Lunn Poly -won in the end! (Lunn Poly)

Member Name: jo1l

Product:	Lunn Poly
Date:	24/05/01 (262 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: excellent service, Competitive prices

Disadvantages: Insurance works out about the same as other high st Travel Agents

Every August Little Treasure and I pack up our bucket and spade and head off for a week in Wales. Every May I persue the bargain's on teletext you know the ones the go now for £99 types and every year I look at my bank balance and think never mind may be next year!!

Unfortunately due to someone booking that August week off before me at work our annual holiday was going to end up as a weekend in Wales!! So as I do every year I looked at the teletext bargains and even dabbled with some of the online booking agency.

Teletext, did give me some ideas, Greece for around about £129 seemed to be the order of the day. I rang two companies giving them a two week departure period and the results were actually very poor!! I wanted self catering accomadation ( basically I want a fridge to chill the beer and Little Treasures juice!!, reasonable flight times and above all a cheapo holiday.

What I got was a very mixed bag, one holiday did offer Room only accomadation with a day flight from Manchester ( my local aiport) but the return was at the dead of night and to Gatwick!! We then had a holiday that retailed at £129 but extra's on top ie tickets on departure, booking fee, transfers to resort and insurance made it closer to £209 in reality. I was then offered a Club 18 to 30 holiday but given the fact I'm too old and Little Treasure is only 3 I declined that!!

None of the holidays that were offered could give me a named resort let alone accomadation. Given the fact I was travelling with a 3 year old I really didn't want to end up in a resort that sleeps during the day and party's all night!! I'm sure Little Treasure would have loved it but I need my sleep after a hard day on the beach!!

Online I did find some fairly reasonable holidays ,a good site is WWW.Bargainholidays.com. This site does tend to give you the low down on every thing ie those all important flight times!! Other sites were willing to give me the
briefiest of details but important detail like flight times were missing! When I attempted to email one company I was given the corporate email in reply asking me to ring them!!!

In the end I gave up as I really didn't want to run my phone bill up any further!! Whilest in town a holiday to Rhodes for £99 caught my eye in Lunn Poly's window. On further investigation it turned out to be the same Club 18 to 30 holiday I'd been offered but at about £20 cheaper on the basic price!!

The assistant then looked for other holidays departing on that date and came up with an absolute bargain, for the basic price of £109 it even gave me named accomadation! Then the downside came the return flight left Rhodes at 5am! The thought of being homeless for nearly 24 hours really didn't appeal! My dream of an Aeroplane holiday ( Little Treasure's words!!)appeared to be over till the assistant checked other flights. Suddenly a day flight appeared on the screen and the return was a day flight as well back to the same airport!! I waited for the assistant to tell me the price thinking it would be loads more expensive but no the basic price was still the same!

With the extra's included this holiday works out at just over £156 per person. This includes tickets on departure transfers to the resort and travel insurance.

When I got home I actually calculated the cost of this holiday if we had booked it as a normal booking, it worked over £575 per person for the week!!!

This same holiday if booked throw one of the online sites with every thing included would have actually been £25 dearer!

Basically bargains can be had but I wouldn't give up on the High St travel agents just yet. The face to face service I got was second to none they even rang the Greek Embassy in London for me to make sure my passport would be ok as it expires in August and some countries like you to have at least 6 months on your passport from th
e day you travel. To be honest if I ever want a late booking again I know where I'll be heading again

Now I really must run I've got packing to do I've a holiday to go on next week!!

Summary: