Fussy friends
While actors vow never to work with children and animals, in our business, the trick is never to book friends and family.
Imagine Natalie’s dismay then, when an old college friend walked through the door with her boyfriend in search of a cheap holiday.
Knowing the girl to be high-maintenance, Natalie began to sink under the weight of expectation even before the couple had sat down.
The brief: a 10-night holiday somewhere neither too lively nor too quiet, departing from a local airport, preferably half-board, though they wouldn’t rule out self-catering.
So far, so good. But, as ever, all of this was to be bought on a shoestring; in this instance just £600 for the two.
Natalie gently advised that it would be a struggle to find a holiday at that sort of price and that seven nights might be more realistic.
“It’s not worth it for seven nights,” said her friend, leaving Natalie with no choice but to go through the possibilities.
“How about Greece and the islands?” she suggested.
“No,” replied the girl, “I’ve been to Greece before and I didn’t like the toilet conditions.”
“Lanzarote?”
“Ah, that sounds good,” the girl smiled and looked excited. Before Natalie could say anything further about the resort, the boyfriend, who had said nothing up to this point, interrupted.
“Lanzarote’s no good,” he said firmly, “I’ve been there before. With someone else.”
His girlfriend raised her eyebrow. “Definitely out of the question then,” she added.
Natalie soldiered on, offering an array of seven, nine, 10 and 11-night holidays, all of which were over budget. Eventually the penny dropped and they realised the amount they were prepared to pay wasn’t going to buy them the holiday they wanted.
“It’s not fair,” wailed the girl, “everyone I know manages to find cheap, last-minute deals.”
Natalie explained the days of the £99 offers are long gone, as anyone who has filled up at the pumps recently would surely understand.
“These days, £99 barely gets you around the M25,” she added.
By dint of pure hard work and persistence, Natalie finally came up with a holiday in the Canaries.
It ticked all the boxes: over-run neither with Club 18-30s nor besieged by the blue rinse brigade, the resort had not previously been visited by either party with an ex-partner and the price was agreeable.
Natalie attempted to book it. The system, however, would not permit her to confirm it, so she was forced to phone Thomson, whose staff advised that, although it was showing availability, there were not enough passengers and they needed to have a child with them.
Natalie suggested the couple leave it with her to sort out the following Monday, waving them off with the words: “If you could produce a child over the weekend, it might help!”
Maureen’s got it mapped
On the subject of children, a very confident five-year-old came in to the shop with his father this week to thank me for arranging a last-minute holiday to Florida for them.
They told me the trip had been a success: the weather had been glorious and the car upgraded.
As the chap elaborated on the holiday, his little boy interrupted: “Dad, this was the lady who told you where to go, wasn’t it?”
I was momentarily paralysed; I couldn’t recall having been rude to the bloke, but then, at my age, I can’t recall a lot of things.
The father gave him one of those stares meant to silence a kid at 100 paces, but the lad was persistent.
“No,” said the boy, “I mean this was the lady in the car.”
The father’s cheeks flushed as he said: “Don’t be offended, but we called our satnav Maureen because she was extremely helpful.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, “especially given my real-life sense of direction. I get lost in the car park.”
“Well, she got us to all the places we wanted to visit,” continued the father, before his son added: “Except we didn’t get to see the space shuttle, because Maureen’s batteries ran out that day.”
“Story of my life,” I said, “just as I’m promised an out-if-this-world experience, all systems fail!”
Maureen Hill works at Travel Angels, Gillingham, Dorset