Summer is here and so is the holiday season and for many it's time to travel abroad; favourite spots such as Spain will no doubt feature heavily again this year for many UK holidaymakers. But when it comes to booking our annual sojourn and even staying in touch with home once on foreign shores, the way we do it now has changed dramatically from as recently as three decades ago.
First, booking a holiday abroad in the Seventies was a laborious, even tedious process for the privileged few who could afford it. It usually necessitated studiously leafing through a stack of brochures to see what was on offer and drawing up a shortlist of suitable holidays in the process, just in case your first choice was no longer available - which frequently happened when the time came to book!
Because holiday dates were determined by the day that the charter flight departed you had to find holidays that matched your pre-arranged holiday absence from work. Booking flights, accommodation and car hire separately was unheard of; everything had to be packaged and booked through travel agents or holiday companies. How different to now when we simply search the internet, find something that appeals at an affordable price, click the mouse and voila! Our holiday is booked.
Keeping in touch with home was almost out of the question too once you left for your 1970s holiday abroad. Cheap calls to Spain - the top package holiday destination in the 1970s - simply didn't exist then. If someone from home wanted to get in touch with you they had to go through the operator to get connected to Spain, as most of Europe wasn't available on direct dial at the time. It often took several minutes to get connected and call quality was incredibly poor, with calls frequently getting cut-off. Trying to ring home was just as laborious. In most cases that involved 'booking' a time for your call and waiting in a private phone booth at the hotel while the operator connected you. The cost was usually enormous and there was often a huge delay on the line making normal conversation virtually impossible!
Now, of course, you simply pick up your mobile phone, pick the person you want back home and press send. From many European destinations you don't even need to enter the UK's country code as it is applied automatically by the network. However, an even cheaper option for calls to Spain is using voice calling over the internet. Find a computer that shares the VoIP software on the home computer and you can talk for free.
This is all certainly a world away from the 1970s when such technology existed only in a TV series called Star Trek!