Amy as always is a delight! Wouldn’t book our flights with anyone else.
Very helpful when I contacted them and nothing a bother
As always our experience was perfect. Enjoyed the Virgin premium economy flight home which gave us extra bags to bring back our treasures after selling our Florida home. Although we won’t be making the trip twice a year to Florida we will always use DialAFlight for our future travels
Have been using you for years and recommended loads of friends to use your excellent service!
Shame BA were not as helpful and despite cancelling our flight they did not help at all in resolving to a better deal to get us home
Theo helped us when our flights were cancelled coming home - would highly recommend Theo and Jeff
Great service, kept well informed
Everything went great. Good company to use
Jack did an excellent job as usual with no problems
First class service as usual from Eve and the team. Always there to keep you right and answer any questions.
Just keep up the fantastic service and a big thank you to Gary
I always deal with Charlie Miles who is so helpful and kind as I know I ask some bizarre questions. Wouldn’t book a trip without him!
Fantastic company with great customer service. I have used DialAFlight for many years and have always been treated with care and dedication. Daniel knows that l am not good with technology and he takes it all in his stride when l phone him. He helps enormously to stop my fears and worries.
Jeff was very responsive. Super helpful and very kind.
Great service overall although on the way back, they put one of our suitcases on the wrong flight so we had to get that delivered to our home which was done very promptly.
Very impressed with support given
Excellent service as always from Dylan Harris. Dylan has helped us with our travel plans for many years and without fail always goes above and beyond with ensuring that every single detail of our holiday is perfect. I would recommend him without hesitation and would never trust anyone else with travel decisions as I doubt there is anyone better.
This is the third time I used you, excellent service thank you
Always good service from DialAFlight !
The guy I dealt with was really good...helpful, knowledgeable and friendly. Thoroughly recommended.
As always, friendly knowledgeable staff. Elliot and Roy sorted out my trips to my specific preferences, always at the best price, and send prompts about travel requirements and reminders as my trip draws close. Already have my next trip booked with them.
I have been using DialAFlight for a number of years and would not consider using anyone else. They take all the stress out of planning your holiday.
Brilliant service as ever. Have already recommended to a friend who has booked through DialAFlight
Another excellent trip, kept well informed, will keep on booking with DialAFlight. Any problems are always sorted out.
Gavin is always extremely helpful.
Excellent customer service. Highly recommend
Our travel manager Deborah was extremely helpful and patient in helping us find the exact holiday we were looking for. Everything including flights, car hire and villa were excellent.
Ben Till is an excellent adviser and provided a great deal with really nice service.
Joe is awesome. Ground service and food/ drinks on the flight was a disaster.
Top class service from start to finish. The only people we would book with. Thank you Harry and the team.
In January 1981 when mass tourism from the UK to Florida had hardly begun, I made my first trip to the Sunshine State - flying to Miami; this was memorable if only because in the departure lounge at Heathrow I found myself standing next to Eric Morecambe and his wife Joan.
Bring me sunshine, he was probably singing to himself. He needn't have worried; it was freezing in London but when we landed in Miami in the late afternoon, it was roasting. In January! Yet in 1981 Miami was in decline. In the 1960s, for example, when The Beatles made their first trip to the US in 1964 to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, they demonstrated their stratospheric success by finding time for a sunshine break in glamorous Miami Beach.
But 20 years later the Al Pacino gangster film Scarface showed how fast Miami Beach had fallen - business was so bad that plans were laid to demolish the famous Art Deco hotels which had largely become hostels. (Curiously, it was the filming of the 1980s cop series Miami Vice that initiated the preservation campaign - the rundown buildings clashed with the show's Ferraris and Armani suits, so the city was forced to smarten up.)
By 1981 Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, had been open for almost a decade but the place was relatively modest; EPCOT didn't open until 1982.
My trip in 1981 was to write a piece on Air Florida, which had announced the start of low-cost flights between Miami and Gatwick - a route on which it was to compete with Laker Airways. Laker went bust the next year while Air Florida collapsed in 1984. But by the mid-Eighties, thanks to the marketing of some mass operators, Florida had begun to dominate the UK long-haul market.
It had good year-round weather and offered extraordinary value for money. Brits found the accommodation well-appointed and spacious and in the favoured Orlando suburb of Kissimmee, theme parks were on your doorstep.
Since that first visit, the more I've seen of Florida, the more I like it. I've been pretty much all over from Key West - so far south it is just 100 miles from Cuba - up to St Augustine and beyond. I like it all but I'm beginning to decide that I like the western Gulf coast the best, especially the stretch between Tampa and Sarasota.
For a week recently I had a house rental on Anna Maria Island, about an hour's drive south of Tampa. Tampa is an attractive entry point into the States, with shorter immigration queues.
Everything in Florida is nice and easy, from picking up a hire car to obtaining the keys of your holiday house (most have lock boxes, all you need is the combination - I never met anybody from the house rental company). Florida has everything to make a holiday perfect. Had we wanted, we could have made the two-hour drive to Orlando for a theme-park fix, but Anna Maria island has pretty much all you need.
The property came with a golf cart for short trips to the shop or the beach - bikes were also available. There was a large pool, a table-tennis table, a multi-channel TV with domestic TV catch-up - and the fastest wifi I've come across: 80mbps (ten times faster than I get at home). With a Slingbox connection, I was able to sit next to the pool and watch England beat the Aussies in the Ashes - holidays don't get much better than this.
Bradenton was a 25-minute drive, worth it to visit the Ellerton premium outlet mall with outrageous bargains on designer clothes. A similar distance away down at the end of Longboat Key (winter home to writer Stephen King) was Sarasota, worth visiting to stock up on food and drink at Whole Foods: not as cheap as the Publix, a ten-minute golf-cart ride away from the house, but in a different universe in terms of quality.
Because Anna Maria is a place which doesn't attract day trippers, the beaches are never crowded, and at many times of day, if you avoid the busier stretches, you will have them to yourself. Keep an eye out and you will spot dolphins skimming the offshore waters.
The house had a rooftop deck area where one night we watched the Perseid meteor shower stream across the night sky.
Even on non-meteor-shower nights, it was a delight to sit up on the roof and look at stars that seemed close enough to touch. There may be more perfect places to holiday than Florida but, at this very moment, I'm finding it hard to think of one…
First published in the Mail Online - January 2016
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