Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Great service and prompt attention
Great service as usual. Excellent phone pick up, good prices and wonderful advice about which airlines, stopovers and timings.
Zoe always delivers.
Annabelle C is amazing and I'd book again with her!
Lloyd was very helpful at all times
Thank you for an excellent service
You guys are great….will return to you when (all being well) we head back to Kiwi in 3 years time. Lots we didn’t get to do!
Thanks so much to Jim for his consistent help with my trip!
Again you excelled. Hotels were fantastic, close to all amenities and attractions. About to book again with you.
Great service as usual.
I appreciated the prompting and information regarding online check-in and luggage. The cherry on the top was the personal call to confirm all was in order for my trip.
Good service as usual. Just the one small hiccup
Our journey with Emirates went smoothly & the flight timings worked very well for us to minimise our jet lag.
Fantastic as usual, superb communication throughout.
I had to change my flight at the last moment because of a family emergency and the staff could not have been more helpful.
We were unimpressed with BA cabin service. The cabin staff were grudging and slipshod compared with ANZ and other Asian airlines. I will take this up with them separately; and second, transiting through Shanghai is pretty awful with lots of uncertainty and unnecessary bureaucracy which made many of us on my flight pretty fed up. Not a patch on Singapore, Hong Kong or Seoul.
Always an excellent service. Very professional in all aspects of the travel industry. Would always use and will always recommend
Always give the best service and advice. I always recommend you to others. There is always someone ready to help when needed
My thanks for your help in booking my trip to New Zealand . I will definitely use you again and recommend
Just to say thank you for making my trip trouble free
Gary, as usual, went above and beyond to make sure we were very well looked after
Very appreciative of all aspects of your help and service. A great trip - thank you
I have used the service of DialAFlight for many years and they have never let me down. The best.
Helpful, knowledgeable and responsive. Great service!
Working with Emma is such a pleasure. I never used to use a ‘holiday agent' but I get so much care and attention with DialAFlight, that I will continue for years to come
Flights went like a dream. Thank you Freddie
After over 20 years of using DialAFlight to book our holidays we are so grateful for all the help Kylie Budinger has given us. Always there for us and has never let us down.
Helpful staff
Will use you again
Everything you organised worked perfectly, thanks
Some of us simply can't do a whole English winter any more. For me, there is the added business every December and early January of being on the panto treadmill, three shows a day, in Guildford.
What's more, this year, the Grim Reaper had been scything like Poldark through my address book. I needed a break. I needed sun. Then someone suggested Goa is a goer. 'Goa?' said our son. 'Isn't that where you take stimulants and rave?' Well, excuse me if I rave.
THE LEELA HOTEL
The Leela Hotel is wonderful - despite the fact that Putin visits. Sir Mark Tully, the BBC's voice of India, stays, as does Sonia Gandhi, who arrived shortly after we left.
My wife Kate and I flew there non-stop and then had an easy 75-minute transfer.
Many of our fellow passengers were heading for package hotels up the coast, rather than sweeping into The Leela's discreet gates at the end of the peninsula.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND
The Leela was built 26 years ago and has benefited from less strict planning controls than exist now. It was able to secure a private beach then, not possible now, so that means it can put as many sun loungers on the sand as it wants.
Hotels now, fronting public beaches, can park no more than a dozen loungers. But for Leela guests, there are more than enough loungers for everyone.
Croquet is the only nod to the Raj, but the guests nevertheless are 50 per cent English: you can tell by their Boden linen. An elderly lady archaeologist from Pimlico, an accountant from Bromley, a yoga teacher from Hampstead. All regulars for decades. 'What makes this place,' they chorus, 'is the staff.' The astonishing ratio is 3.5 staff to each guest, lifting your finger before you're even aware that it needs lifting.
Of the rest? Russians (in bling), Euro-randoms (Italians leading the charge) and wealthy Indians. Their children are perfect: well-behaved and virtually invisible.
AT THE BEACH
The beach is perfect, too – no lacerating coral, the breeze cooling without sandblasting. At sunrise, there are dolphins. Sea eagles frame themselves beautifully between palm trees.
Sandpipers dart. Beach guards keep hawkers away. At night, you watch the lamps on the fishing boats and owlets hunting.
The huge rooms are scattered around 75 acres, overlooking lagoons where pink lilies bloom.
There are private villas, too, within the – yet more exclusive – Club, for Bollywood stars and Mr Putin. Silent buggies convey the elderly from joy to joy.
Conferences are discreetly arranged, wedding pavilions erected and down by morning. Indian ceremonies are welcoming and their tribute bands do a creditable Radio Ga Ga.
We attended not one, but two, Punjabi weddings of radiant couples we had never seen before, nor shall again, but may blessings rain upon them. My meditation class was too singsong to be intelligible, but the four-year-old Indian boy in front of me had it sussed. The gym is so deserted that the trainers are truly personal. In the top-flight spa, Kate had a magnificent holistic massage, with oils, bells and probably whistles.
CULINARY DELIGHTS
All You Can Eat was never like this. Thyme-scented lentil soup with roasted walnuts? Goan kingfish? A bewildering vegetarian menu, creamy dhals, dhingri palak? Desserts? How about rabri (cardamom condensed milk) and dates in soft, white fudge?
Trips to the Goan capital Panaji with your own driver are astonishingly inexpensive and you can shop there for textiles, paper and incense.
Ten miles on and Old Goa, with its Portugese churches, is unmissable. 'Another day in Paradise,' says the daily Leela newsletter. Nonsense. Paradise can't compete with this. Paradise won't have so many staff.
First published in the Mail Online - July 2018
More articles below...