I’ve worked out the reason it always takes me so long to review my holidays - or reasons, plural, I should say. The first is that it I will nearly always have something negative to say about them, because I try to appraise my holidays in the same frank and balanced way I appraise everything else I review.
This is hopefully an approach that benefits whoever is reading, but it does make me worry that I’ll sound ungrateful, or tone deaf - “millions of people would love that holiday!” - even though actually what I’m trying to do, as with all the other things I test and mull over and review, is to decide whether that particular holiday is really worth the time, money and effort.
In a world of travel reviews that are frequently - let’s face it - severely biased, because the reviewer has quite often gone for free, I like to think that I’m offering a more realistic viewpoint with these unbiased family holiday reviews. But it does keep me awake at night*, wondering how it’ll all come across.
*for at least seven minutes.
The other reason it takes me so long to review my holidays (I mean we still haven’t had the Center Parcs write-up and I went there last December!) is that they necessarily involve talking about kids, and the fact that holidays with kids are never as relaxing or good value as holidays without kids. Again, I fret that this will come across as ungrateful - “cherish every moment!” “blink and they will have left home!” - (my God, I bet loads of parents wish they could blink and their grown-up kids would leave home, hohoho!) but holidaying with kids is a very specific extreme sport and it needs to be addressed in an honest way.
Now I know that a lot of people manage incredible holidays abroad with their kids, where they camp out on remote Spanish beaches cooking freshly caught fish on an old car radiator, or hire a crumbling old Portuguese townhouse and spend their days pootling around food markets and encouraging their kids to try local, delicacies. A lot of people seem to manage these holidays really well, wherever they go, and report back with great enthusiasm.
Gite in the middle of nowhere in Provence, plagued by wasps and serviced only by a three hundred year-old water well and two small solar panels? We had the most amazing time! they write. So wholesome! We made jam - or should I say “confiture!” - and the boys loved splashing in the lake until sundown, when we would sit by candlelight drinking red wine and playing Uno.
What the actual. Who are these people? Why do they like spending their downtime making jam? How are they able to play Uno by candlelight without one or more of their kids having a total breakdown because they’re up too late/overexcited by their proximity to real fire/sensing you’re relaxing with red wine therefore need to do something to obliterate your downtime?
WHY DO THESE PEOPLE NOT MENTION THE WASPS?
Full disclaimer: I love my kids as much as the next man. More, if the next man is Michael Owen. They are my world centre, they occupy the majority of my thoughts throughout the day, they bring me the most intense joy and when I make any plans for the future, no matter how small, they are the most-considered factor. I would lie on a train track for them. I would (and you know what a sacrifice this would be) squeeze myself into a tight underground tunnel for them. (Caveat: would require sedation, most likely, and would also want some sort of hinged lid on the top side of the tunnel, like an escape door, that would be immediately flung open by a capable tunnelling pro-expert if I knocked upon it three times.)
And I do love going away with them. It’s brilliant! Their little faces when they see new things, when they get excited by big boats or things going on at the airport, or ask me loads of anxiety-inducing questions about aeronautical engineering when we’re in the boarding queue. But I swear you are fibbing if you tell me that holidays with kids are as relaxing and enjoyable as they were before you had them.
There’s no comparison, surely? In the one scenario you’re fighting the same battles you fight at home: finding things for them to eat at the local Mini Mart, spending half an hour slathering them in sun cream as they try to wriggle away, worrying that the pool inflatables aren’t fit for purpose and that they will disappear off across the completely flat, motionless, life-guarded sea riding a glittery lilac unicorn despite the fact that you’re standing there holding onto its muzzle. Negotiating every single element of the day including how much they can play Mario Karts and whether or not they can use your phone to look up how much a rare Beyblade L-Drago Guardian costs, checking that they are putting their used toilet roll pieces into the small pedal bin next to the toilet and not into the toilet, which is a new type of hell in itself, trying to download a new Audiobook to get them to sleep when it’s already 11pm and you’ve forgotten the password to your Audible account and the email address it’s registered to is only linked to your laptop.
Gah.
In the other scenario, in which you are totally free from all and any responsibility, you lie on a lounger for nine uninterrupted hours, maybe getting up for lunch but maybe not, because it’s not as though you need to fuel any activity with food, and then you float to some form of dinner, which might just be fries and mayonnaise and rosé, and then you fall into bed and dream about what sort of business idea would allow you to retire at 48 so that you can live permanently on holiday.
Tell me they’re the same thing! Go on! Tell me!
So anyway, all of this flies around my brain when I’m wondering how to present my holiday write-up. I wish I could just do two lists and say “this was shit” and “this was good” and then people could try and use their critical thinking skills to work out whether our holiday philosophies, holiday budgets and holiday goals vaguely align; but we all know that the internet is now devoid of any nuance and so all content must be over-explained and plastered in disclaimers.
With that in mind, here’s a review of my family holiday to Paros. I should say at this point that one of the primary objectives of booking this particular holiday (self-catering, not a buffet in sight) was to compare it to the holiday we had at Ikos the year before. Because for all of Ikos Olivia’s faults (mainly being just far too expensive, in my opinion, for what you actually get, the review is here), I have to admit that when I was there I was completely relaxed.
I mean, apart from having constant heartburn due to the fact I’d spent three times as much on the holiday as I would ever have normally spent, and feeling a searing sense of anger every time the food was sub par (which was often) and wanting to cry with sad, ironic laughter every time we queued to go to the buffet - THE BUFFET! - in this so luxurious, so exclusive resort, and apart from the fact my blood boiled each time someone in our “bungalow” block closed a door because it shook our entire headboard and made me feel as though I was in some weird concrete holiday prison cell… Apart from all this I was completely relaxed.
I didn’t have to make any decisions, I didn’t have to go to a supermarket and have the entire queue stare at me because I hadn’t had my nectarines weighed and would therefore have to do the walk of shame back to the woman with the weighing scales while everyone waited, I didn’t have to decide where we would go for dinner or get into a car to go to dinner or look at a map to get us to where we were going for dinner and, if the dinner was a bit mediocre (which it often was) I didn’t then have to pay a bill for it.
(Yes I know it was actually all paid for, royally, twice over, but that’s the joy of all inclusive - you can kid yourself that all the food is for free because you just get up and leave at the end of the meal.)
So the brief for this year’s holiday was this: find a holiday with the same sense of luxury and convenience as Ikos, but with more privacy, more living space and better food.
But readers, guess what? I booked late. I started looking at the end of May, to go in August. And I soon realised that replicating the convenience of a luxury all-inclusive resort was going to be nigh on impossible. There were no villas, pretty much anywhere in Greece, that were within an hour of an airport but that were also within an easy walk of restaurants and a beach. We would need to hire a car. (First inconvenience, because we all know what a palaver hiring a car abroad is.)
The villas that I did find that more or less fit the bill were so expensive that Ikos began to look positively thrifty. It felt like a lose-lose situation: more than I wanted to ever spend, but without any of the carefree conveniences of Ikos. The transfers, the luggage-taken-to-room, the “free” ice creams and drinks and lunches and post-dinner cocktails.
The villas that didn’t fit the bill at all in terms of convenience were much more purse-pleasing and so, in the interests of research, I booked a villa that required a flight, a taxi journey, a ferry and then a car journey along a stretch of unmade road that contained potholes so big you could live in them to get to it. Did the villa have any places to eat nearby? No it did not. Could we walk to a shop? Negative. Would we have an eighteen hour journey on the way home, due to the ferry/flight timings and needing to leave enough time for potential ferry delays? Not something to worry about. Eighteen hours? Where’s the inconvenience in that.
I have to say though: Paros. You do get a superb quality of Greek island when you need to take a ferry to get to it. I don’t want to sound snobby, because I love a direct flight destination as much as the rest of us, but it doesn’t half cut out a lot of touristy hell when you go to somewhere that requires that extra bit of effort to reach. Just that one ferry journey!
And I realise that Paros is probably massively touristy compared with some of the other smaller Greek islands (and definitely with a lot of the places in mainland Greece that I’ve visited) but if you’ve ever been to Santorini, or to Mykonos, then you will know the “touristy hell” of which I speak.
Paros just felt positively lovely, even the areas that were heaving with visitors, like the ferry port in Parikia and the whole of Naousa. I can’t imagine it’ll be long before Paros airport expands and direct flights come in and then you get an Ikos or a Grecotel popping up on there, because isn’t this the way of the world, but for now it just feels…nice. Like the tourist spots of yore. A few popular towns and villages and then the rest of the island left relatively undeveloped and bare. Head into the mountains to Lefkes and it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop, it’s like going back in time. Pop to Aliki for lunch and yes, it’s thrumming with groups of people but it feels properly pleasant. Wholesome.
We went for seven days and the villa we rented was this one with Pretty Greek Villas. When Rich gets back from Sainsbury’s I’ll ask him what he rated it out of ten. He didn’t care that it wasn’t near any shops or restaurants: he absolutely loved the view. We looked over Parikia and he spent most days watching the ferries and cruise ships and mega-expensive billionaire yachts coming and going out of the port. There was a pool for the kids to splash about in and a small beach around 100 metres or so away. Had we wanted to, we could have turned left and walked all the way along a bigger stretch of beach to a place called Crios, which was a fancy restaurant and bar playing the sort of trendy chill-out music you get in expensive bars in Ibiza in the daytime.
You could hire loungers there and order food to your lounger, but it was something like eighty euros for the loungers and then a minimum food spend and Rich refused on principal and because he hates places like that with a passion.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Possibly the best part of the holiday, for me, was the adventure of the whole thing. I do think that’s what you miss out on with a package holiday. In a way, when you do a package holiday to a resort, what are you actually going away for? The heat? Because you don’t see much of the surroundings, you don’t explore any of the place you’ve flown to, you just go airport - taxi - resort - taxi - airport. I really enjoyed the ferry journeys, though getting on and off them was completely chaotic and everyone almost died of sunstroke waiting in the queue to get on.
We took the huge car ferry, which takes 3.5 hours from Santorini and I thought that it was so exciting, passing dozens of rocky islands that all look like the sort of islands from the Greek myths and legends where demi-Gods have been left to be pecked to death by crows, etc. When we stopped in at Naxos to let people off, it was like being on a mini cruise. I imagine. I am the least likely person to go on a cruise, because I watched Titanic in 1997 and the sinking scenes seared into my brain, and then I saw a video online about how you escape a cruise ship in an emergency if the lifeboats can’t be lowered and that just about did it for me.
Greek Ferries though: I’m in. So I loved the ferry bit and I loved - loved - exploring the old towns in Parikia and Naousa. Both Naousa and Parikia old towns are beautiful; tiny cobbled streets between white sugar cube buildings, cute little tavernas with tables so close to the sea they’re almost falling into it, sexy-looking bars hidden away in dark corners, it’s all a travel marketer’s dream. I really liked it, the whole place, though I’m going to be probably slightly controversial and say that I thought Parikia was actually a bit more interesting than Naousa, which is the “front of the postcard” place. The functional seafront and the noisy, chaotic port would lead you think that this was just the place where you get off the ferry and hire a car, but hidden behind these roads are the most gorgeous little lanes and passageways, you could write a brilliant book set there!
I would absolutely say that Paros is worth the extra bit of travel. Would I particularly go there with kids? Possibly not. I think that other places in Greece have better beaches and a bit more to do, but for swanking around as adults, it’s gorgeous.
In terms of cost, the villa was £3700 for the week (slept six, so if you were sharing with other adults in would be infinitely better value, or indeed if you didn’t go in August when it would be approx a third of the price!) and we spent around £400 on car hire and about £130-£150 a day on food, drink and ice creams for the four of us. (When I say “drink”, Rich probably had two small beers a night, I had one or two small glasses of wine, so we weren’t tearing it up!)
Total cost, so that we can compare with the Ikos holiday? Around £5100, without flights. Ikos (*cries*) came in at £9792, which I think was €11,000. And I am fully aware that even the lower cost holiday is hugely expensive. The Ikos holiday was the most I had ever spent on a holiday, by a long way, and would never ever spend this again. (Could never spend this again!)
Pros of the self-catered holiday: we all had our own room, more space in general, our own pool with incredible views and a sense of total privacy. We explored, got a real feel for the place we’d travelled to, and we enjoyed the adventures we went on in the absolutely brutal heat that always felt very ill-advised, like we could die of thirst or spontaneous-combustion at any moment. Exciting! We could choose where to eat, and the local tavernas and restaurants were way, way better than anything we had at Ikos. (Don’t want to keep singling Ikos out here, maybe we got a dud one, but I have no other family resort experience to compare it with!)
Cons of the self-catered holiday: the adventures required planning and getting into a car. We had to do at least one supermarket trip, which is my absolute holiday turn-off, and the kids could only amuse themselves so much in one small pool before they started to get twitchy for something else to do. Everything at a resort is completely convenient, and almost everything when you self-cater is the opposite.
The question is, what price do you put on convenience? Is it worth double? I honestly still haven’t worked this one out, so answers in the comments. Because yes, a resort is convenient, but you’re still all squashed into one room (unless you have the funds of Jeff Bezos) which is positively un-luxurious in my books, and you’re still mostly eating food that is, let’s face it, cooked en masse by caterers. It’s never going to have the same care put into it as an age-old seafront Taverna that’s been serving the same list of specials for over a hundred years, etc etc, play traditional background music.
Is it really worth the money, to shell out twice as much for a resort but then feel overwhelmed with absolutely blinding rage when you see people reserving sun loungers around the pool, spreading out their beach bags and towels? To all be queueing for the breakfast buffet - A BUFFET! At that price! - where you’ll then sit shoulder to shoulder with people who are conducting full-volume Facetime conversations with relatives back home?
I’m dumping my thoughts, now, but I do think I’m slowly coming around to Rich’s philosophy when it comes to family holidays, which is this: accept that the holiday should be for the kids - happy kids, happy family - and don’t set the bar too high in terms of expectations. Keep travel plans simple and unstressful. Maybe he’s onto something. After all, both kids have listed “the trip to Yorkshire” (2023) as one of their best holidays ever! I think it’s because they went pony trekking, which they loved, and we visited two castles (also a big hit) and ate in loads of old dark pubs that did good chips and pies.
Could it be that holidays in the UK will be the way forward for us? I’ll keep you informed. I have to say that the flights to and from Greece that so depleted me at the time now feel like a distant memory, and I’m being bombarded online with content about Mallorca, and my neighbours go all the time to Mallorca, so now - in typical me style - I’m wondering why we’ve never been to Mallorca and whether that could be the place that finally gives us a stress-free, convenient, family-pleasing holiday!
Watch this space. Rich had better not read this, he might weep in despair…
Hit the heart button, if you can summon up the energy - it helps send the post to people who have yet to be introduced to my particular brand of thought chaos. Oh, also, let me know in the comments where you stand when it comes to resort holidays vs self-catering and also if you have any intel regarding Mallorca. Merci beaucoup!