Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Finn Conlon as always did an excellent job for which I am very grateful.
Not aware that Palm Springs car rental at Alamo did not open until we had to check-in. Checked their website and found their advice about checking in early morning.
Always keeps us up to date on all of our travel arrangements.
Everything went to plan. Had a wonderful time with my family and seeing my grandson graduate from university.
For the many, many years I have dealt with DAF and Ewan and his team, they have never let us down, and our recent trip was perfect as well. Thanks DAF for being just a 100% perfect company to deal with.
Disappointed not to have adjacent seats from Sacramento to Dallas. Suffice it say we will never fly BA again. Got our lost baggage back last night.
Peter looked after my trip from beginning to end, thank you
Everything went like clockwork - very nice resort
Excellent contact and communication. Clear information on flights and good choice of hotel. Probably need to inform customers about hotel tax!
Very polite and efficient service
Have dealt with Christian for many a year and would not organise a trip through anyone else. Superb as always.
Everything was perfect thanks. Great seats on the plane. Great car. Excellent connections. Thanks.
Mason has always helped us with travel plans superbly and the app from DialAflight is really helpful.
I know someone is looking after me from booking to arriving back home. Makes my trips stress free
As always perfect in every way, great holiday, fantastic hotel recommendation, caring communication - pre hols and post hols checkin.
The car hire arrangement was just what I wanted - thank you
Gino gave great service and even booked us upgraded seats for the best price - a nice touch and much appreciated
A bit more clarification re US time zones would be good.
All good thank you
Thank you for the ongoing support, even whilst we were on holiday and needed to call! Des was great right from booking through to the travel date.
Philippa was great throughout the whole process - thank you for your help!
Would highly recommend. Thank you Steven Merralls and team.
Always a pleasure to book with DialAflight. Very professional and efficient. I look forward to the courtesy call 24 hours before I travel . Professionalalism at its best.
We had a problem with our hotel room. One phone call and all sorted! Thank you
Shelley has been fantastic and I’ve already asked her to start looking at options for NZ next year
Gary always does a great job … I don’t go anywhere else for travel
Ashley and his colleagues very helpful and found them very competitive.
Always a good service.
You booked me return flights with BA but they became AA flights, not such a good airline. The Miami transition was a nightmare. Don’t use that airport unless you have to. Only just made the flight, and wouldn’t have managed but I had to jump the line several times. Lots of muttering and savage looks, but I did it.
Plane was diverted to JFK. Navigation down. Put on another plane.
When his daughter stepped on to a plane to Kenya and waved goodbye, the King was too British to tell her he was dying.
The film The Crown takes us back to 1952, when 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth was asked to carry out a Commonwealth tour with Prince Philip for the ailing George VI. She escaped Buckingham Palace for Treetops, a rustic treehouse in the Aberdare forest of Kenya.
Her stay had its dramas, with wild animals sometimes on the rampage below her room and the Princess filmed it, agape at waterbuck goring a rival to death and rhino charging each other.
When Elizabeth was told it was time to come in for tea, she asked to take it on the balcony, saying: 'I don't want to miss one moment of this.' The next morning, she said she'd had such a good time in Kenya that she couldn't wait for her father to visit. In The Crown, she is seen writing a letter to the King requesting that she and Philip live in Cyprus like a normal husband and wife. Then Palace aides track her down to her remote location to tell her that the King has died and that she was now Queen.
Personally I'd have stayed in the tree-house and pulled up the ladder with me.
I set out in the couple's footsteps. Kenya's safari parks still bring British visitors the same blast of friendliness and fresh air, and floating above the green Aberdare, Treetops still looks like a giant bird hide on stilts.
The original shack was commissioned by war hero Eric Walker, who had it built to satisfy his aristocratic wife's desire to have a treehouse like Peter Pan's hideout.
The original treehouse was burned down during the Mau Mau crisis in1954 and the present version has showers and a ramp. But it is very much a tree-house; my gin rested on a giant twig thrusting through the bar's polished wooden floor.
It floats above a watering hole - directly below my room. As the sun dropped, I was unpacking when I saw grey shapes just a few feet below. Dozens of elephants were in a row, drinking. The mums were hiding a baby elephant so small it could probably ride in my car.
As I ran downstairs to get even closer, I passed a huge skull. An elderly regular who died last year, said a guide - it's not impossible he was one of the youngsters putting on a show for the Queen all those years ago.
'When he died the other elephants came to mourn,' the guide said.
'Elephants always do. If they're his relatives, they stand facing away from him, their backs just touching him. For half an hour they stand in silence, then they leave.'
We saw buffalo, warthogs, giant forest hogs and colobus monkeys. The baboons, I suspect, were barred from the animals' pub, so they broke in through the fence.
Amos Ndegwa, 64, is a seasoned Treetops guide, carrying a 100-year-old Winchester rifle that guarded the Queen in 1952. He took us up hills with runways of bare red earth from the top to the bottom. 'The elephants make the tracks,' said Amos. 'They like to sit on their backside and slide down for fun.'
After Treetops, we headed south to Nairobi. At the five-star Sarova Stanley hotel, there's a photo of the Queen and Philip's lunch there with the white-glove set.
The Stanley is named after the man who tracked down explorer Dr Livingstone. Ernest Hemingway sat where I sat in the Stanley's Thorn Tree cafe, writing The Snows Of Kilimanjaro. 'I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy,' he also wrote.
I spent Sunday at Ngong racecourse, where Princess Anne once came to watch the turf fly. Princess Margaret was another Royal to visit this area and she headed for the anything-goes Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa.
I did too and stayed at the Serena Beach hotel, with its fabulous lobby where Moorish chandeliers refract the sun under a sweeping 25ft ceiling. On the beach, blue lizards sunbathed.
We dined in the Jahazi Grill, listening to the night animals. The following day I walked along the beach to watch seabirds and enjoy a drink in the Moonshine bar. I had a daiquiri served in a pineapple. The Dawa (the Swahili word for medicine) featured local honey with vodka.
On my last day I woke to the dawn chorus. It starts in the haze with birds, then other animals join in until it's a wall of sound. I was right back in the animal kingdom.
First published in the Mail Online - October 2018
More articles below...
Not quite what you're looking for?
We can easily customise an offer to suit your exact requirements