Holidays - always fun

Having had 3 chilly weeks in the UK in April and May, (my first visit back for over 2 years and it was cold!), we decided to use some of our air miles and have a 10 day break in Phuket and Singapore.

Phuket was for relaxation and Singapore was for some serious shopping!

I hadn't realised how diffciult it is to use air miles to book a "free" flight. Firstly, the flight maybe free but you have to pay taxes and fuel surcharges,so the flights ended up costing about $100 each (US$). Then you have to scour the flight database to find which flight will take your type of free ticket. This meant that we had to fly to Singapore one day, stay overnight then fly onto Phuket the next day, thus further increasing the cost. By now it is only a tiny bit cheaper than using the low cost carriers!

However, all would have been well but when we arrived at our hotel in Phuket, we were told that our reservations had been cancelled the previous day. Not only that they had already rebooked our rooms.

After a lot of protests from us, we found out that the firm we had used, Asiativ aka asia Online aka Asia Trails Thailand, claimed it had gone into liquidation. They sent me an e-mail timed one minute before my check in time to tell me this , hence our voucher was worthless. So we had to spend 2 nights at anew hotel acrosss the road from the one we had booked and then moved to that one. And of course paid again.

I am currently giving information to Barclaycard about this, and from the website it looks as if the firm is still trading, though they are not answering any e-mails!!

After that, it got better. We went to Phang Nga (James Bond island - from man with the Golden Gun), and did generally relax.

Then Singapore, we saw some friends, ex-Informatics people in my case, and Filipinas in grace's and did a lot of shopping.

I mostly bought stuff for the camera, actually for the flash system and today I actually spent 45 minutes playing with it all and taking some pictures to see how the various toys work!!

Now I must get on with getting my photos onto the web.

Next project!!

And I shall try very hard to blog more frequently!!
Bye for now.