Turkey soars for sunny breaks

Staff’s diplomacy skills are sometimes stretched to the limit by crazy pleas for help, from locating vampires to finding out who’s on Strictly.

Now the fed-up Foreign Office have released a list of the wackiest calls from Brits abroad in 2018.

As well as the Braveheart plea from a caller in the Netherlands, one worried man phoned to ask if there were vampires in Poland – because his online date had asked about his blood group.

Another staffer in Rome almost dropped the phone when asked to arrange a wedding, recommend a florist – and get the happy couple tickets to see the Pope.

Meanwhile, a caller in the US asked who’d been voted off Strictly the previous night.

And a man in New Delhi called asking whether the embassy sold vegetarian sausages. In Bangkok, a Brits are shunning traditional beach holidays to the Canary Islands in favour of Turkish resort breaks, figures show.

Analysis of millions of holiday searches and bookings found popularity of breaks in Turkish cities such as Antalya, Istanbul and Dalaman has soared this year.

The study by travel comparison site Kayak revealed Istanbul rose from 43rd place in the 2017 to 22nd this year, with demand up 47 per cent. Sunny south-west beach resort Antalya saw a 60 per cent rise, while Dalaman moved from 71st to 46th.

Tenerife, meanwhile, plummeted from 23rd most popular worldwide destination in 2017, to outside the top 50 this year.