Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Always excellent service
Great recommendations and guidance, as when we previously booked travel through Ben and the team - reminders and links for booking in were invaluable!
Excellent advice on booking and help with advanced seating. Really most helpful guys to deal with and wonderful assurance of somebody out there to help if anything went wrong.
Amazing! Everything was perfect
Thorough planning, everything went according to plan, great service
Lucy McNab was really good throughout
Eric fabulous as always. Sorted out transfer issues immediately
A brilliant tour of Sri Lanka, lovely memories.
Thanks to Kitty who was very supportive, had a great flight and trip to Sri Lanka.
Hotel not suitable for disabled or elderly people, the hotel LONG BEACH should be called, LONG WALK, the hotel is spread over a large area, and access is unbelievably poor, so do let any of your client's know this
Callum was super as usual!
Hotel staff helpful. Excursions offered in Mauritius were overpriced. Air Mauritius Business lounge in Mauritius was appalling - an alternative needs to be found.
Keep up the good work.
Only minor hitch was the hotel on last night we couldn’t get to as we were unable to go through immigration but luckily we found a sister hotel which had a room. Otherwise excellent service particularly as we changed our plans last minute.
Amazing holiday booked at the last minute. Matthew gave excellent service as did your local representatives. All the transfers went perfectly and they gave us a lot of information which was really useful. First class service all round!
Fabulous as always
Excellent service and advice from Stacey
Jake is superb and a great credit to you.
First class. The logistics for the whole holiday were excellent. Probably the best DialAFlight experience we have ever had.
Lucy MacNab was brilliant. Will definitely use her to organise all my travels
Tristan always delivers at the highest level
All pretty good ...
Jamie and his team did a fantastic job at arranging our honeymoon - the only thing they couldn’t arrange was the weather!
Philippa Wales is a credit to your company - everything was exactly as expected, thank you
All perfect, can’t wait to book again. Thank you Ashley.
Thank you for making our holiday so relaxing as everything was taken care of making it trouble free
Shelley Dimes was excellent, very efficient and always came back to us when she said she would. Very helpful all the way through giving us a wonderful holiday.
Thanks to everyone at DialAFlight. Especially Owen.
Great support from Logan and his manager
A really smooth operation flying into Male, getting a transfer to a sea plane and then to our resort and back. There was always a DialAFlight representative on hand to sort ourselves and our bags. The resort was also amazing. A great trip
A BIT OF HISTORY
In his 1891 book Palms And Pearls: Or Scenes In Ceylon, Alan Walters highlights a 14th century Icelandic work which names Paradise as an island off India 'studded with flowers', which he believes to be Ceylon, renamed Sri Lanka in 1972.
And French author Hugo Victor is believed to be referring to Sri Lanka when he writes: 'Paradise is a spot in the Orient productive of all kinds of woods and pomiferous trees: it contains the Tree of Life; there is neither cold nor heat but perpetual equable temperature.'
Arrival in Sri Lanka, with the chaos of Colombo airport and the surrounding roads, seemed some way from that early notion of Paradise.
But once you reach the areas of natural beauty, you'll see why the Paradise description is so apt. There are 26 national parks in Sri Lanka, each one teeming with wildlife. I stayed at the Uga Escapes resort of Chena Huts, in Yala National Park.
A PLACE TO RELAX
The hotel is intimate, with just 14 luxury suites, and they're spread out to ensure maximum privacy.
A sign on the path to the hotel declared that an elephant had last been sighted here just three days before.
One lunchtime, we were enjoying a watermelon martini at the bar when four monkeys sat down just yards away. And on another occasion, we wandered down to the sandbanks below the resort and heard a huge crash. Turning around slowly, we came face to face with an elephant. He was unfazed, but we were overcome with emotion. It was one of the best moments of my life.
You might think that the staff would become blasé about living so close to wildlife, but they delighted in showing us photos of leopards, crocodiles, wild boars and elephants which had all meandered into the hotel grounds. The private suites at Chena Huts are similar to safari lodges: vintage camping lamps, a freestanding bath, a huge bed, colonial style rugs and - a safari essential - Nespresso machine.
There's a plunge pool in the garden of each suite, too - as well as an enormous, lagoon-like pool moments away.
Meals and alcohol are inclusive and you can turn up to eat at any time. And once you've tasted the Sri Lankan fish curry, you'll want to sign up for the cookery classes offered by the head chef.
At 6.30am every day you can set off on a safari tour of the park (or at 3.30pm, though morning gives you a better chance of leopard sightings). Driving through the park, you'll suddenly come to a clearing which looks as if you've been transported to Africa, with huge lakes covered with water hyacinths, and mountains looming in the background.
We saw toucans, elephants, leopards, monkeys and water buffalo - a fabulous experience.
Following our stay at Chena, we set off on a three-hour drive to Weligama, a popular surfing beach on the south coast. Here we stayed at Cape Weligama resort, perched on a clifftop.
The resort has an activities centre where you can take out surfboards, snorkels and paddleboards. There are also scuba-diving courses. I was happier sitting by the Moon Pool - an infinity pool fringed with palm trees where you can watch the surfers bobbing like buoys, waiting for the next big wave.
A VISIT TO GALLE
The nearby town of Galle is one of the most distinctive on the island. It features a 16th century fort built by the Portuguese. We had tea at the Galle Fort Hotel, the most chic destination on the coast.
Back in Colombo,Residence, another Uga Escapes hotel, is the
perfect sanctuary. It's a ten-minute walk from the Town Hall and near the
Gangaramaya Temple, so ideal for sightseeing. We sat by the hotel pool sipping
a gin and tonic and plotted how to return to Paradise as soon as
possible.
First published in the Mail Online - September 2018
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