A glossy travel brochure might sell five-star spas and Michelin-starred dinners as the ingredients of a perfect trip, but the writers and travel-industry contributors who answered a call from the Daily Mail said something else mattered more: the people they were with. Ten contributors picked the holiday they still think about years later, from a Victorian turret in Scarborough to a spontaneous dogsledding trip in the Arctic.
A seaside grand dame in Scarborough
Health writer Marti Stelling named a stay in one of the Victorian turrets at the Grand Hotel in Scarborough, around 2011, when she was ten, as her most memorable trip. The turrets, which once housed the hotel's original water towers, sit high above the Victorian building on St Nicholas Cliff. Stelling remembers riding the tram up the hill and looking out through the turret's huge round windows over the South Bay promenade. She said that although she has since stayed in far grander hotels, the trip remains one of her favourites.
Tracing family roots in Latvia
Travel writer Erin Waks took her 80-year-old grandmother, Marlene, known as Moen, to Riga, Latvia, in January this year, after a DNA test confirmed her ancestral roots lay in the Baltic state. The trip traced the family back more than 100 years and fit into the wider trend of heritage travel, in which people travel to research where their ancestors came from.
Waks's family is of Jewish eastern European origin and fled to South Africa before the Second World War, largely evading the Nazis. With family memories hazy and little photographic evidence to go on, she and her grandmother nonetheless found the apartment where her great-grandmother, Vera Trembatzki, grew up, as well as a cemetery containing the graves of earlier generations. Waks called it the most off-beat trip of her life, far removed from the beach and city breaks she usually prefers, but said she and her grandmother agreed the chance to travel alone together would probably not come again.
A taverna with no menu in Crete
Features writer Poppy Atkinson-Gibson picked her first holiday abroad, a trip to Crete in the summer of 2008 to visit her grandfather, who had recently moved there. She recalled the heat hitting her as she stepped off the plane and the coastal views on the drive to his house. In the mountains, the family tasted fresh honey and ate at a small taverna where no English was spoken. Instead of a menu, they were shown into the kitchen and shown the pots bubbling on the stove, and given water from a jug filled at a fresh spring by the road. On a terrace hundreds of feet above the sea, they ate gigantes beans in tomato sauce, lamb chops, green beans, tzatziki and bread.
The Crocodile Club at Pontins
Travel writer Jo Tweedy chose a week at the Pontins South Devon Holiday Camp in Paignton in the late 1980s, when she was about seven. She remembers a Bluecoat, the Pontins equivalent of a Butlin's Redcoat, telling around 50 children: "And for the last prize of the day, the first person to hand me anything white gets a T-shirt." Tweedy threw one of her white plastic sandals at him and won the prize. She spent the week in the camp's Crocodile Club kids' club, taking part in badminton tournaments and disco dancing competitions and eating Devon fudge at breakfast. The former world snooker champion Ray Reardon also made an appearance, showing off trick shots.
Dogsledding under the Arctic sky in Svalbard
Daily Mail producer Emily Cooper had studied Svalbard at university, where she learned it is the world's northernmost settlement and home to the Global Seed Vault, but had never planned to holiday there. While booking a trip to Norway, she and her partner found cheap flights from Oslo to Longyearbyen and added Svalbard to their itinerary at the last minute.
The settlement itself took only a few hours to explore, with free-roaming reindeer among the highlights, though visitors are warned not to wander beyond the town without a firearm because of polar bears. Cooper and her partner went dogsledding with huskies, losing all sign of human influence within five minutes and finding themselves surrounded by silent, snow-covered mountains. A speedboat tour took them past glaciers she described as ice caps the size of cathedrals. Svalbard, she said, is the only inhabited place on Earth where the Northern Lights can be seen for 24 hours a day.
A food-filled reunion in Malaysia
Travel writer Genie Harrison flew from Tokyo, where she was then living, to meet her boyfriend, Will, in Malaysia in 2023. Over ten days, the pair travelled from the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to the island of Langkawi and the country's food capital, Penang. With a population that includes people of Chinese, Singaporean, Indian and indigenous heritage, Malaysia offered plenty to try, and Harrison sampled oyster omelettes, roti canai and, in the night markets, durian fruit. Coming from Japan, where people tend to keep to themselves, she said she was struck by how friendly everyone she met was. The only low point was a close encounter with some overly friendly monkeys.
Slowing down in Lanzarote
Acting travel editor Ben Parker said his best holiday was not in the jungles of Borneo or the surf towns of Oahu's North Shore in Hawaii, but a week in Lanzarote with his wife and their then 18-month-old son, Theo. The family rented a villa on the island's southern coast, close to broad stretches of pale sand but far enough from the resorts to spend much of the day seeing only a handful of people. Mornings began slowly with pan con tomate, days were spent doing little under a clear sky, and evenings passed with Spanish wine. The villa's private pool became the centre of the day, and Parker watched his son go from tentative in the shallows to, in his words, a water baby.
Falling for Colombia
Commercial partners editor Jessica Taylor first visited Colombia in her mid-twenties and has wanted to return ever since. Over three weeks with a travel companion, she visited the UNESCO World Heritage city of Cartagena, hiked through Tayrona National Park, where the pair had a near-miss with a crocodile, and took in the culture of Medellin and Bogota. Despite warnings from other travellers that Colombian food left much to be desired, Taylor said she embraced the meat and carb-heavy cuisine as fuel for the hiking. A friend from Bogota showed them the city's nightlife and invited them to Sunday lunch with her father and sister at a restaurant full of locals rather than tourists, an experience Taylor said made it impossible not to fall in love with the country.
A 12-day road trip through Iceland
Weekend magazine sub-editor Karla Hallett described a 12-day family road trip around Iceland in June 2023 as "the gift that wouldn't stop giving." The family arrived in Reykjavik but saved the capital for the final days of the trip, instead picking up a rental car and driving down the southern coast to the fishing town of Grindavik, which felt almost entirely deserted. They then continued east to a Nordic-style wooden cabin between Selfoss and Hella, using it as a base to visit waterfalls including Skogafoss and Svartifoss in Vatnajokull National Park.
The family later drove north through Borgarnes to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, where they saw the stratovolcano Snaefellsjokull, which featured in Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Back in Reykjavik for their final two days, they visited Hallgrimskirkja church and the Perlan museum. On the morning of their flight home to Manchester on 10 July, they woke to news that the Fagradalsfjall volcano had erupted.
A first cruise around the Mediterranean
Travel writer Alesia Fiddler named a week-long Mediterranean cruise on Tui's Marella Voyager with her fiance, followed by two nights in a hotel, as her favourite holiday. The itinerary took in six destinations, including the Acropolis in Athens. In Santorini, the couple climbed 600 steps from the port to Fira before catching a bus to Oia, taking photographs among the island's blue domes and white-washed buildings and eating souvlaki. It was Fiddler's first cruise, and although she had been sceptical about whether there would be enough to do on board for younger passengers, she said she was not disappointed, filling the days between ports with the ship's food, entertainment, whirlpools, bingo and quizzes, even though she and her fiance never won.
