{"id":13307,"date":"2016-02-03T20:50:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T20:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesojournseries.com\/bavaria\/?p=13307"},"modified":"2016-04-06T08:05:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T08:05:15","slug":"to-package-holiday-or-not-to-package-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thesojournseries.com\/bavaria\/to-package-holiday-or-not-to-package-holiday\/","title":{"rendered":"To Package Holiday or Not to Package Holiday?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was about to tell you that I have never been on a package holiday, but Mr R reminded me that many of the snow holidays we went on in our child free days were exactly that (I just went along, I didn\u2019t book anything!)\u2026<\/p>\n

I guess the very words conjure up images of those first holidays to Spain for many a Brit \u2013 featuring cheap hotels, lobster sunburn and English breakfasts offered to the masses – not ski holidays (however raucous they might have been – I am blaming the cheap French plonk personally), but apart from those, I have honestly never been on one.\u00a0 When I was small, my parents ran a busy country pub so we had very few holidays abroad.\u00a0 The breaks we did take were to either visit family, or to stay in sunny apartments belonging to friends.<\/p>\n

Then, having flown the nest, independent travel was always my preferred option.\u00a0 This probably stemmed from a hatred of being told what to do, and possibly out of pure fear of the atrocity that was my younger sister\u2019s bright red checked uniform (complete with palm tree adorned hair scrunchy) when she worked for a major high street holiday company back in the nineties.<\/p>\n

As they were the main source of amusement at family meal times back then, I could tell you many a tale of the days she spent selling holidays by the bucketful.\u00a0 They included having to decipher the various location requests of customers (Pizza turning out to be Ibiza, not Pisa), complete confusion over the phonetic alphabet, and mortification at phoning up a popular holiday camp to ask whether they accepted \u201cgroup sex\u201d when she actually meant to say \u201csingle sex groups\u201d (they didn\u2019t at the time)\u2026\u00a0 Anyway.\u00a0\u00a0 Back then, package holidays didn\u2019t exactly get a good rap did they? And gradually our high streets saw many a popular holiday firm close their doors for good\u2026<\/p>\n

But recently, there\u2019s been a bit of a resurgence in package holiday love.\u00a0 Actually, here in Germany, it never really went away, and neither did high street travel agents (many Germans can\u2019t figure out why anyone would want to go to all the hassle of booking every single aspect of a holiday, could it be they have been right all along?).<\/p>\n

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40 Buddhas one for each year of Buddha’s teaching. #burma #Myanmar #rsa_ladies #instatravel #instapassport #travel #travelgram<\/a><\/p>\n

A photo posted by @esthergumnphotography on