It's an online holiday from hell

Bypassing travel agents was meant to be a step forward,

.

Booking a holiday online seemed so simple, just putting the dates and places you want to go into a couple of boxes and then perusing the results.

And it'd be fine to just leave it there and book your time in the sun, with the pictures showing unnaturally blue sea and the sun loungers free of German towels.

Of course it's impossible to do that. You just have to open up another browser window and look for reviews of your holiday on tripadvisor.co.uk. It makes sense. You don't want to just swallow the line from the tour operator. They're the ones that try to get you to watch cabaret in the hotel.

Now I tried this recently and was truly perplexed at some of the comments I found.

Under subject headings such as "Avoid this place if you don't want to stay in a prison", punctuated with 10 exclamation marks, were comments such as "the cleaners couldn't speak English" and "the bar ran out of Carling TWICE!!!!!!!"

Not that I'm ungrateful to the people who were kind enough to warn me about the dreadful experience I would suffer, you understand. It's just I do have to wonder whether it's the traditional British trait of not complaining to the hotel but instead deciding to exaggerate and moan to anyone who would listen afterwards.

Most amusing were the ones which began "I wasn't looking forward to this holiday anyway and sadly my worst fears were confirmed". Why did you book it then, you loser? Stay at home.

Reading the rants and raves of the online community is meant to be helpful but all it ended up doing was leaving me sat cowering under my duvet convinced that the world outside was a cockroach ridden hell hole where food would leave me hugging the porcelain, chambermaids would use only soiled sheets and the only way in and out of the room was via the scaffolding outside where the bare chested workman would snooze the day away after starting work with a drill at 5.30am.

And yes, I am aware of my glaring hypocrisy in moaning about other people's opinions while expressing my own.

Two weeks without the internet. Now that's a holiday.