In honour of my upcoming visit to New York I thought I’d see if I could find a suitable theme to celebrate. I poached this one from WordPress, who designed it for Expedia. It’s pretty nifty, they do a few themes for major cities of the world. I wonder if they have one for Manchester, seeing as that’ll be my next stop.

…how was everybody’s Christmas? Mine was slightly disastrous, with a couple of the family members being sick; one of them with the flu; seriously, proper throwing up and everything, another with a chest infection. Which means that I had to eat most of the turkey myself. As the family went to Scotland on Boxing Day it was left to me to make sure the turkey wasn’t wasted. Which means I had it for three days, including turkey sandwiches yesterday. I hate to waste food and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away on Sunday. Not that I’m a greedy cow, I just hate wasting food. Did your mother not remind you of all the starving children in Africa when you were a child and wouldn’t eat your vegetables/salad/porridge? It still verberates in my ear to this day. So I’ve eaten as much as I could without it sticking in my craw. All I can say is, good thing turkey’s a seasonal thing and I don’t expect to eat it again until Easter.

In other news, my fervent wait for the flight sale is over as I’ve found a relatively cheap flight to New York for the Spring. And I’m so pleased with myself. Especially as I’ve snuck a look back at Expedia today and found that said cheap flight has now increased by about £50. I didn’t realise the sale started on Christmas Day. I was doing a bit of mindless surfing, waiting for the buzzer to go on the oven when, as luck would have it, I happened on a banner for one of the big airlines announcing their “very very big sale”. Which meant if one had started it, that means they all have. Which is why I booked through Expedia, there was no point trawling through various airline websites when I could just look at one very-well established comparison website.

So that’s me well and commited to New York now. The hotel was already booked a couple of months prior (c’mon, you know me by now, this is the gal who’s already booked her hotel for Manchester in August) and I must say I’m very much looking forward to it. A colleague of mine, the one I call Amy, the pitbull of Saafe, is going for the first time in March. Don’t laugh but I’m excited for her as well. New York is not a cheap city by any means, but it is a very exciting place and I hope she has a great time. I’m even slightly envious of her because she got a cheaper deal, but I take a little comfort in knowing it’s because she isn’t going during the Easter holidays.

Apart from that, it was a very quiet Christmas. I’ve been holed up in the house on my own since the run to Gatwick on Boxing Day and as usual I’ve loved every minute of the peace and quiet. But I do have things to do before I fly out to the West Indies on Saturday. So I have to force myself to leave the comfort of my home the next couple of days to run errands and do “stuff”.

I’ll be back on-line to say ta-ta before I depart on New Year’s Day.

One thing I have been meaning to mention for some time is a not so cool experience I had with a travel website over the holidays.

Recently I booked two tickets to go to New York at Easter. This isn’t for work, it’s purely pleasure. I reckon what with my degree coming up later this year, this’ll be my last chance to be going anywhere for a while, so I’m making this trip a good ‘un.

But I digress. I had finally booked the flights via Expedia, but I did have an unpleasant experience with Netflights.com. You know that old adage, if it’s too good to be true, it usually is? Not that their prices were brilliantly low in comparison to other sites, but there was a few quid difference to make me think I was getting a bit of a bargain.

There was a bit of a sale going on with flights these past few weeks and Netflights were selling Virgin Atlantic tickets for around £300. Virgin’s own site were selling the same tickets, same flight times, for around £340. Bargain I thought, so I tried to book the two seats. When I put in my credit card details a message popped up telling me I had to call Netflights direct. Bit strange I thought. I knew it wasn’t the card. So I called them. Which wasn’t cheap I might add. Not only is it not a local number, I was kept waiting for a good 20mins.

When I finally got through, guess what they told me? That these flights didn’t exist but they’re happy to sell me more expensive flights. It was all I could do to refrain from chucking a few expletives down the phone at them. What a waste of time and my money. What ticked me off was that they had my credit card details. So the next thing I did when I got off the phone with Netflights was to call my credit card company and warn them of any transactions coming from this website.

And this isn’t a fly-by-night website. I like to think I know what I’m doing when it comes to checking out and using sites. Netflights aren’t only ABTA and ATOL bonded, they’re a subsidiary of Thomas Cook. If you’re not in the UK, Thomas Cook is a travel company that’s been in business for over a hundred years. Indeed, Thomas Cook (the bloke the company’s named after) was the inventor of the package holiday here. Not to mention at the bottom of their main page, they have all sorts of travel awards they supposedly won.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you not to use Netflights.com, but I will suggest that you use them with caution. You may have even used them already and had no problems.  As I said before, I finally found flights with Continental Airlines via Expedia and they were a pleasure to deal with. And here’s a tip when using Expedia, if you can’t find your flights or hotel dates on their website, it’s worth giving them a call. I got the exact times I wanted for our itinerary which wasn’t on their site. It seems their computers are updated quicker than their website.