Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Great service when booking
All great thanks - impressed that you got back to us promptly when we had a (minor) query re taxi transfer. We had a fabulous time and have already recommended you to family and friends!
Gary Patel is excellent and always responds promptly!
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
This was clearly no ordinary cup of tea. The liquid flowing from the china teapot was cough-medicine pink and gushed around the large block of ice in my teacup, reminiscent of a tea chest. Although one of the ingredients was mountain berry tea, it had been infused in Bombay Sapphire gin for two days, given more flavour with lime juice and thyme, and then topped up with Prosecco to create The Destruction of Tea - a cocktail with a kick.
Served in the new Coterie bar of the Four Seasons Hotel Boston, this power-packed treat is named after the initial term given to The Boston Tea Party, an event that sparked the American Revolution.
They'll be raising more than a cup of it this coming Saturday, the 250th anniversary of the most famous tea party in history. It promises to be filled with processions and performances along with the dumping of yet more tea into Boston Harbour.
The celebrations will remember the night of December 16, 1773, when colonial men, fed up with being taxed on their tea, sneaked on to three schooners moored in the harbour, destroyed 342 tea chests and threw 92,000lb of East India Company tea into the water. The cargo was estimated at $1.5million in today's money, and its destruction prompted George III to send troops across the Atlantic.
But the Tea Party hasn't put the Bostonians off the beverage - you can still enjoy an excellent cuppa in the city, often accompanied by delicious afternoon teas.
In search of the best of them, my son and I set off on a tea trail, digesting nuggets of history as we went. Although Boston trades on its past, this city of 650,000 residents - with a hefty proportion of students and businessmen - is far from stuffy. It's also incredibly easy to walk around, as you take in everything from the buzzy harbour area to the upmarket Back Bay neighbourhood.
We started in the Boston Tea Party Ships And Museum, whose two reconstructed boats we could see from the windows of our room at the Intercontinental Hotel. The excellent interactive museum features the only known surviving tea chest from that inauspicious night, used over the generations as a doll's house, a container for kittens and to play games (one is scrawled on its surface).
In the teahouse we tried all five types of tea that were thrown overboard, including two green teas. Although our guide, Priscilla, told us that 'Young Hyson tea was the most expensive, and a favourite of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson', I preferred the bog-standard black tea, Bo-hea.
There are scones at the teahouse, but for a proper afternoon spread we walked to Boston Public Library, the first large and free municipal library in America, with a fancy tea-room downstairs. Be sure to dress up for this superb feast that started, unusually, with burrata and celery soup.
Fuelled for some learning, we hit Boston's Freedom Trail, which details the fascinating story of events leading up to the Tea Party. We take in the meeting house where the Bostonians decided to act, and Granary Burying Ground, which holds the grave of a certain Paul Revere. He made a midnight 12-mile dash on horseback to Lexington to warn revolutionary leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British were en route.
Hancock and Adams's graves are also in the cemetery, opposite the Beantown Pub. 'They say they're the only place where you can sink a cold Sam Adams while looking at another cold Sam Adams,' joked our tour guide Jeremiah Poope ('Yes, it's my real name - you can imagine the fun I had in school.') It was at Lexington, the site of a skirmish between British and colonial forces on April 19, 1775, that the first shot of the American Revolutionary War was fired.
Minutes from the green where the fighting took place, and where seven of the first eight men who were killed by the British are buried, we settled into rocking chairs on the porch of the charismatic Inn at Hastings Park - a Relais & Chateaux property - to enjoy yet more tea, along with strawberries dipped in chocolate, cannoli, blueberry scones and an array of tempting sandwiches and cakes. Better still, this tea is served early, from 11.30am, which meant we could consider it brunch.
You need to leave room for lobster in Boston - I devoured warm lobster tails at Smith & Wollensky and a spicy lobster pasta at rooftop Contessa, while looking out on to the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House.
It wasn't always thus. As Jeremiah told us, in puritans' time, you could be whipped, fined and put in stocks for eating lobster in public. 'To the puritans, it was a giant cockroach from the sea. Only the prisoners ate it.'
Thankfully, you can now enjoy lobster rolls anywhere and anytime, including at afternoon tea. They featured in our favourite stop, at the Four Seasons's One Dalton Street, with its beautifully crafted cakes and delectable sandwiches. Not only that, these goodies were also accompanied by champagne, liqueur and of course, plenty of tea.
First published in the Mail on Sunday - December 2023
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