Inside this week's Escape, Observer editor Roger Alton compares his holiday on a cruise ship to school. Which struck me as rather interesting in the same week I met Roger Diski, owner of Africa specialist Rainbow Tours, who compared being a tour operator to being a teacher.
In fact Diski, a former history teacher, tells me there are quite a lot of ex-teachers running travel companies (especially geography teachers). He says the skills of teaching are similar to those of arranging someone's holiday. 'You have to reach out to people and find out what makes them really interested. You are the headmaster, you tell people what is good for them.'
Sounds like there's more job sat isfaction in selling holidays than arming kids to pass their GCSEs. Flicking through Rainbow's brochure is more fun than any history book I can remember at school. How about Kosi Bay, South Africa (unfeatured by other UK operators), where the locals still make wicker fish traps and on one side of the peninsula is the Indian Ocean, on the other a lake filled with hippos.
'It's magical,' he says describing making people happy with a simple honeymoon at an affordable price taking in Cape Town, a safari and ending up on a Mauritian beach. But did his former pupils ever say, 'That was the best history lesson of my life'? 'Er, no... er, more like, they roll up at the petrol station and say, I remember you, Sir. Your lessons were all right.'
In case you're wondering how Diski got from teaching in north London to making people's holiday dreams come true, he started off 10 years ago arranging tours of South Africa, when apartheid ended, for former anti-apartheid supporters. His business partner had gained his experience running tour buses between Nairobi and Cape Town with AK-47s hidden under the seats for the African National Congress.
'The first Rainbow Tours brochure cover depicted a smiling boy holding a picture of Nelson Mandela and the focus was "community tours," said Diski. 'But after an initial rush, interest sank and people wanted to go and have a jolly good time and see animals. We put a picture of Victoria Falls on the cover and we were in business.'
· Rainbow Tours (020 7226 1004)
A quick one...
Travelodge has been quick to point out that its half-hour Catnap and Coffee £5 hotel room rentals will be for one person only (just in case you and your extramarital affair might be getting any ideas). But isn't it missing a trick? I remember going to the launch of the first Formule 1 hotel in the UK several years ago and the boss boasting that the French motel chain was the only one with a more than 100 per cent occupancy rate. In Venezuela and Brazil, they have love hotels rented by the hour (particularly popular lunchtimes). All as a result of cheating lovers.
As young as the brochure you feel
It isn't surprising to hear from Thomson that sales of 'grey' holidays are in decline even though the population as a whole is getting older. As everyone knows, most people as they age become extremely keen to look and be perceived as younger. It takes a brave man or woman to ditch a traditional brochure bearing bronzed young folk with pearly white smiles to the one with the Edna Everage-type woman with the blue rinse or grey locks.
It's like clothes shops labelling their size 14 clothes a size 12. It makes us feel better about ourselves. Anything with the words golden years, young at heart or similar such cliches will get short shrift.
Maybe they should take a leaf out of Saga's books, where the likes of Mick Jagger are used to promote the image of the over-50s market (now known as 'third agers') in Thomson terminology.
