Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Finn Conlon as always did an excellent job for which I am very grateful.
Not aware that Palm Springs car rental at Alamo did not open until we had to check-in. Checked their website and found their advice about checking in early morning.
Always keeps us up to date on all of our travel arrangements.
Everything went to plan. Had a wonderful time with my family and seeing my grandson graduate from university.
For the many, many years I have dealt with DAF and Ewan and his team, they have never let us down, and our recent trip was perfect as well. Thanks DAF for being just a 100% perfect company to deal with.
Disappointed not to have adjacent seats from Sacramento to Dallas. Suffice it say we will never fly BA again. Got our lost baggage back last night.
Peter looked after my trip from beginning to end, thank you
Everything went like clockwork - very nice resort
Excellent contact and communication. Clear information on flights and good choice of hotel. Probably need to inform customers about hotel tax!
Very polite and efficient service
Have dealt with Christian for many a year and would not organise a trip through anyone else. Superb as always.
Everything was perfect thanks. Great seats on the plane. Great car. Excellent connections. Thanks.
Mason has always helped us with travel plans superbly and the app from DialAflight is really helpful.
I know someone is looking after me from booking to arriving back home. Makes my trips stress free
As always perfect in every way, great holiday, fantastic hotel recommendation, caring communication - pre hols and post hols checkin.
The car hire arrangement was just what I wanted - thank you
Gino gave great service and even booked us upgraded seats for the best price - a nice touch and much appreciated
A bit more clarification re US time zones would be good.
All good thank you
Thank you for the ongoing support, even whilst we were on holiday and needed to call! Des was great right from booking through to the travel date.
Philippa was great throughout the whole process - thank you for your help!
Would highly recommend. Thank you Steven Merralls and team.
Always a pleasure to book with DialAflight. Very professional and efficient. I look forward to the courtesy call 24 hours before I travel . Professionalalism at its best.
We had a problem with our hotel room. One phone call and all sorted! Thank you
Shelley has been fantastic and I’ve already asked her to start looking at options for NZ next year
Gary always does a great job … I don’t go anywhere else for travel
Ashley and his colleagues very helpful and found them very competitive.
Always a good service.
You booked me return flights with BA but they became AA flights, not such a good airline. The Miami transition was a nightmare. Don’t use that airport unless you have to. Only just made the flight, and wouldn’t have managed but I had to jump the line several times. Lots of muttering and savage looks, but I did it.
Plane was diverted to JFK. Navigation down. Put on another plane.
Some of this flight might be intense, but trust your guide and be brave.' The words of warning came from Dr Jackie Ogden as our group gathered in the Link Chamber of the Pandora Conservation Initiative. We had already been through the Genetic Matching Room and been decontaminated for micro-parasites, and were being given the final sequence of instructions before being let loose on the alien planet.
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
With the final motivational message of 'Rise to the challenge!' we were swooping off across the otherworldly terrain and lush foliage of Pandora on the back of a Mountain Banshee, the gigantic dragon-like beast from Alpha Centauri that eats people for breakfast.
Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on your level of bravery - all this excitement was purely man-made. Or, we should say more accurately, Disneymade. Because we were in the Animal Kingdom theme park in the heart of Walt Disney World, Orlando.
A WHOLE NEW WORLD
Pandora: The World Of Avatar is the latest attraction built by the House of Mouse - with the help of film-maker James Cameron - in its vast Florida resort. It has taken seven years to complete.
While some Disney die-hards doubted the wisdom of such an obvious film franchise being successfully shoe-horned into this most naturalistic of parks, the end result is a 12-acre immersive environment that is so packed with features and special effects it would take a small book rather than one article to list them all.
It starts with the Floating Mountains that seemingly hover over the area - gigantic, 156ft-tall rockworks that are complete creatures and waterfalls – and continues through a junglelike panorama of immense complexity, studded with the bioluminescent plants from the 2009 movie that are all recreated in amazingly painstaking detail. They include some examples that react to touch and movement using specially developed sensors.
Cleverly hidden among the alien terrain - which mixes artificial plants with real ones from Hawaii and Africa - are two contrasting rides that take the story of Avatar into the future, 100 years after the war between Earth's Resource Development Administration and the indigenous Na'vi people.
RIDE OF YOUR LIFE
The Na'vi River Journey is a meandering boat ride through the Pandoran jungle, usingwith vegetation, a mix of animatronics and screen projections to create a stunningly realistic series of encounters with the flora, fauna and people. It takes an ecofriendly approach, highlighting conservation principles and real-world issues such as habitat destruction.
After this the action intensifies - Avatar Flight Of Passage kicks things up several notches with the aforementioned simulator ride in the company of Dr Ogden. Sitting astride a kind of stationary bike (and equipped with 3-D glasses), riders seemingly dive, twist and turn in through a long whirl over Pandora, taking in the sights and sounds that made the film such a visual extravaganza.
There also ought to be a special award for the Blueberry Cream Cheese Mousse with its neon blue a there is such a thing as alien looking food, this is it.
Even James Cameron was apparently initially surprised at the huge scale of Disney's plans when they approached him with the idea of Avatar Lane. He said: 'I thought we were going to be talking about creating an attraction. Disney’s vision when they came to me was to create a land.'
ART & ENGINEERING
It has been reported that the area cost up to 500-million dollars to complete. It features music composed by the late James Horner and Simon Franglen, based on the original score from Avatar.
The final word, though, deserves to come from Disney's Zsolt Hormay: 'We had to use a lot of experts to help us with the technology. It needed a lot of different skills. It melds art and engineering. It is like finishing a painting, only in three dimensions - and with a lot of engineering.'
First published in the Mail on Sunday - January 2018
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