Struth! No whinging please, we’re British!

IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says that after readers’ responses to his recent bizarre complaints received by British travel specialists Thomas Cook and the Association of British Travel Association, he has more howlers compiled by the two.

“I think it should be explained in the brochure,” one disgruntled British holidaymaker wrote to his agent, “that the local store there does not sell proper biscuits – like custard creams or ginger nuts.”

Another wrote: “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time – this should be banned.”

And another: “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”

“We booked an excursion to a water park, but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels,” another holidaymaker complained, while yet another’s peeve was: “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow, but it was white.”

And yet another: “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women,” while one poor fellow was surprised with a purchase from a street hawker in Europe: “We bought sunglasses that had ‘Ray-Ban’ labels on them from a street trader for five Euros, only to find that they were fake.”

And: “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica (to England,) but it only took the Americans three hours to get home,” wrote one complainant, with another’s gripe being his apartment: “I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment. And ours was significantly smaller.”

And finally the best whinge of all: “We had to queue outside where there was no air conditioning.”