Will always use your service
Excellent service as usual - as we have learned from the many years we have been booking with you.
We have used DialAFlight for many years and have always had great service.
Have been using Sadie for 10 years - would never use anyone else.
Great communication and support during our holiday.
Thank you for excellent service.
Sadie is amazing - we trust her 100% and she delivers every time.
Great as always
As ever, fabulous service offered by Declan. No issues with flights and car hire. Will continue to be first place to go for holiday planning.
Excellent service. Myself and family have used DialAFlight for many years. Always first class service especially Zoe who we always deal with. Never waiting In a queue to be answered. Have recommended many people and they all say the same. Excellent!
Fantastic service from Ethan .. holiday was amazing, would definitely recommend
Keep it up
Bradley was so helpful and made our trip so special
Thank you so much for all your help.
Great service as usual and special thanks to Libby
Great service. We rebooked after a cancelled trip due to Covid and Philippa was excellent throughout the process.
Brilliant as always
Excellent customer service, very helpful with quick responses to any queries
Would never use Dollar car hire again - terrible car and service
Everything from DialAFlight was fab as usual but the one thing I would like to say was how terrible Dollar car hire were. 2.5 hour wait in queue with child in tow. Very disorganised and totally battered cars and one nearly broke down. Wouldn’t use Dollar / Thrifty again
Always efficient and nothing is too much trouble.
Finn most helpful. So much so we have booked another holiday with your company
As always Ben Till was great.
Rupert has taken care of my Florida trips for about 25 years. Always great and nothing is too much trouble. Have recommended on numerous occasions and will continue to.
Very helpful whenever we called
All arrangements as we've experienced before were excellent. The only negative element of our trip was the car hire pick up at Orlando, an airport we have used regularly over the last 15 years. Our car hire voucher was for Dollar, and we had a 90 minute queue wait before being served. This is the worst it has ever been
Delighted with DialAFlight throughout and from first call... excellent customer service and attention to detail. All as I remembered from some 20 years ago!
Your team did great
DialAFlight delivered exactly what we expected and kept us updated throughout the process. Part of what we purchased was car hire via Hertz. They however for their part at collection at MCO were very disappointing, only 5 people in front of us and it was over one hour to get seen and get car details. Not ideal
Excellent deal with fly drive and hotel. Prompt response with quote however I wouldn’t fly with Aer Lingus again, old aircraft and not allowed to pick seats, therefore we were sat at the back with broken TV.
Some of this flight might be intense, but trust your guide and be brave.' The words of warning came from Dr Jackie Ogden as our group gathered in the Link Chamber of the Pandora Conservation Initiative. We had already been through the Genetic Matching Room and been decontaminated for micro-parasites, and were being given the final sequence of instructions before being let loose on the alien planet.
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
With the final motivational message of 'Rise to the challenge!' we were swooping off across the otherworldly terrain and lush foliage of Pandora on the back of a Mountain Banshee, the gigantic dragon-like beast from Alpha Centauri that eats people for breakfast.
Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on your level of bravery - all this excitement was purely man-made. Or, we should say more accurately, Disneymade. Because we were in the Animal Kingdom theme park in the heart of Walt Disney World, Orlando.
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
Pandora: The World Of Avatar is the latest attraction built by the House of Mouse - with the help of film-maker James Cameron - in its vast Florida resort. It has taken seven years to complete.
While some Disney die-hards doubted the wisdom of such an obvious film franchise being successfully shoe-horned into this most naturalistic of parks, the end result is a 12-acre immersive environment that is so packed with features and special effects it would take a small book rather than one article to list them all.
It starts with the Floating Mountains that seemingly hover over the area - gigantic, 156ft-tall rockworks that are complete creatures and waterfalls – and continues through a junglelike panorama of immense complexity, studded with the bioluminescent plants from the 2009 movie that are all recreated in amazingly painstaking detail. They include some examples that react to touch and movement using specially developed sensors.
Cleverly hidden among the alien terrain - which mixes artificial plants with real ones from Hawaii and Africa - are two contrasting rides that take the story of Avatar into the future, 100 years after the war between Earth's Resource Development Administration and the indigenous Na'vi people.
RIDE OF YOUR LIFE
The Na'vi River Journey is a meandering boat ride through the Pandoran jungle, usingwith vegetation, a mix of animatronics and screen projections to create a stunningly realistic series of encounters with the flora, fauna and people. It takes an ecofriendly approach, highlighting conservation principles and real-world issues such as habitat destruction.
After this the action intensifies - Avatar Flight Of Passage kicks things up several notches with the aforementioned simulator ride in the company of Dr Ogden. Sitting astride a kind of stationary bike (and equipped with 3-D glasses), riders seemingly dive, twist and turn in through a long whirl over Pandora, taking in the sights and sounds that made the film such a visual extravaganza.
There also ought to be a special award for the Blueberry Cream Cheese Mousse with its neon blue a there is such a thing as alien looking food, this is it.
Even James Cameron was apparently initially surprised at the huge scale of Disney's plans when they approached him with the idea of Avatar Lane. He said: 'I thought we were going to be talking about creating an attraction. Disney’s vision when they came to me was to create a land.'
ART & ENGINEERING
It has been reported that the area cost up to 500-million dollars to complete. It features music composed by the late James Horner and Simon Franglen, based on the original score from Avatar.
The final word, though, deserves to come from Disney's Zsolt Hormay: 'We had to use a lot of experts to help us with the technology. It needed a lot of different skills. It melds art and engineering. It is like finishing a painting, only in three dimensions - and with a lot of engineering.'
First published in the Mail on Sunday - January 2018
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