Why are so many Britons plunging from holiday hotel balconies?
Cheap booze and balconies are a lethal mix If they’ve been drinking, their insurance is void
LIKE any loving mother, Audrey Amos-Larkin was looking forward to her daughter Dina’s return from a trip to Spain. The 21-year- old second-year law student had been with team-mates from her university cheerleading team for a four-day sports festival in Salou, on the Mediterranean coast.
While she understood that her only child would be partying, Audrey’s worries were eased because Dina rang home every day to say she was safe and well.
On the last night, Audrey received one last phone call from Dina before she got on the coach the next morning for the 28-hour journey home.
What happened next was a parent’s worst nightmare.
Audrey, 48, from Poole in Dorset, recalls: ‘I was chatting away as usual to Dina in her hotel room, with her mobile on speakerphone. We’re very close and she tells me everything, so we’d talk like that for up to an hour a day.
‘That night Dina was upset because she’d had row with a close friend and wanted to talk about it. During the conversation she put the phone on the bed and told me she was just going out for a quick cigarette on the balcony and would be back in a minute.’ Dina never returned to finish the call. ‘When I heard nothing after a minute or two, I started calling “Dina, Dina! Are you there?” There was no answer.
‘A moment later, one of her friends came into the room to look for her. When she heard me calling her name, she picked up the phone and said Dina seemed to have vanished and she would call me back.’
In fact, as 5ft 7in Dina leant back over the balcony rail of the fourth-floor room, which she says came up to her hips, she toppled backwards, falling about 60ft onto a corrugated roof.
As a result, Dina, a champion gymnast who had represented the UK and was ranked eighth in the world for trampolining, is now paralysed from the chest down. At 21, this talented and articulate young woman has been told she will never walk again.
Any parents hearing about her might reassure themselves that this was some terrible one-off — a rare tragedy. But that would not be the case. In the past three months there have been 12 serious balcony falls at popular holiday destinations in Europe alone.
These falls, revealed in figures compiled for the Daily Mail by the Foreign Office and ABTA, the UK’s largest travel association, include three deaths: two in Spain and one in Turkey.
A Foreign Office spokesman said that while some of the accidents were still under investigation, ‘it’s safe to say that this is a particular issue in resorts popular with young people, and alcohol has been a factor in a number of cases’.
Indeed, the large amounts of lowcost booze on offer at destinations such as Magaluf in Majorca and Sunny Beach in Bulgaria, combined with hotel balconies which may not comply with up-to-date safety regulations, is proving to be a lethal combination.
It must be stressed that these accidents are not just happening on rowdy hen and stag nights.
More and more, ‘party-hard’ trips to Europe are seen as a rite of passage for A-level students to celebrate the end of their exams, as well as morale-building exercises for sports teams at some of the UK’s top universities.
Other balcony fall casualties include Oxford University student Luke Parry, 21, who ended up in intensive care after falling 25ft from a second-floor balcony at a student sports festival on the Costa Brava three years ago. At the time, police said he had been seen trying to jump between balconies.
A year later, 21-year-old Romany Mitchell fell 30ft from a third-floor balcony in Phuket, Thailand, and suffered broken bones. She was there to celebrate her graduation from Edinburgh Napier University.
Almost two years to the day before Dina’s accident, a 21-year-old male student, who was not named, suffered multiple injuries when he fell from a first-floor balcony on an identical holiday in Salou that was organised by the same company.
The operator’s website makes no secret of the fact that the opportunity to drink a lot is one of the main reasons for going. It describes its Saloufest holidays as the ‘THE fundamental rite of passage for students’, adding: ‘We have exclusive access to over a dozen of the best bars and clubs, complete with cheap-as-chips drinks deals!’
From the very first day, the holiday itinerary says students should ‘get ready to hit it hard! Your first night is always a big one’.
During the day, they are told, they can nurse their ‘sore heads’. On the last night, the company declares: ‘It’s time to go hard or go home.’
Dina admits she’d already had a shot of a potent local punch followed by a few more drinks when her accident happened, but says she wasn’t drunk.
‘Everyone comes under intense peer pressure to drink,’ she says. ‘It’s the reason you’re there. You can’t refuse. It’s what the experience is supposed to be about.
‘Before we were due to go out clubbing, I called my mum because I was upset about the row with my friend. I left the phone on the bed and went on the balcony to have a cigarette. I leant back on the railings and toppled over backwards in one smooth motion.
‘ I don’t remember anything beyond that. I had bleeding on the brain, four broken ribs, a broken cheekbone, and my spine was broken in three places — at my neck, chest and lower back.
‘The next thing I recall was waking up in a Spanish hospital two weeks later. The doctors kept me in a coma because my l ungs had collapsed and I needed to stay completely still because of the damage to my spine.’
At her bedside were her parents, Audrey and Stephen, 49, a former firefighter, who flew out as soon as they heard the news.
‘When I arrived at the hospital and was taken to the room, I almost didn’t want to go in because then I knew it would be real,’ says Audrey. ‘When I saw Dina I was shocked. Her face was swollen, her eyes were black, she was on a ventilator, her arms were tied down on each side to keep her still.
‘Every day for two weeks, we sat by her bed looking at her. Sometimes she would come out of unconsciousness, crying, but had to be instantly sedated again.
‘It was the best moment of my life when she was woken up and we realised she didn’t have brain damage, as had been feared. But that doesn’t mean our hearts aren’t broken.’
What happened to Dina and her f amily i s cruel. But statistics suggest that others will suffer the same fate, or worse, unless we address a drinking culture that renders young people, often away from home on their own for the first time, all too vulnerable.
Many cases do not reach the mainstream media, but at a conservative estimate some 14 British youngsters are seriously injured or killed in balcony falls every year. So far in 2015, the figure has exceeded this.
Many of these accidents are due to risky behaviour by adolescents who lack the maturity and life experience to understand how alcohol affects their judgment. Some are the result of ‘balconying’, in which youngsters jump from balcony to balcony or into swimming pools below.
One tour operator, whose job includes arranging the return to Britain of injured young people and the bodies of those who have died in falls, told the Mail that some accidents happen before youngsters have even unpacked their bags.
‘The bigger the group, the more accidents happen,’ she says. ‘They egg each other on, so everyone is under huge pressure to drink too much and behave stupidly.
‘Usually the drinking starts at the airport bar and continues on the plane, where flight staff get commission for every drink they sell, and on the transfer bus to the resort. By the time they get to their rooms, they are already intoxicated.
‘If you have 20 drunk teenagers who’ve just finished their exams and are off on holiday, they check their brains in with their luggage. These days they are from every background. They could be the most sensible, intelligent young people with amazing futures ahead of them at home. But when they get together like this, they go potty.’
Beyond the terrible injuries, there are also unexpected financial costs to their families.
‘As soon as a young person falls off a balcony, the first thing that’s done is their blood is tested for alcohol. In 90 per cent of cases they’ve been dri nking. That r e nders any insurance they have null and void.
‘This leaves the families facing huge costs, either to repatriate the bodies or to bring them back on the plane accompanied by medical staff. Some end up remortgaging their homes to find the money.’
Dina’s parents were left unable to pay the £10,000 cost of transporting her back after her insurance company refused to pay out. Instead, friends organised a charity donation page which has so far raised £24,000. Now she is home, the money will go towards paying for a specially modified wheelchair and modifications to her home.
But what about those hotel balconies? It turns out there are no EU standards for balcony heights in tourist accommodation. Countries can set their own rules.
According to a recent EU report, the minimum height permitted in most member states is one metre
(3.28ft), although several countries have raised this to 1.1 metres.
Leading personal injury lawyer Katherine Allen, of Slater and Gordon, says that in some countries, including Spain, height regulations can vary between areas.
Even hotels where there have been falls are not required to raise balcony heights until they carry out major refurbishments.
Katherine says: ‘If a hotel was built in the 1980s and no significant work has been done since then, its balconies have only to comply with the regulations that were in place when it was built.’
One person who agrees that balconies should be higher is Jake Evans, from Liverpool, who was 18 when he fractured his skull three years ago after falling 90ft from a Magaluf hotel balcony. It was the same hotel where 17-year-old schoolgirl Grace Ford, of Greenhalgh in Lancashire, died in a similar fall the year before.
Jake said: ‘I wasn’t bal conying or messing about — I just leant out to try to catch a lighter someone had thrown up to me.’
For Dina, who also believes she would not have fallen if her balcony had been higher, life is a daily struggle to adjust to her disability.
By rights she should be just finishing her second year exams. Instead, she spends her days in bed at Poole Hospital, waiting for a place to become available at a specialist spinal unit.
Every day, she copes with the realisation that she will never walk again. ‘There is no point being miserable because it doesn’t change anything and makes life harder. So I try to remain positive.
‘There are times when I get very upset. I see and hear things around me that trigger me to think: ‘What if I never have a relationship? What if I never have children?’ Before this, I wanted to be a mother more than anything.
‘Doctors tell me this may not be the life I had imagined for myself, but I can have a good life. Still, I find it hard to adjust.’
Nevertheless, Dina is determined to become a human rights barrister, as she had always planned — and as a brilliant sportswoman she wants to train as a Paralympian. From her bed, she is also planning to set up a charity to help transport people injured abroad back to the UK, if their insurers decline to cover the costs.
Dina says: ‘I would say to any young person going on holiday this summer, never get too close to the balcony rail. You can enjoy the view from farther back. I don’t want anyone else to go through what I’ve been through.’