Holidays Please

As Tailor-Made as a Saville Row Suit!

We had heard about Holidays Please in the past. My mum (who was wheelchair-bound) and my dad had used the agent to book a trip to Singapore and Australia some years ago and a good friend used them many times for cruises all around the world.
Our 25th wedding anniversary is coming up and we wanted to mark it by doing a cruise, something that we had never done before. The down side to this might be that we would have no real idea of what we should expect from doing something new. I have recently become very restricted in my mobility so this added some important things to the list of considerations.
I called our local Holidays Please agent (Philip Grout-Smith) who remembered me from his time working in a high street travel agency. He was only too pleased to visit us at home to discuss our requirements. We hoped to do a 7 day stay at Walt Disney world with a 7 day Disney cruise after that. Another well known travel firm, starting with a "V") were offering a "Disney Stay & Cruise" package but they have stopped using Disney Cruise Line boats (making it a Disney stay, with a cruise supplied by a cheaper cruise company), which seemed a bit of a let down to us. Philip looked into this and worked out a tailor-made package working with different operators, but put together under the Holidays Please ABTA guarantee, that included:

V*rg*n return flights,
Transfers to the resort
7 nights in Disney's Old Key West Resort,
7 days on Disney's Fantasy in the Western Caribbean.

To this he arranged for local taxi transfers to and from the resort and ship and then to the airport on our return to port. He also made sure that ALL the transport would be disabled friendly and that disabled access rooms were booked at each point, even calling the Disney Company in the US to confirm every aspect..
I was particularly impressed with his knowledge of each of the areas the ship is due to dock in. He could confirm that the local areas were easy to get around in a wheelchair and advised us on which activities and excursions would be suitable or not. His whole attitude was completely professional throughout the process. The icing on the cake was the fact that the whole package came to a price that was considerably less than the flight operator quoted, yet it is made-to-measure rather than what they want to sell you. We are very impressed with the whole experience and can't wait to go on what we expect to be a worry-free trip of a lifetime.

Tobias Malmo found this review useful