My consultant Fraser Gillespie was great
The trip was bang on the money.
LATAM has improved its service since March 2022: Better aircraft, better food and more comfortable. Business class seems almost worth the price!
Your service is exemplary.
The commitment to your client is always 100%. I consider my contact at DialAFlight as a knowledgeable friend in all things related to travel. From pre ordering my special meals on flights to planning connecting flights with appropriate timing.
The DialAFlight team were very helpful when there were issues with Avianca over delayed flights to my destination. They investigated the situation on my behalf, and gave me prompt feedback and advice. Although the email I received from Avianca the day before my departure informed me of a changed time for my second flight, it was DialAFlight who discovered the real problem was with my first flight (from Heathrow) which was delayed 12 hours! I was thus able to make arrangements for an overnight stay in advance - unlike fellow passengers, who only heard about it on arrival at Heathrow. Thank you, DialAFlight!
Thank you Callum you are a star
As always, excellent
Unfortunately British Airways once again were woeful at Heathrow
As usual, DialAFlight made it all so easy and convenient. Thank you once more!
Always happy to use DialAFlight!
Everything went well with no problems.
As always, Cameron goes above and beyond. Service was excellent
Excellent customer service given by Elizabeth Lidbury
No problems anywhere but if there had been it was very reassuring that I had contact numbers to be able to use at any time. Thank you for a stress free trip from booking until home again.
Thank you for making this such a smooth trip!
Although American Airlines cancelled my return flight 8 hours before departure this was not your fault
Despite BA cancelling our Manchester/ Heathrow shuttle at ll hrs notice, prior to our connecting flight to Lima, Stan and the lovely lady on the out of hours number did as much as they could to help and support us.
Always amazing customer service, knowledge and sense of humour!
Fantastic service. Thanks
Flights were all on time and we had no travel problems.
Thanks for smooth travel
Thanks a lot Darryl for your help. Very professional
Great customer relations
I only use DialAFlight for all my trips. Shane is so helpful. It's so easy dealing with him.
Did not rate Iberia. Bag delayed 2 days in Madrid
Reassuring to know you are always available to handle unexpected changes - any time. Thank you very much for your excellent service
As always Gavin Dattani was excellent. He is a real credit to DialAFlight and a very professional and knowledgeable member of the team. My mum always books her flights with Gavin and he is patient, understanding, clear, detailed and thorough. He looks after her and takes time to find the best deal for her. I would not hesitate to recommend Gavin, he is a true travel professional
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Great service
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
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