We were recently lamenting those long gone days when, if you lived in the UK, there was an excellent choice of small tour operators that provided a superb choice of small places to stay in Greece. It seems to me that the golden age for a Greek holiday that delivered the true Greek experience was probably the 1980s-90s. Since then it’s been going downhill alarmingly fast.

When I try and think back now, names like Sunmed, Kosmar, Libra, Laskarina, Manos, Cosmos, Priceright and a few more besides spring to mind. We used to be able to go into a travel agent during late summer, and there’d already be available probably around five or six really good brochures for the following season from companies like those listed, offering holidays in Greece where you’d stay in small apartments near the beach, studios etc., and it seemed that self-catering was by far the most popular way to go. I particularly lament the demise of SunMed, which used to be the best brochure by far in the 1980s. In the 90s we booked a number of times with Libra Holidays, who even had their own airline, called Excel. Excel won awards a few years running for best European charter airline, and we always had a good experience flying with them and staying in Libra accommodation on islands like Samos, Symi, Skiathos, Thassos…

What a thrill it used to be to come back home from a two-week break in late September, nip into the travel agent, collect half a dozen brochures and then keep them on the coffee table for weeks while we browsed through them in the search for the next Greek experience. The choice was endless, it seemed, and the big conglomerates never entered into the picture. By the time they’d been in the house for a few weeks, those brochures would be full of turned down pages where the little photos of some accommodations that we were shortlisting would have pink highlighter circles drawn around them. The first time we were ever conscious of a larger company beginning to dominate the market was when Airtours came onto the scene. They seemed to grow quite aggressively and soon re-branded as MyTravel after a series of big negative stories hit the UK TV consumer programmes like the BBC’s ‘Watchdog’ for example. They finally died the death in 2007, when I think they were absorbed into the Thomas Cook Group.

All of those small operators used to offer really lovely ‘stay small’ holidays in beautiful locations where you couldn’t help but intermingle with local folk and end up perhaps being taught the Sirtaki, or being given tasty samples of something that the owner had baked or cooked in her own kitchen. A lot of people back then would return to the same accommodation year after year and felt as though they’d almost been accepted into the family of those who owned the small block of studios or apartments, maybe simply village rooms (as they used to call them) where they stayed.

I remember well when Libra Holidays finally bit the dust, and it was only months after they’d taken the disastrous decision to purchase another smaller company that was getting into debt and about to fold. We were already living on Rhodes by then. It was 2009 I seem to recall. I believe it was Kosmar, always a slightly less ‘polished’ outfit I remember, whom Libra had acquired, and pretty soon they went down as well. That was a big shame.

It seems to me that the only surviving holiday company in the spirit of those I’m talking about, at least for UK travellers, is Olympic Holidays (not to be confused with Olympic Airways, now wholly owned by Aegean), and I used to work for them in my first few seasons living on Rhodes. I did airport transfers for Olympic, purely on a piece-by-piece basis, although they did give me a day’s training and supplied me with a smart uniform, which consisted of a couple of white shirts with the logo front and back, and a couple of pairs of blue trousers (it was hideous having to wear long trousers, why couldn’t they have supplied shorts?) which were a nightmare to wear, because they were synthetic, not cotton, and thus made your legs sweat something awful all the time you had them on. They also gave me a posh rucksack and a clipboard. Looks like they’re still functioning, but they’re in an uphill battle against the big boys with their huge hotels and ‘all-inclusive’ mantra, which – if you’ve read any of my drivel for any length of time – you’ll know I hate with a deep passion.

If I still lived in the UK, and I have to admit that what life over there was like is fast becoming a distant memory now, since this last month we celebrated 18 years of permanent residence in Greece, I don’t really know how easy or hard it is to find an ‘authentic’ Greek holiday these days. Perhaps someone reading this in the UK will restore my faith by telling me that there are still some excellent small companies offering village room/studio/apartment holidays away from the sweaty hordes, eh?

And, if that’s not the case, then long live DIY holidays, where you book your own flight, find your own accommodation, and thus enjoy Greece for her real self, rather than simply a couple of weeks of sun, sea and swimming pools among a huge crowd of your compatriots, or maybe a bunch of tall Scandinavians, or towel-wielding Germans. No offence intended, because what I mean to say simply is that I don’t understand the attraction of going on holiday only to be surrounded by loads of other people who are on holiday too.

The photo at the top of this post was taken at Bali (pronounced Balee), a small ‘resort’ on the north coast of Crete about halfway between Heraklion and Rethymnon. Here are a couple more photos that I quite like…

Above: Approaching the island of Spinalonga for a visit in October 2020.

Above: That’s where we live folks!

Above: The climbing chickens belonging to our neighbour Evaggelia are at it again.

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