds. She was able to see there were no flights from Gatwick the following morning but there were spaces on the Heathrow flight and she changed our booking to this flight. She also re-arranged our connecting flight for Dubai to Delhi. All this whilst my husband was trying to talk to the airline's customer call centre who were saying they couldn't do anything as the flight hadn't been officially cancelled! A big thanks to Korinna for her help.
Efficient and helpful
No hitches on the way despite the potential for this to happen. Radisson Blue Hotel in Connaught Place excellent service and very convenient for shopping and restaurants.
Always very helpful and a pleasure to book with.
Other than the changes with the flights everything else was great
Amazing customer care
Excellent service
None. Good service
Alfie was very helpful, as usual and ensured all went smoothly
You didn't have to rearrange a flight home for me after a last minute international flight cancellation on this holiday, as you did on the last, but it was so good to know that - far from home - you were there to help me should I find myself stranded. Thank you so much for being there.
Excellent service and they were there for me when I needed assistance. Will definitely use again.
Always had good customer service from Michelle
Flight suggestions worked really well
All perfect!
Everything was handled promptly, professionally and it delivered an experience in India that was everything we hoped for. Great to have a team that were readily available to support us in both the planning and execution! Particular call-out for Brody Letchfield who was our main contact and ensured that, through liaison with Tamarind Global on the ground in India, everything ran smoothly
Connecting flight from Heathrow was delayed because of fog in Delhi, causing us to miss the connection to Goa. Seven hour wait for the next flight.
Great service yet again
Brody once again has provided excellent service and planned our holiday to perfection
Edward Scudder is a star - above and beyond. Quality service
Absolutely seamless holiday to Goa with all the flights booked with Rosie at DialAFlight Thanks again
As always, excellent service especially by Gino. If only BA could learn a thing or two from you about customer service.
Raphael was very helpful throughout the entire process, from initial booking to just before departure
Aiden is great and always most helpful as are all your team!
Thank you for your attentive services
We're mountain biking at 12,500ft in the Andes, past dusty pueblos, along dirt tracks through the fields of red earth that give Peru's Sacred Valley its name. Sacred because of its fertility and ability to support the finest, fattest corn and a mind boggling 2,800 types of potato.
The going has been unusually tough; the air up here is thin, but the stupendous ring of jagged crags and the coca toffees we've been chewing seem to have got us to the top of the world.
As we descend, heading towards the sunken terraces of Moray, one of the 3,000 archaeological Inca sites that litter the valley, we stop for a breather at a field of what could be red-hot pokers. The crop has floppy burnt-orange heads and bright-pink stalks, like the legs of flamingos.
'Quinoa!' says our guide Juan Carlos, beaming with pride. 'It's famous now, no?' Indeed, it is. Not so long ago, only health-food nuts would have known about this tiny Peruvian grain; today, sales of quinoa have rocketed. You'll find it everywhere, a high-protein superfood.
There are 300 varieties of quinoa grown here (including a bright red variety that turns your tongue scarlet), but it's only one in a line-up of indigenous Peruvian ingredients taking the culinary world by storm.
Some are familiar - amaranth, acai - others relative newcomers to our plates, but you'll be hearing more of them soon: maca, lucuma, camu camu, cocona, yakon and huacatay, a black mint traditionally served with pork crackling.
Many can't be found anywhere else, and now there are direct flights to Lima from Britain, they're within reach of the new breed of traveller who will cross half the world for a decent lunch.
Any foodie tour starts in Lima, Peru's vast capital sprawling some 60 miles along the Pacific coast. These days, Lima is a cosmopolitan hot spot where beautiful people drink Pisco cocktails at colonial-era bars such as Ayahuasca, or take yoga classes on the terrace of the spanking new Hotel B in the Barranco, before swinging over to celebrity photographer Mario Testino's gallery in Miraflores.
Testino is a god here, but if you ask for the name of other famous Peruvians, it's the chefs' names that crop up – Gaston Acurio (the granddaddy of them all, 'he's treated like the Pope'), Pedro Miguel Schiaffino at Malabar, Virgilio Martinez at Central. These men are Lima's rock 'n' roll royalty.
But it's not just the high-end new wave restaurants of Lima that draw in the gastronomic tourists – it's the thousands of humble family-run picanterias, the bodegas serving sashimi-style tiradito and ceviche, marinated in a kicky 'tiger's milk' of lime and chilli. It's the street-food carts serving anticuchos meat skewers slathered in garlicky sauce, the stuffed rocoto chillis, and the Pisco bars on every corner.
I stayed at the Westin, a shiny tower of a hotel, its chef a superstar and its breakfast bar serving every superfood under the sun, from inca berries to bee pollen.
Cuzco, Peru's ancient capital high in the Andes and an hour's flight from Lima, is where you find some of the country's most exciting chefs.
Many of the dishes now gracing the refined tables here originate from pre-Inca times. You can see recognisable ingredients painted on the ancient ceramics housed at the unmissable Larco Museum in Lima; while in the 17th-century Andean Baroque painting of The Last Supper in Cuzco's marvellously gaudy cathedral, Christ and the Apostles are all set to tuck into a dish of roasted guinea pig.
Between meals, we visit Cuzco's Coricancha Sun Temple, an amalgam of sacred Inca architecture overlaid with grand courtyards from the Spanish colonial era. Many of the exquisite restaurants and hotels are built within Inca walls.
At the Palacio del Inka hotel, we're served coca tea, a traditional remedy for altitude sickness, and rest our backs against the longest original Inca wall in the country.
This is the story here: a marriage of the historic and the sophisticated buzz of the new.
Back in Lima, I meet British-Peruvian chef Martin Morales, the man behind London's acclaimed restaurants Ceviche and Andina.
'We're a nation obsessed with food,' he shrugs. 'But there's real soul here, too. This (he points to transparent slivers of river trout tiratador and melting cubes of ceviche) is soul food. You can get amazing dishes from a hole in the wall on a back street.' Like everyone I meet in Peru, Morales is full of pride in his nation's culinary endeavour.
'Look,' he says as we leave El Mercado, 'there's history in every dish, the result of 7,000 years of cooking, and we're only scratching the surface.'
Expect a lot more from Peru on a plate near you soon – though the coca tea, I suspect, is unlikely ever to make it through Customs.
First published in the Daily Mail - September 2016
More articles below...