Back the 1980s, travel agents controlled 90 per cent of all holiday bookings in the UK, face-to-face or via phone, with thousands of agencies and high street branches such as Lunn Poly and Thomas Cook. Then the internet struck. Like much else in modern life – supermarket checkouts, cab ordering, music streaming, stock trading – the boozy man in the drab suit or Silk Cut-mainlining woman in shoulder pads was jettisoned for greater value for money and control.

As things stand, the mental cost of planning outweighs the pleasure of travelling

As things stand, the mental cost of planning outweighs the pleasure of travelling

But where travel is concerned, losing the middleman was a big mistake. Now, not only is actually getting to your destination hell – there has been much comment of late about the horror of airports and flying in the era of unspecified network breakdowns – but booking it all in the first place has become an impossible burden. The exact thing that killed the travel agent is the very thing that’s murdering the fun of travel now: the saturated, direct-to-consumer, social media-splattered booking engine ecology of the internet.

For a start, there are too many choices, most of which aren’t actually choices, because they’re unrealistic to get to in your allotted time, or much too expensive, or a scrum with crowds to be beaten off to get anything from a room to a dinner reservation. Often all three.

Still, one begins hopefully, carefully........

© The Spectator