Why now?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away (well not really but it sounds better than a place few miles from here)……
We’d been on a couple of holidays, our first proper holiday together was back in 2005 to a small resort just outside Tossa De Mar in Spain called San Eloy. It wasn’t anything fancy but it was our first holiday so will always have a variety of memories, I was thin for a start and looked a lot less like Shrek!
Over the years we had a few trips, a few family holidays here and there but life always had a thing which kinda meant not many holidays happened. In 2014 we tried to change this and went to Tunisia, this was another holiday with a number of memories, day long 4×4 excursion with broken AC and a really nice spa experience (my first) and being the only people in the sports bar before dinner having cocktails, which since became a thing.
More life things such as a wedding and buying a house happened! Buying the house meant saving and as part of this we didn’t go on a honeymoon after we were married, instead saving for the house with the view to go on a belated honeymoon later. House was bought and we started saving for our honeymoon and in 2019 we booked our 2 week honeymoon with Virgin Holidays to the Maldives.
Our honeymoon was booked for July 2020……then someone in a far off land either decided to eat bat soup for dinner or if you prefer the conspiracy or Sci-fi option, then a virus escaped from a top secret lab and Covid happened.
We hoped and crossed everything we could that we wouldn’t miss out, we had notification from the airline that our flights had been cancelled, which meant pre-booked things had to be cancelled, losing some money due to the exchange rates. Then just over 2 weeks before we were due to go we managed to speak to a human on the phone who found alternative flights for our holiday but from a different airport – we were over the moon, made all the arrangements, rebooked all the hotel, car parking, lounges etc etc.
3 days before we were due to go we still hadn’t received anything regarding our holiday (flight tickets, itinerary, nothing) so again I managed to speak to an actual human, only this time it was satan himself. Possibly one of the most rude humans I had to deal with during Covid, basically said to me “if you haven’t got your tickets, then you aren’t going” and promptly hung-up.
After trying to get hold of another human I somehow managed to speak to the person from weeks earlier who remembered me and the booking, you could hear her tone drop as soon as she looked into the booking and she became so apologetic. Yes, our honeymoon had been cancelled but Virgin Holidays ‘forgot’ to tell us. Sadly this did mean we had a fight to get our money back, rather than adhering to the law and refund in 2 weeks, it actually took me raising a complaint with my credit card company to receive a refund some 4 months later.
Sadly this didn’t cover the money lost due to the repeat game of booking and cancelling various things, yes they refunded by due to the ever fluctuating exchange rate it meant I lost money each time. On the other hand I was hearing horror stories from other Virgin Holiday customers who were waiting months after we received our refund to receive theirs.
Because of bat soup/virus lab we then decided to hell with it, if we can afford to go on a holiday then we shall go on a holiday.
As a ‘joke’ I looked at the Sandals website thinking this would be way too costly and not our sort of holiday, for some reason I had the idea of an expensive ‘club 18-30’ style holiday (for those who don’t know, this was a popular holiday type that basically was a drinking holiday for 18-30 year olds).
The joke was on me, the holiday looked amazing so we booked for July 2021 – not the Maldives but something that should match it. A few days later after booking I was playing around on the site and noticed the butler elite option, again my brain thought there is no way we could afford this but why not check…..
By dropping from 10 days to 7 days we could upgrade to the Butler Elite experience for the same cost, this sounded amazing, what was even more amazing was how accommodating Sandals were and made the change for us!
That was 2021 and how it all started……………….
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