In 1989, before no-frills airlines, online check-in, and price comparison sites had taken off, airline tickets were generally impenetrably complicated paper documents - laboriously hand written by a travel agent, with several sheets of carbon paper inserted between the leaves. Lose one, and you had to pay for it to be re-issued. You could check in only at the airport of course, and take pretty much anything you liked through security - including liquids and fold-away penknives.

Meals, luggage, seat allocation and credit card fees were all included in the fare, but there was far less competition, and far fewer routes generally. Your best bet for a cheap fare on a scheduled flight in Europe was likely to be on Dan Airs rather limited network (it was sold to BA in 1992) or with Air Europe (which collapsed with the tour operator, Intasun in 1991). Freddie Lakers Skytrain had been and gone, Virgin Atlantic was just five years old. Stansted Airport was still housed in an old military terminal and used almost exclusively for charter flights. At Heathrow, terminal five didnt exist, terminal four was only three years old, and there was no Heathrow Express.

Booking hotels and villas

The vast majority of people booked with tour operators or travel agents. The brochure - nearly always printed on cheap paper and often criticised for misleading descriptions, and selective photography - was king. If you wanted to make a hotel booking independently, you would have to research the one you wanted through a guide book, make an expensive international call, and follow up with a letter, or the latest in new-fangled technology, a fax message - though you wouldnt have a fax at home, and might not even have access to one in the office.

Hotel room prices were largely fixed rack rates which depended on season. There were no last-minute agents either - walk in customers could still get last-minute bargains, otherwise you had to pay the going rates. Finally, there was, of course, no way of finding out what other people thought of a hotel. You couldnt easily seach for a villa either - agents and operators, most of which now nolonger exist, controlled the market.

Information

Getting local information was generally either impossible, or expensive and time-consuming. Snow reports were not published, so you didnt know what the snow was like until you met the rep at the airport. The same went for the local weather. The first you knew would be the captains update as you came in to land. If you wanted to find the location of a hotel or a villa, there was no Gogle maps - you would need the address, and a map, which probably had to be ordered specially from a London specialist, such as Stanfords in Covent Garden. And, of course, on arrival, there were no smart phones to plot your route, or check some history. You had to be able to read a map, and you certainly had to buy a guidebook.

In short, the internet has fundamentally changed the way we research and book our holidays. We can compare prices, find accommodation and research the most obscure details without even having to pick up a phone. We are certainly saving money, and taking more responsibility for what we book, but perhaps we are having to spend more time about it. And whether or not we enjoy our holidays any more as a result, is open to question,

About Nick Trend

Nick Trend trained at the Consumers Association and has been an editor and writer for the Telegraph Travel section since 1995.

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Travel before the World Wide Web