Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
As usual Karl Patel got it spot on. Great trip and very well planned
A bit of a mix up with our room and due to it being a bank holiday the hotel was very busy and our late arrival didn’t help. But the hotel did get it sorted after 2 days
Kelly is awesome
Alway provide excellent service.
We have used Travis for many years and we have always had excellent service. He is friendly and knowledgeable and always does what he says he is going to do.
Have dealt with you for some years now and never been let down.
Please take over Border Control at Manchester Airport!
Only one small thing that we didn’t foresee when booking was the rainy season. And the hotel Serena is not good for a 14 day stay - four or five days max.
Hotel and location was excellent as always
Delighted with the service and one to one communication with the agent - top class
Troy came up trumps as always
Everything went to plan. Will not hesitate to recommend to friends and family. Special thanks to Jim who organised the trip, kept us informed of any changes and was available all the time to answer any questions. Best holiday I have ever had.
Cameron Bleasdale is so, so helpful. He’s a real star
Both Sally and Annabelle were excellent and prompt when queries needed to be answered
Donovan was great as always.
Thank you for always answering my many questions and it is so reassuring to know that I can contact you easily with any concerns I might have
Eve was brilliant. We have booked many flights with DialAFlight and always asked for the same travel consultant. She knows what I want when looking for a holiday. Absolutely brilliant customer service and support 24/7
Another superb trip organised by Bradley
As always with DialAFlight. Brilliant service and follow up. Saf and his team are first class
Everything excellent as always. Will use you again
Excellent all round service - reassured me
Dexter, all perfect. Many thanks. We will be back!
DialAFlight take out all the stress that would be involved in booking complicated longhaul flights
Have recommended to my sons and friends - such amazing service
Can’t wait to book my next flight with you.
Both Howard and Russell were excellent in support and no query was ever too much for them. A brilliant service.
Another fantastic trip organised by Kieran Greenfield at DialAFlight. Already planning the next one
Les is brilliant, very customer-focused and helpful...
First class attention. Very pleased with the support and information given by Emma. Very impressed
Matthew and the team are first class in every respect
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
More articles below...
Not quite what you're looking for?
We can easily customise an offer to suit your exact requirements