The race is on to 2008's best places to stay
| Published: 30th September 2007 11:38 |
Ever noticed that by the time most of us get round to booking our summer holidays, the top spots have long gone?
There might still be space in your favourite hotel, but that corner sea-view room with the wraparound balcony was booked months ago, by a slightly smug-looking man with a fake tan and a pink sweater draped devilishly across his shoulders.
And that gorgeous villa overlooking the beach, the one you'd sell your granny to grab? Gone before the sun had set on last summer, to a familiar-looking fellow who wrote all his postcards on the first day of his holiday and is now indoors, ironing his underpants.
How does he do it? By booking preposterously early, of course - and that means right now, while the rest of us haven't even decided what we want for Christmas.
Now you can beat Mr Smugley-Dunne at his own game, because we've found the hardest-to-get rooms in the hippest hotels, the best beach clubs, the most vied-for villas, and the perfect pitches on the most coveted camp sites. Get dialling.
- Prices, unless stated, are for those grail-like high-season weeks and are the most you can expect to pay - so you could save a bundle by booking off-peak
The hot hotels
If you find yourself at the Hotel Terraza (00 34 972 256154, www.hotelterraza.com in the Costa Brava resort of Roses next summer, you are probably entitled to feel smug. It's not that the sea-view rooms overlooking the hotel's perfect little private beach are particularly hard to get, nor that they're especially exclusive, at about £100 a double. It's just that the restaurant up the road is El Bulli - consistently voted the best in the universe - and securing a table there is as likely as winning the Euromillions lottery. To be in with a chance, send your request, citing four dates, by e-mail to bulli@elbulli.com on October 15 - no earlier and no later. You could ask for a corner table, but I wouldn't push it. Fly to the nearest airport, Girona, with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com).
Holidaymakers don't go out much in Oia, that dazzling village of white houses teetering like spilt sugar lumps above Santorini's black volcanic caldera. They lounge instead on cantilevered terraces, sipping chilled kokkineli and gazing across the wine-dark sea until the sun slides behind the crater's western rim. Unlike the tourists bussed in to watch the sunset from the ruins of Oia's Venetian castle, those organised enough to have found rooms here have that view to themselves all day, every day. No wonder they look so pleased with themselves. Early birds can still grab a week in Oia's most sought-after spot - 1864 The Sea Captain's House (00 30 22860 71983, www.santorini-gr.com). Ask for the Sailing Suite, which has a four-poster bed and a sun-trap balcony; £345 per night. Fly to Santorini with Thomsonfly (0870 190 0737, www.thomsonfly.com).
Few find the Château de Bagnols by chance, and fewer still are lucky enough to cast themselves as a captive princess or fearless musketeer embroiled in some liaison dangereuse inside this fairy-tale castle, deep in theBeaujolais foothills. That's because word of France's most gorgeous five-star palace has spread to the peasantry, and now Barbra Streisand, Hillary Clinton and Naomi Campbell are among those clamouring to be allowed across the drawbridge. Prices here are predictably aristocratic, but if you keep your head and move fast, there's plenty of high-season availability. The best room here is Gaspard Dugué, a junior suite with arched ceilings, a gilded four-poster and hand-painted murals on the walls. Original Travel (020 7978 7333, www.originaltravel.co.uk) offers two nights of wanton extravagance for £820pp, including flights and car hire.
Nearer home, Cornwall's Bedruthan Steps hotel (01637 860860, www.bedruthan.com) looks like a polytechnic from the outside, but that doesn't matter if you're on the inside looking out. The problem is that families who've discovered what appears to be a collaborative experiment in child-friendliness by Willy Wonka, Enid Blyton and the Pied Piper, perched above gorgeous Mawgan Porth beach, tend to rebook as they're checking out. "We're 79% full for next summer," the hotel says, "but there's still availability if you book now." The best rooms are villa suites 112 to 116, which cost £3,024 per room per week, half-board, based on a family of four sharing.
You're way ahead of the Smugley-Dunnes if you're looking for a room at trendy Babington House (01373 812266, www.babingtonhouse.co.uk) in Somerset. "We're looking at 96% occupancy for 2008, but there's still plenty of weekend availability," confirms the celebrity-spotter's crib. As you'll be booking early, you'll have a choice of accommodation, so ask for room 6 - it has a huge bathtub on the balcony. Room 12, with the enormous emperor bed, is your fall-back. Both cost £355 per night, room-only.
The best beach clubs
There's one sector of the population that cannot be tempted by slick advertising and glossy brochures selling exotic hotels in challenging, far-flung destinations. They're the Mark Warner barmy army, who've found what they like - full-board, free watersports and childcare - and see no reason to go anywhere else ever again. Or at least until the kids leave home. This makes for fierce competition for the top weeks, and the most hotly contested property is the San Lucianu resort, in Corsica. The best rooms here are the family suites: "They're much more spacious and manageable, from a family point of view, than the interconnecting rooms," the company confides. What's more, they have the biggest balconies and the best views - but there are only four of them, so call now. A week costs £3,900 for a family of four, including flights; call 0870 770 4227 or visit www.markwarner.co.uk
The sailing-holiday specialist Sunsail (0870 427 0077, www.sunsail.co.uk) opened its first beach club in 1981, and quickly realised it was on to a good thing. By reclassifying lounging by the pool as a watersport, Sunsail succeeded in making a shore-based sailing holiday attractive to the most sloth-like of landlubbers. Last year saw the opening of the company's fifth resort, Club Phokaia, in Turkey, with the usual armada of free boat-based activities and a spa for the ladies. It's already the most popular port of call for Sunsailors - the best rooms are the spacious garden villas, with two bedrooms and a large living area. A week costs £4,836 for a family of four, including flights. Book before November 10 and you get 10% off.
Swish villas and cottages
If Boden were a holiday company, it would probably be Classic Cottages (01326 555555, www.classic.co.uk), the West Country letting agency that likes you to be beautiful, well dressed and glowing with health before you set foot in its properties. Which you are, so no worries there. First to go, every year, is Stonebarrow Lodge, a four-bedroom timber bungalow just east of Lyme Regis. The first booking for this cottage for next summer was taken in September 2006. Could it be the summer house, the stream that meanders through the grounds or the hot tub with views over the Jurassic Coast that makes the place so highly desired? Or is it the mystery at the bottom of the garden? I'm sworn to secrecy on the latter, so it'll cost you £1,434 a week to find out. You're so far ahead of the game this year, you could also book La Paz - not the Bolivian capital, which sleeps 1.25 million and has three bathrooms, but the coveted cottage of the same name above picture-perfect Maenporth Cove. It sleeps 10, costs £2,292 per week and will be all booked up next month, as will Skylight Barn, another Smugley-Dunne secret. Above Perprean Bay, and just up the lane from Coverack, the cottage sleeps four and costs £705 per week.
When the new Coast & Country Cottages (01239 881397, www.welsh-cottages.co.uk) brochure hits the doormat in early October, the best weeks in the cutest cottages will be long gone - in some cases, for years to come. Take the stable cottage at Croesgoch, for example - except you can't, because the company tells me a close friend of Mr Smugley-Dunne has booked the same high-season fortnight every year until he dies. The lesson here is not to wait for the brochure - call up, or go online, and book a week in the National Trust lodge at Llangrannog, which sleeps 12 in a stunning clifftop location for £1,100 a week, or the exquisite whitewashed cottage at Pwllderi, on Pembrokeshire's Strumble Head, which sleeps three for £605 per week. As we go to press, there are plenty still available, so brysia (hurry up), as they say in Wales.
By the time you've read the description of Sunset House, on Cephalonia, it could already be too late, so here's the important stuff first: it sleeps six and costs £1,034pp for the week, including flights and car hire, and you book it through Greek Islands Club (020 8232 9780, www.greekislandsclub.com). So, what makes Sunset House so hot? Put it this way: you're on a boat trip around the Erissos peninsula. The wine is chilled, the sun is going down in a blaze of glory and everything is perfect, until your loved one points at that fabulous villa in the island's most dramatic setting and says: "Why didn't you think to book us that one?" Well, that one is Sunset House.
What price a week in a villa on the Côte d'Azur? Price of a small car? Price of a big car? Price of a terraced house in Rotherham? And then some: the five-bedroom Villa Katarina costs £41,000 and the all-but-impossible-to-book Mas des Sources, near St Tropez's Pampelonne beach, costs £35,000 a week in high season. But Smugley-Dunne's wife is called Prudence, and she knows that the Beauvallon villa, in St Trop's secluded Domaine de Beauvallon, offers better views of the gulf for about 10% of the price. Put her brand-new nose out of joint by grabbing one of the last remaining high-season weeks: it sleeps 10 and costs from £3,955, through the Villa Book (0845 500 2000, www.thevillabook.com). Fly to the nearest airport, Toulon, with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com).
Leave it until after Christmas to book your Tuscan villa and all you'll get is a lockup in Lucca or a partially converted goat shed on an industrial estate in Grosseto. "The huge family villas are always the first to go," says the villa specialist To Tuscany (020 7193 7782, www.to-tuscany.com), and the best weeks of the year are snapped up long before Hallowe'en. Since you've got time, try for Villa Mina, a sprawling palace in the Chianti hills, with views of Florence from its private tower. It sleeps 14 and costs £3,919 for the hardest-to-get weeks. Or try Villa Valliole, a 17th-century farmhouse that sleeps eight, has views of Siena and costs £3,338 per week. Airlines flying to the nearest airport, Pisa, include EasyJet (www.easyjet.com and Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com ).
Getting to St Barts has never been easy. While Air France flies from Paris to St Martin, a 10-minute hop from St Barts, the British have always had to waste a precious night in Antigua before another full day on an island-hopper flight. Thus, this chic French département d'outre-mer has remained the domain of tight-trunked Parisian playboys, hungry American day-trippers and - you guessed it - the Smugley-Dunnes, who snap up the lovely Harbour Crest House before the rest of us can get a look-in. Sleeping six, this cool, colonial-style cottage, with a pool and a hot tub, is set above Shell Beach and has views across to St Kitts and Nevis. At £2,680 per week, with Wimco (0870 850 1144, www.wimco.com), it's a bargain, and getting there is no longer a problem: the Caribbean airline Winair has announced direct flights (£150 return) from Antigua to St Barts, connecting with incoming flights from London. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Gatwick to Antigua; from £561.
The cool camp sites
It's already too late to book a weekend at the home-counties hippie hang-out Blackberry Wood (01273 890035, www.blackberrywood.com), just north of Brighton, where every Friday and Saturday night from April until September 2008 has already been seized. Why? Mainly because Blackberry Wood is one of just a tiny handful of sites that allow campfires - as crucial to camping as the Flake is to a 99. Add open-air showers and an award-winning gastropub - the Jolly Sportsman, in East Chillington, a half-hour amble to the east - and it begins to sound too good to be true. Fortunately, there's loads of midweek availability, even in the school holidays. Pitch your own tent for £5 a night; add £7 per night for each adult and half that for kids under 12. Oh, and the pitch they call Mecca - because it faces east, not because it has a bingo hall - is the best. It's the most remote and has its own stream.
"I'd rather you didn't mention Sandy Balls," begged the gentleman I met in Fordingbridge. Rather than an embarrassing travel-hygiene issue, he was vainly trying to protect a well-kept holiday secret. The Westlake family are still welcoming guests and their dogs to the quirkily named camp site they established in 1934 in 120 acres between the New Forest and the River Avon, although these days the accommodation extends to mutt-friendly, plasma-ed-up, hot-tub-fitted log cabins.
Sandy Balls' reputation for bucolic tranquillity and wholesome, summer-camp-style children's entertainment - bird-watching, orienteering and storytelling included - is carefully spread by word of mouth to trusted confidants. Superior Dog Lodge 159, which sleeps four and a pooch, and has a decking balcony overlooking the river, is the one the Smugley-Dunnes always ask for, whispers manager Tim Howell. The price is £1,315 a week - otherwise try a tent for £425. Call 01425 653042 or visit www.sandy-balls.co.uk
You'll need to move fast to bag a pitch at Pinewoods (01328 710439, www.pinewoods.co.uk), near Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk. Admittedly, it's not very pretty, and there is a fair amount of branded leisurewear mooching around the caravan site, but one of Britain's most beautiful beaches is a couple of minutes' walk away. Lovely Holkham Hall is a mile west, and three miles farther is the Hoste Arms, in Burnham Market - a gastronomic peak for gourmet Munro-baggers. Best of all, though, are Wells's colourful beach huts, which Pinewoods guests can hire for £24 a day. Ludicrously, only six tent pitches can be booked here, and to secure one, you need to apply by post, which apparently involves something called a stamp. Reservations are allocated on a first come, first served basis, and pitches cost £17 a night.
Britain is lovely - it's why we live here - but camping makes you a hostage to the weather, so the smart money heads south, where sunshine is guaranteed. Among Europe's fastest-selling sites is Bella Italia, on the southern shore of Lake Garda, with spectacular views across the lake, five pools and six waterslides. Pitches here go quicker than a greyhound on a bullet train, but which one is the best? "Definitely area 26," says the camping specialist Keycamp (0870 428 9450, www.keycamp.co.uk). "It offers peace and tranquillity, and is close to the lake shore." A week in a three-bedroom supertent costs £758 for a family of four, including ferry crossings.
Brittany's best camp site is Le Ty-Nadan (00 33 2 98 71 75 47, www.camping-ty-nadan.fr) - which could be Breton for hen's teeth, as this accurately describes the rarity of available pitches here in high summer. Set in an oak forest, north of Concarneau, on the sandy banks of the River Ellé, the site offers a range of facilities, including indoor and outdoor pool complexes, canoeing, rock-climbing, riding and archery. Then there's staring at the river, drinking cidre fermier and looking forward to more moules-frites - but only if you act now. Pitch your own tent for a family of four for £229 a week. Return crossings with Brittany Ferries to St Malo (0870 907 6103, www.brittany-ferries.co.uk) cost £368. Or book a package with Eurocamp (0844 406 0456, www.eurocamp.co.uk), which has a week in a ready-pitched tent for £743 for a family of four, including ferry crossings.
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