Who Remembers When Our Holidays Were Like This?
It’s not that long ago
We’re enjoying a week’s holiday in Portugal at the moment. We booked online, checked reviews of places nearby on TripAdvisor, checked out the restaurants, downloaded our boarding passes and tickets to our phones, transferred our spending money to a separate payment card reserved for the holiday spending.
But it hasn’t been like this for that long really.
I’m old enough to remember my parents getting travel brochures and I even did the same with my own family before the advent of Booking.Com and other online juggernauts.
We’d sit with a stack of brochures for our chosen destination and would leaf through, gazing at the glossy photos of the hotels, their swimming pools and restaurants. It all seemed incredibly glamorous.
Then we’d sit for ages with a travel agent, painstakingly going through the booking process until we finally had an idea of how much it would all cost. After all, trying to calculate it from the brochure was practically impossible.
Once it was booked, we endured what seemed like an interminable wait for the holiday to come around. For us back then, there was no ‘Lastminute.com’.
Instead the time passed with signals, like the arrival of travellers cheques, to be cashed in at our destination and, like the money withdrawn for nights out, there was no opportunity to overspend. We had our spending money and once that was gone, there was nothing.
Just weeks before, the ultimate thrill was the satisfying thump of the arrival of boarding passes and tickets in the post as they dropped through the letterbox.
The holiday was finally happening, and it was only a matter of weeks away.
During the holiday, travellers cheques were divided equally into days so there was less chance of running out of money. Meals out were calculated like military operations so there was no chance of an overspend.
Photos were taken on proper cameras with film inserted into the back and on our return, the film would be deposited into an envelope. It was sent to be developed, leaving us waiting anxiously at home for a few more weeks to see if we’d managed to capture the fun and excitement or if all we’d captured was 50 photos of our thumb!
Like our nights out, I’ve no recollection of how we managed to successfully negotiate our time away. There seemed to be, from my point of view at least, remarkably few incidents that upset our 10 days in the sun, because without fail, as soon as one trip was done we were off collecting brochures again for the next one.
These days, it all seems so easy. Bookings are online and everything you need is carried around on your phone.
It’s more convenient of course, but has it taken away that thrill?
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