Once upon a time we all made our way down the high street to book our ski holidays, hell bent on becoming the next Alberto Tomba. A visit to your favourite high street glamour parlour. Yes, glamour. While today we take travelling for granted, back then the travel agent, least of all your destination, was a magical place! To sit with your travel agent was an honour, after all they had travelled with the gods to exotic places, or so they thought, occasionally returning to help the minions like us plot trips to less far away places. Generously gifting their bronze gleaming tans, perfectly white teeth, and the obligatory ‘can I help you’ smile.

Stage One of Booking a Ski Holiday – The Heist

Planned to military precision, or so we liked to think, it was a two-stage process. The first stage of the extravaganza being a quick visit to clean the shelves of every ski brochure you could find. Strangely we all felt like naughty schoolboys or girls as we grabbed every brochure we could find, even the luxury ones that contained luxury chalets and ski holidays you could never afford on a trainee accountants wage! Avoiding the glaring gaze of the brochure police (travel agents), your supermarket sweep successful, we would make a discrete and hasty retreat armed full of magazines under our arm (the environmental impact only to emerge several years on).

Back home it was kettle on as we went straight into scanning mode. This was all part of the build up – analysing the number of stars for each ski resort in each brochure to select the best fit. Checking the level of difficulty was the number one priority, making sure the short-listed ski resorts had a least 4 out of 5 stars for challenging runs, even though we were all just early intermediates better suited to blues! After the difficulty, nightlife was next, and then last but by no means least – check if we could afford it….. and then when we couldn’t, checking the credit card limit! Once we had homed our search, next was boring friends with our analysis until they too could repeat verbatim the merits of our wonderful choice, even the ones that weren’t joining us!  

Stage Two of Booking A Ski Holiday – Navigating The Glamour Parlour

Once consensus was broadly gained, in true terminator style “we were back” at the Travel Agents on the first available Saturday. The obligatory best polo shirt, Pringle sweater, and or Nevica top (we swear Nevica was cool back then), ready to face the bemused travel agent for the next hour or four. If we had dressed properly, she (or he) might look half interested at some point, at least until they realised we were just accountant ‘trainees’ and on mini-budgets. And worse still, that we were going somewhere “cold” as they would invariably comment! Yes, they might have been selling ski holidays, but it didn’t stop them hating the whole idea of them.

Don’t Lose Your Place

Younger readers might be thinking why was it a Saturday? Well in the 80s and 90s, on Sunday’s the shops were all closed, and the working day was strictly 9 til 5 and Monday to Friday. And guess what, the travel agent shut at 5:30pm every day – no late night shopping! Consequently, everyone had the same idea (and little choice), whether booking winter or summer. Even if you got there at opening time (9am), Harry and Hilda, and countless others were already inline and therefore entered the shop before you (what chance did we have, we were young and hungover, arriving at opening time – they had been up and queuing since 6am). It was one’s worst nightmare, trumped by the hoards that were hell bent on gong to Benidorm or Majorca!

“Take a ticket sir” – well we would have if only the ticket system had been invented back then. Instead you soon became adept at hovering over desks like children playing musical chairs. Blink and Vera’s Benidorm crew snook in before you! It really was elbows out, eyes alert, and try not to get distracted by the shelves full of exciting places as boredom sat in after the first couple of hours had passed waiting for your opportunity to pounce! Inevitably, as in supermarkets, you would choose a desk to align to, and invariably select the wrong one! Just as you thought the seat might be yours soon, you’d realise your were in the queue behind Aunt Aida who was about to spend hours going through the best hotels in Tenerife, before opting for self-catering in Blackpool!

If you were lucky, two or three hours later, after a missed opportunity or two, you were in the seat, now facing the chosen one in their red or blue jacket. Paying homage to your travel agent was the first ritual otherwise they were going to send you to Bulgaria, or somewhere worse (even if it didn’t yet exist) if they took a disliking to you! To be fair to our glamorous travel agents, they were all very knowledgeable and could talk for hours on the merits of Barbados, Tenerife, or Disneyland and it all seemed very impressive, or so you let them believe. Once they paused for breath, having told you about their last three or four vacations, notwithstanding the next two later that year, you took your moment, “we’re here to book a ski holiday”. At this point, you sat back, watching the the colour drain from their face, their brains quickly checking whether they had heard you right and the words that shouldn’t be spoken had been so. Yes, the ultimate conversation killer had been unleashed. Next was the shift in the chair that signalled that they had now realised that they had one or two of ‘those types’ sat in front of them, the unwashed! If they had a panic button under the desk, it would have been pushed, and security called to escort us out. Because, they may have known everything about Jamaica, and ‘Las’ whatever it is called, but they knew nothing about skiing and neither did they want to!

The Travel Agents lack of knowledge however never deterred us; in fact it probably spurred us on. It was a gotcha. We had found their Achilles heal, we could now more than match them, and bore them, on the best places to ski! Revenge was sweet……… but short lived when you are in front of the Queen or King of Travel.

A Day Out at the Travel Agents

If you are too young to remember the Travel Agent extravaganza you may be forgiven for thinking that all of the above doesn’t seem so bad? In fact, at the time it wasn’t, but before we get too nostalgic, let’s not forget what should have been an hour visit was far longer and that booking rarely was completed at the first time of asking. In fact the first visit was a minimum three and half hour ordeal. Pre-millennium the internet had yet to take hold. Brochure’s were great, assuming you forgive the fact that they were printed in January or February and it was now July or August! As a consequence, having waited two hours to sit in front of royalty, the next 90 minutes you soon got used to their favourite phrase of “that one’s booked too”, before they finally arrived at, “what about Bulgaria”! Just as you thought you might be getting there, winning even, they had played the serve and volley you feared most – “we’ll take Alcatraz instead thank-you”!

Finally you would arrive at one that ‘broadly’ fitted the bill. But it wasn’t as planned and discussed with ‘others’, and it was Saturday and most of the group would be somewhere else, waiting for the exciting news. Grab the mobile, then text and or phone – try the telegram instead! It is hard to believe that only three decades ago we all somehow survived without mobiles! Instead we had to trudge back off home, or to the bar, to eventually catch up with friends, armed with the last two or three options, of which one was of course – Bulgaria!

Chalet Ski Holidays, saving trees, and avoiding the queues of the 80s. And did we mention, run by people that actually love skiing and snowboarding, and won’t therefore be sending you to ski in Bulgaria!