Excellent customer services 10-10
Excellent service and trip - can’t wait to make our next booking!
Always a great service
Brilliant holiday destination. Had the best time and would love to go back.
Another well managed booking, all ran smoothly. Holiday was fantastic. Galley Bay Antigua was luxurious.
It was very helpful to speak to a person when I had to make a change in travel plans.
Guy was incredible and ensured our whole holiday was perfect from start to finish. Thank you so much
Excellent service from Dylan as usual
Great. Always OK with service given.
BA plane two hours late taking off. One hour late returning. No apologies, not impressed with their customer care. Missed connection coming home.
Ashley was amazing. He was very patient whilst we were deciding on the perfect location for our family holiday! Once we had eventually nailed it down to a location he was able to come up with a selection of resorts within our price range which helped making a decision very easy!
Elliot is the best
Robbie was amazing. Very helpful
Wayne Bailey is excellent and always responsive
Firstly thank you to Emma for sorting out the filghts, she was very helpful and always happy to take my call. With all connections getting back home, it took us 19 hours to get back to Gatwick, now I understand why - Winair are short of staff, hence all the notifications from you that the flight times had been changed. I will not be useing Winair again, for now. Prefer to pay the extra money and use the French or Dutch Airlines to St Maarten.
Any problem always fixed quickly.
DialAFlight deliver what they promise. Abbie is always helpful and goes above and beyond to ensure all our travel needs are met.
Thank you very much Tommy for the organisation and support. Mum had a fabulous birthday.
Stuart always goes above and beyond, never lets us down and is always there if a problem arises
Tara was absolutely excellent in helping us find and book the honeymoon of our dreams. I can’t speak highly enough about how great her communication was, how friendly and polite she was, how knowledgeable she was on the best destination during this time of the year, and helping us find the best available trip for our budget.
James was extremely helpful and supportive
Very impressed with DialAFlight and keeping in touch up to a few days before travelling. Flights are also reasonable with options on payments.
Trevor and his team were very knowledgeable and kept us informed. Their customer focus had our best interests in mind at all times making us feel valued customers
Excellent service once again from Darryll and the team
Fantastic customer service from Calvin. He was patient and accommodating with our request which helped make our holiday a memorable one.
Great service and a pleasure to deal with
Jason is an excellent manager
Always great to work with such a great team.
Jamal was amazing - great service, helpful and our holiday was perfect.
As always you delivered a fantastic service. Efficient, reliable and helpful. Thank you DialAFlight and especially Amelia
Some might remember a TV show of seven years ago called The Young Ones (not to be confused with the comedy series of the Eighties), in which six celebrities in their 70s and 80s attempt to overcome some of the problems of ageing by harking back to the 1970s.
They spent their time in a country house decked out as a 1970s time capsule. The idea was to transport them back to their heyday - they walked on shag pile carpet and watched Crossroads, sipping Dandelion & Burdock, to see if it improved their ailing health and failing memories.
The six were cricket umpire Dickie Bird, dancer Lionel Blair, newsreader Kenneth Kendall, radio presenter Derek Jameson and actresses Sylvia Syms and Liz Smith - and it seems that taking them back to a world where everything was strictly 1975 had a miraculous effect. The experiment, particularly the part involving shag pile carpets, was very successful and they did feel younger.
I mention this because I met a very clever man called Bengt in Bequia, a tiny island just a speedboat dash from Mustique, who is conducting a similar experiment. Bengt is the proud owner of the Bequia Beach Hotel, which is full of couples of a certain age congratulating other couples for being so much younger than all the other couples of almost certainly the same age.
Trapped in time
For Bengt, you see, has created a perfect time capsule. By the time you've checked into one of the 1930s colonial-style rooms with 1950s-style posters, and followed 1960s-style wooden signs to the bar and ordered your first Dark 'n' Stormy, you're already feeling 20 years younger.
It's not just the decor, agreeable though it is. Everything here exudes old-style charisma, a Pathé newsreel picture of how the Caribbean used to be before the big bucks and giant cruise liners steamed in.
There's nothing fusty about the Bequia Beach Club, but everything is as it should be. Charming open-air restaurant on the beach: check. Delicious fresh seafood: check. Friendly but unpushy staff: check. Secluded stretch of sand fringing a gently swelling ocean: check. Cool pool with mysterious rejuvenating powers: check. Friendly faces at the bar swapping rum-punchy gossip about how Carole Middleton put people's noses out of joint in Mustique: check.
The island, which hasn't changed much since Harold Macmillan stayed here (someone told me they'd read he came up with 'You've never had it so good' on the island) is proud of its Royal connections.
Princess Margaret once dropped anchor off Bequia. As a result there's a rather fetching beach named after her. A 30-minute stroll away is the capital, Port Elizabeth, a scruffily teeming one-street town packed with shops, markets and harbourside bars.
Forty minutes away by twin-prop plane is the five-star Coral Reef Club in Barbados, where we stayed for our second week. It, too, exudes old-school cool, although this time for very A-list guests.
Had they wished, the owners of this hotel could have adopted the Bequia naming policy and christened its beach after visiting royalty. Or you could now be staying in a Harold Pinter, Agatha Christie or Prince Harry suite. All have enjoyed the hospitality of the O'Hara family, who have owned the hotel since the 1950s.
But this is the kind of hotel where the rich, famous and we lesser mortals can drift in and out incognito.
No wonder Agatha Christie was inspired to write A Caribbean Mystery here.
There's still an air of exotic mystery about the place, as if a man in tennis whites might appear at any moment among the palms and confess to Miss Marple that yes, it was he who committed the heinous murder in the bougainvillea and he doesn't care who knows it.
Every room is high-spec and the restaurant is high-end. But Coral Reef hasn't lost sight of the good old days. You can bet every dry martini here is shaken, not stirred.
If you hanker after a nightclub, well, that's just a short car ride away - this is hip and happening Barbados after all. But at the Coral Reef it's more cocktails and cool crooners.
Family values
The Coral Reef Club is built on good old-fashioned family values. And that's down to the O'Haras. They may look as if they've stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue, with their brilliant white shirts and glossy good looks, but they are a very real sleeves-rolled-up presence in the hotel.
Matriarch Cynthia glides around the reception rooms and hosts an elegant cocktail party once a week, and sons Mark and Patrick patrol the restaurant.
This is not just their livelihood, it's their home, and you are made to feel like their guests, not just hotel guests.
First published in the Mail Online - February 2017
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