Originally Posted by
fortunateguy
Yes, we were extremely lucky that peculiar circumstances prevented me from booking the holiday & paying the deposit - that would have sealed both the holiday and our certain deaths for sure! I also recall the Stockport crash that occurred just hours after the Perpignan one, and that one sort of overshadowed the Perpignan press reports because it happened here in the UK.
It's a shame I wasn't so lucky in my above long post about the two holidays, because as the volume of typing I had to do was so long I first completed it as an MS Word document which was grammatically perfect. I then just highlighted, copied & pasted it into the forum input field but I see that in the pasted copy a considerable number of words have become attached to each other. Thank God I've input direct within this post.
Does any member of this thread have a copy of one of the Lyons Tours 1966/67 brochures that they could scan the page that advertised Hotel Acapulco in Calella and email me a jpeg photo?
Found you an old postcard photo of the
Hotel Acapulco in Calella de Mar
The hotel is long gone now - this Hotel was one of those the holidaymakers were due to stay at from the Air Ferry flight.
Also shown is the Hotel Guillem in Malgrat de Mar, also used by Lyons and Everyman's - I stayed there in 1964 - my first holiday abroad.
In the 1960's onwards the Costa Brava resorts and hotels of Calella, Tossa de Mar, Lloret de Mar, Pineda, Malgrat, Playa D'aro, San Felui and Blanes all were really popular with the new booming holiday market and the Costa Brava then was No.1 choice as it was the nearest and the cheapest.
Majorca was the next obvious choice for Brits, and then Benidorm.
(But you still then had to fly to Valencia as ALC airport was not yet open and so you had to suffer a 3-4 hour hot and slow coach ride along the old windy coast road from VLC to Benidorm)
Torremolinos was more expensive and hotels were of a higher quality (fly to Malaga)
Lido di Jesolo in Italy (you often though had to fly to Ljubljana until Venice was used) and the Adriatic resorts near Rimini were also extremely popular.
Package Holidays sold out to Brits, Germans and Scandinavians from around £30 Guineas upwards for 15 days Full Board. (no one really went only for a week back then and many flights were fortnightly)
It was slightly cheaper to go for 11 or 12 days if the Tour firm offered it.
Just after each Xmas or New Year, the companies new Brochures for the next summer would come out and so they opened on a Sunday and folk would queue around the block to be sure of getting their 2 weeks booking in the sun.
Lyons Tours of Colne (The Air Ferry crash charterer) were a low budget firm, they sold very cheap foreign holidays, and their hotels were usually 1 or 2 stars.
They did a lot from Southend with Channel Airways on their Viscounts to Ostend, Austria, (both for coach tours) and to Spain and Majorca.
Charter flights to the Costa Brava to begin with during the early years mainly flew into PGP Perpignan and so coaches then took the holidaymakers over the Border to the Costa Brava.
Why>? I cannot recall - maybe something to do with airport tax or even Franco pops in my mind.
Barcelona was also then used more so, and thus PGP was dropped.
BEA Vanguards and British Eagle Britannia's flew lots of passengers from London Airport on the BCN route, then Gerona was added once it had opened.
Gerona was not yet open until later in the 60's.
Britannia Airways with their Britannia's were one of the first to fly to Gerona from Luton.
Many of the very first
Jet package holiday flights were in 1966 with Lunn Poly/Everyman on British Eagle BAC 1-11's
BUA also had used their new 1-11 200's on IT's from the start in summer 1965,
and in 1967 both Channel Airways and Laker Airways got their first BAC 1-11's
Autair a year later in 1968 would also get the BAC 1-11.
In 1968 saw Channel Airways acquire their first 2 Trident's of a 5 aircraft order, but would subsequently only take delivery of the first 2, and BKS would take 2 of these Tridents.
Britannia Airways was the first airline in Europe to order, and to take delivery in summer 1968 of the first Boeing 737-200.
Hotel Acapulco Calella de Mar
Hotel Guillem Malgrat de Mar - my first holiday abroad in 1964 with Lunn Poly Everyman