Here's your £100 discount. That'll be £140 please.

It's that time of year when people like to start booking family summer holidays. The brochures start dropping on the doormat, the ads appear on the TV and your inbox seems fuller than normal.
This is the time when the tour operators circle around like vultures so that for £500 per person, they can kick you out of the country for a fortnight.

Now pleny of firms will offer you an "online discount", so we decided that was the way to go. After we filtered through the crap of flights from Leeds to Mallorca, via Brussels, Paris and Madrid that one e-firm was offering, we settled for a deal with Portland (well, it's actually Thomson but that's not important). It was 11 nights in Sa Coma, Mallorca, with flights to & from the shiny new Doncaster/Sheffield Robin Hood Airport, working out at £2200 for the 4 of us, including £100 online discount.

So, of we go, filling in the details until you get to the screen to chose your "extra cost options", things like your in-flight meals, taxi transfers, that sort of thing.

Then you get to the insurance page. Portland offered their insurance at £35 each or £140 for the 4 of us, which is fairly expensive as they sort of rely on the fact that despite the fact it costs more, the customer can't be bothered to look for cheaper insurance, so it's a nice little earner for them. We managed to get it cheaper with the Post Office, so we said no.

And that's where the problems started.

From that point, this intriguing error message came up, for no apparent reason and we were asked to phone up. Determined not to lose our online discount (Yorkshire folk are like that), we tried again and again and again and again the morning after.
At that point, my mind took me back to a story I read in the paper, where the bank Alliance & Leicester wouldn't let you by a loan online unlesss you took out their payment protection plan to boot. Instead, you were asked to phone their call centre in Bangalore where some small Indian boy tried to give you the hard sell.
So we tried with the insurance at a £140 premium. Strangley, the computer didn't seem to have a problem with that and it was more than happy for us a waltz straight through to the payment page.

So we jumped on the phone and tried to blag our £100 discount. Anyhoo, the operator on the phone didn't seem that suprised. Turns out that anyone who doesn't opt for the stupidly high insurance package ala Dixons, isn't allowed to take advantage of their generous offer.
A few "that's not on's" later and it was all sorted.
Come July, I'll be strapped into an aluminum tube in South Yorkshire hurtling down the tarmac at 200mph. Sound's like fun!