Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
All the flights were really good. However coming back home from Auckland to Shanghai, I wish I’d been made aware that my suitcase would need to be collected at Shanghai and then rechecked in. It wasn’t a pleasant or particularly easy experience. Anyway it all worked in the end.
You are not to blame for the poor service I received on my business class flights from LHR to AKL via Dubai but I will not be booking Emirates in the future
No issues from your end but Dubai airport and Emirates were very poor as far as communication went during our six and a half hour delay.
Great friendly service. Makes life so much easier using them. They find you exactly want you want in a matter of minutes whereas in the past it's taken me hours
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
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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
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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
Frankly, I was at the bottom of the learning curve when it came to Tampa. I had heard of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the local football team, but that was about it. Most British visitors to Florida make a bee-line for Orlando and Miami.
But the old pecking order is changing fast. That's probably why Virgin Atlantic, scenting a winner, is now offering direct flights to Tampa. Parts of the city are run down; public transport is pretty basic. Tampa has been up, down, up again, down again, like one of the rollercoasters in Busch Gardens, the family theme park to the north of the city centre.
But its overall trajectory is emphatically up. I stayed for three nights at the spanking new JW Marriott hotel, in the heart of Tampa, and had a blast.
The city combines the dynamism of 21st-century America with just a hint of old-fashioned Southern charm. It is quite a cocktail - and Floridians love their cocktails.
All around the sunlit bay, I unearthed parks and museums, terrific bars and restaurants, quirky neighbourhoods and, best of all, a wealth of history.
In its heyday, Tampa was known as Cigar City, thanks to Vicente Ybor, a Spanish born entrepreneur who moved here in the 19th century, bought up swampland, then lured thousands of Cuban migrant workers to join him. Soon Ybor City, as the area became known, was turning out more cigars than anywhere else on the planet. No longer, alas.
But I would not have missed Ybor City for anything. Like Little Italy in New York, or the French Quarter in New Orleans, it encapsulates the American Dream - beautiful but fragile - in perfect miniature.
After disembarking from a rickety old streetcar, I soon found myself in a rabbit warren of scruffy streets, some overrun with chickens, some featuring bars and businesses, both weird and wonderful. 'Save a horse, ride a cowboy,' read one sign. 'The only shop in Tampa where death and dysfunction dance a graceful ballet,' boasted another, with dusty skeletons in the window.
Should I risk it? Or play safe and visit the more sedate-looking J. C. Newman Cigar Factory and Museum? I played safe. I am scared of skeletons.
Newman is not just a world renowned company, but the last operational cigar manufacturer in Tampa. Watching highly skilled workers cut tobacco and hand-roll cigars with such loving care was a revelation.
Vicente Ybor wanted to build a community, not just churn out cigars. The 19th-century migrant workers were well housed, got a good education and, after work, met at a Cuban club, of which a local guide gave me a tour. It was built on a palatial scale, with a ballroom fit for a king.
Lunch beckoned - and what a lunch. The family-run Columbia restaurant has been a fixture in Ybor City since 1905. I have never had Spanish food of this calibre outside of Spain. Unable to decide between the grilled snapper and the shrimp and crabmeat casserole, I had both and was soon whinnying for more. Olé!
If Ybor City evokes Tampa past, Hyde Park Village, across the bay, embodies its future.
It's a substantial urban development, less than ten years old, beside a much older residential area - the sleepy pre-war Tampa of shady streets, rocking chairs on porches and tattered Stars and Stripes fluttering overhead.
There are no rocking chairs in Hyde Park Village because everyone is on the move: joggers, dog walkers, teenagers on electric scooters, friends snatching a coffee before repairing to their laptops. The village has already become a magnet for young people working in the creative industries. They hang out in shared work spaces and, after hours, meet at the sort of bars where everyone knows everyone else and the cocktails flow like water.
Want to watch an arthouse movie in a funky bistro? Here's your chance. Or eat excellent Italian food in stylish surroundings? Look no further than Timpano, another humdinger of a restaurant.
For lovers of museums and galleries, the new Tampa Riverwalk is another must, linking a string of visitor attractions, from the vibrant Tampa Museum of Art to the Henry B. Plant Museum, an oasis of tranquillity.
I had brunch at the nearby Oxford Exchange, a much-loved Tampa institution. Part cafe, part shop, the Exchange is a lovingly crafted shrine to books. They even present your bill discreetly folded into a dusty old novel. Class.
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On my last morning, I had breakfast in Goody Goody, a retro American diner, then took a mini powerboat out into the bay.
The views were so thrilling that I nearly disturbed a nesting pelican just 50 yards from the general hospital.
My final port of call was Sparkman Wharf. Millennials in shorts and T-shirts sipped craft beer in refurbished shipyard crates, soaked up the sun and yakked about baseball, love and life without a care in the world.
It was hard to drag myself away to catch my plane home.
But isn't that true of all great cities? They leave you wanting more.
First published in the Daily Mail - November 2022
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