The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
British visitors return to Sharm beaches
British holidaymakers have returned to Sharm el-Sheikh for the first time in four years as the Egyptian resort embarks along the road to recovery.
In the summer of 2015, 50 flights from the UK were arriving at the Red Sea resort (right) every week. But after the Isil bombing of Russian Metrojet Flight 9268 in October of that year, the UK Foreign Office (FCO) tightened its travel advice, and airlines and tour operators cancelled services.
In October, the FCO lifted its restrictions, and within hours London-based Egypt specialist Red
Sea Holidays was selling festive trips to Sharm. The first customers arrived on Thursday.
“We’re delighted: delighted for the UK, for our customers and for the hotels out there,” said Andrew Grant, the tour operator’s managing director.
“We’ve been quite overwhelmed by the response. The demand has always been there; we’ve known that by the number of calls we get on a daily basis. People are very keen to get back.”
After the bombing, international arrivals to Egypt fell to 5.26 million for 2016, down from 11.5million in 2012. Sharm el-Sheikh was hit particularly hard, its streets and beaches deserted.
Egypt worked hard on improving security at the airport and in the city and finally convinced the British Government to change its tack this summer. Other European nations had already allowed tourists to return.
Tui will return in February, but until then Red Sea Holidays has exclusive access for Britons.
“Nothing has changed out there,” said Grant. “In terms of what the holidaymakers can expect, it’s really no different.”
SIX SENSES IN THE UK
Luxury brand Six Senses will open its first UK property, Six Senses London, in 2023.
The hotel, based, in the art deco former Whiteleys department store in Bayswater, will be developed in collaboration with architects Foster + Partners, with 110 guest rooms and suites. It is part of a regeneration plan for the west London neighbourhood. ever mind Mustique: this month, the holiday we appear to crave most is to travel back in time. That’s how it looks here at the Miracle pop-up bar (miraclepopup.com) at Covent Garden’s Henrietta Hotel, one of 100 such retro Christmas pop-ups worldwide. I’m sipping a spicy cranberry cocktail out of a Tyrannosaurus-Rex-in-a-Father Christmas-hat mug, surrounded by tinsel, plastic trees, fairy lights and revellers in ironic Christmas jumpers and reindeer horns.
The first Miracle bar opened in New York’s East Village in 2014, when cocktail obsessive Greg Boehm followed his mum’s advice to deck out his unfinished bar in Christmas chintz and serve Christmas drinks, rather than staying closed for renovation over the lucrative festive period. It
PARTY ON THE PISTE
Scotland’s newest ski resort, the Nevis Range, marks its 30th birthday this weekend with cut-price lift passes and a retro outfit competition.
The ski area, which opened in 1989 after years of development, was expecting heavy snowfall for the celebration to attract skiers to its
20km of slopes. They rise up to 1,221m, the highest of any resort in Scotland. became a queues-round-the-block phenomenon, and the following year Miracle expanded to four locations. By 2016, there were pop-ups in Athens, Montreal and Paris, and this year, there are 100.
“Nope, it’s fair to say we never expected it to be quite this successful, but it does make sense,” says Boehm, who still bartends at a Miracle bar every night of the December run. “Cocktails have always been about decadence and celebration, and our bars make it easy for anyone to get into a celebratory mood. Perhaps it’s not always easy to find a space where we can reflect on everything that’s good about life.”
The cocktail menu, developed by bartender Nico de Soto, is a well-judged blend of substance and style. But the unashamedly cheesy interiors are the marketing miracle behind the London bar’s fully booked run. Tonight Andrew Lloyd Webber has hired the entire ground floor for his staff party.
AIRLINE FOOD DELIGHT
The first restaurant dedicated to airline food, AirAsia’s Santan in Kuala Lumpur, has been hailed a success by Telegraph Travel’s reviewer.
Jamie Fullerton sampled the airline’s famous Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak, and said: “Even after such hype, it delivered.”
AirAsia sells 2.8million portions of its Nasi Lemak per year.
Despite the cosy familiarity of the Seventies fireplace, the tinsel and the relentlessly cheerful Bing Crosby tunes, I find all this joviality a tad sinister. Do we really need to pretend it’s 1975 to feel like celebrating? What’s wrong with partying like it’s 2019… oh.
Nostalgia is more keenly felt during recession or political turbulence. “When the present is all doom and gloom, people try to recall a time when they felt safer and happier,” says clinical psychologist Joanna Watts.
If the Seventies isn’t your
ANIMAL WELFARE MOVE
Elephant rides are “unacceptable” and should not be offered to guests by UK holiday companies, Abta has said.
The travel association this week updated its voluntary animal welfare guidelines, listing attractions it deems harmful and inappropriate. The list includes contact with great apes, bears, crocodiles, elephants, orca and sloths, and feeding and walking with wild cats.
Julie Middelkoop, from the charity World Animal Protection, said: “The clear advice that it is unacceptable to use elephants for rides, shows, bathing or any other form of tourist contact without a barrier is a real breakthrough. We are thrilled to see that other harmful tourist experiences, such as selfies with sloths in the Amazon, feeding orang-utans and walking with lions in southern Africa, appear on the same listing.” preferred vintage, Dalloway Terrace at The Bloomsbury Hotel offers a slightly more upscale Twenties Narnia vibe. The Elyx Chalet at The Rosewood London has gone Fifties Swedish, and the Rooftop Winter Cinema at The Berkeley is screening Nineties comfort flick Home Alone. Other cities even have year-round retro Christmas-themed venues, namely Athens’s decadent Noel Christmas Bar and Nashville’s much more dive-y Santa’s Bar.
But it’s worth noting – as I do to my companion over our cocktails at Miracle – that nostalgia wasn’t always couched in such positive terms. The word derives from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), describing a suffering borne out of the desire to return home. The modern word “nostalgia” dates back to the 1688 dissertation of a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, which described the anxieties of Swiss mercenaries fighting in France and Italy. (Some military doctors thought the ailment specific to the Swiss, and related to the sound of cowbells.)
By the 1850s nostalgia was no longer seen as a disease, but was understood to be a form of melancholia and a predisposing condition to suicide.
More recent studies, however, have found that familiarity and reminiscence boost feel-good hormones, allowing us to escape current stressors by fantasising about the past.
I can’t knock the hospitality industry for responding to this, and I’m more of a sucker for Seventies chintz than anyone I know. But while there’s nothing inherently wrong with capitalising on the feel-good factor of nostalgia, the real benefit of the past is what it can teach us about the present, and our future.
So this Christmas, this is what I’ll be thinking about, as I swig another mouthful of Jingle Balls Eggnog from my festive mug.