We save all year for it, count down to it and for more than four million of us, the package holiday we had pinned our hopes on goes wrong somewhere between the booking confirmation and the flight home.

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That's the headline from Citizens Advice this week, and the number should stop you in your tracks. It says its consumer service is now fielding around 14 holiday complaints every single day. A third are about substandard service, the "sea view" that faces a car park, the pool that's drained all week, food that turns your stomach. A large share involves all-inclusive trips abroad that turn out to be anything but.

Take Zorana, a semi-retired NHS doctor who spent £6,300 on a week in Lanzarote with her daughter. Flooding knocked out the hotel's power, water and internet, and when she went looking for her operator's rep, she was told he didn't work weekends. She came home early, then spent months fighting for a refund, and........

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