Only slight issue was food on arrival differing slightly to promised list but suspect that was down to local supplier
Good service as usual
Very happy with the service
Flight and seats great. Very fast through Tampa both ways. Thrifty Car Rentals. Both cars nice and clean and and the larger SUV was actually virtually brand new so a bonus
Thank you Ryan, as usual you were very thorough and helpful.
Excellent service.
I've been pretty pleased with DialAFlight since I first began using them a few years ago. Glitches and blips can occur in the best-laid plans - it's how problems are resolved that matters. Glen Blackburn and the team he works with are brilliant. I not only recommend them, I plan to continue booking with them for all my travel needs.
Our DialAFlight service was top notch as usual. Dominic was fantastically helpful and always on hand to help me with any questions. He kept us up-to-date with flight changes and was great to work with.
Would never fly to Orlando with Virgin again
I was very pleased and impressed with the prompt and helpful response to my email re my concern of having to pay for a bag in the hold, which I hadn't needed to do on my original flight, and which DialAFlight sorted out immediately. Fantastic service, thank you.
Sadie our travel manager always comes up to expectations
Amy is the best
Great help as always
I appreciate the way in which communication is consistent from quotes to booking to preparation for the trip. Always available and always good advice.
Thrifty provided a car which wa below what we thought we had specified. We had to pay$500 extra to get a decent size car (still not what we wanted0. We will not use Thrifty again. Everything else was excellent.
We know travel experiences can be 'luck of the drawer' but our experience with your company has been great.
Great trip.
Sally as always delivered our holiday plans perfectly. Can’t imagine doing what we did and booking with anyone else!
Very flexible in helping us make last minute changes - and always available to speak to.
I have used DialAFlight for many stateside visits. Stuart was fantastic at organising my bespoke itinerary
Will always use your service
Had a few issues with car hire firm which caused some inconvenience. We fed this back to car hire firm.
Once again Nathan Sparks and his team sorted out our flights and car hire to the USA. I’ve been using them for a number of years and they never let me down. They are very professional and nothing is a problem for them.
Excellent service as usual - as we have learned from the many years we have been booking with you.
Amy as always is a delight! Wouldn’t book our flights with anyone else.
Our original flight was cancelled after a 4 hour delay sitting on a hot plane. Calvin Ali was on the phone directly to me to make sure that alternative flights and hotel had been arranged for us. As usual, flawless service. And yes, I’ve made 2 further referrals to friends following our recent trip.
Requested a last minute flight change which was accommodated by your helpful colleagues. Many thanks to Mason and his team. 10 out of 10
Excellent advice and service - Tristan in particular was brilliant
Fantastic trip, excellent price. I’ve passed on your details to friends and family and would highly recommend
We have used DialAFlight for many years and have always had great service.
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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