It’s conference season. They’re all at it – Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the trade unions – but Dino Toulli of Atlantic Holidays is doing it with knobs on.
I caught up with Dino this week and heard his plans to attend the Advantage Conference, followed by the ABTA Conference, followed by the Midconsort Conference. Goodness, think of all the dry cleaning that suit is going to get.
Every conference has an event bound to cause embarrassment – recall, just briefly, Gordon Brown’s kiss with devoted wife Sarah. Dino’s abashment at the Advantage event, however, will be a distinctly shared experience.
He will be among many guests at the Cosmos Group’s ‘Vicars and Nuns Dine-Around’ where all participants will be issued with the appropriate attire. I just hope he gets the vicar’s outfit, and not the nun’s.
The host for the evening will be ‘Cardinal’ Gordon McCreadie, head of sales for Cosmos, with ‘Mother Superior’ Tony Byrne of Tourama. Now I knew Tony had some filthy habits, but I never expected him to be wearing one.
As you can imagine, the event is overbooked for Saturday and any gatecrashers will be dealt with firmly – they don’t call the clergy ‘muscular Christians’ for nothing.
It promises to be a heavenly evening with divine food and drink and no-one on their knees – unless of course the wine runs out, in which case a miracle will be called for.
Dino’s excuse for hanging around the local convent school is to see if he can borrow Sister Mary’s habit and, as for Tony, the only orders I’ve seen him take have been at the bar… Bless them all!
- Photos from the Advantage Conference [Travel Weekly’s flickr.com gallery]
Basketfuls of bother
I do feel sorry for the coach companies at the moment – they can’t do right for doing wrong.
Two of our clients recently returned from a tour of the Black Forest, complaining that they had missed time thanks to the driver’s stop-off to buy fuel in Belgium and Luxemburg, where the lower cost of diesel would offset prices paid in the UK and France. With the coach doing an average eight miles to the gallon, every little helps.
“But why do they fill up on our time, cutting short our visits, when they’ve already charged us an additional fuel cost?” said the old gent indignantly. “That fuel cost is based on UK prices, so the driver shouldn’t have been going out of his way to find cheap fuel anyway!”
I explained that, according to the operator, this time is included in the tour and that the driver had done nothing wrong. I did, however, sympathise with their other bone of contention – the stop-offs at wholesale supermarkets to let passengers buy cut price goods and drink. Some load up with household products – soap powder, cleaning fluids and so on, but others stack up crates of wine and beer.
“We don’t want to go to a supermarket. We don’t need to bulk buy. It’s not a booze cruise after all,” said my client.
“They get their comeuppance,” I replied, “when they can’t get a taxi to carry their goods once they get home, but I agree, it’s no fun to watch people swarm through a foreign supermarket battling to save 20p on an outsize tub of margarine.”
I suggested he put all his thoughts on to paper for the drivers to consider as they wait outside those supermarkets.
Talk about an earful
I see that Thomson and First Choice are advertising free chat time with travel agents as a means of encouraging people through the door. Blimey, the folk round here don’t need an invitation. Especially not those who’ve already booked with someone else.
We’ve never advertised ourselves as a listening service, but boy, do we get the talkers in. I refer to the ones who come in using the line that they ‘can’t afford a holiday at the moment’ but want to ‘see what’s out there for next year’.
Of course, what they want to do is bore you rigid with stories about their last trip to Magaluf/the Rhineland/Paphos while you pray that one of you colleagues will spot your distress and organise an ‘urgent call from abroad’.
But I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures, and anything is better than a silent shop…
Maureen Hill works at Travel Angels, Gillingham, Dorset