Travel with Katie Butler: Don’t check weather apps – it’s fine!

Katie Butler writes: I managed a sneaky five night break in the Costa Blanca with the hubby and youngest daughter.

Although, upon landing in Alicante, Ellie and her boyfriend were going their separate ways to stay with family.

I wasn’t too keen on her travelling abroad for the first time without us, and so in order for it to happen it made complete sense for us to travel with them.

We were planning a short break away on our own anyway and so this worked perfectly.The weather forecast was terrible, and the whole week before we were due to travel – the rain in Spain fell mainly in ‘Benidorm’.

Great! Especially as the UK was enjoying the first of our summer sunshine.

Surely it can’t be that bad I thought, but the week before, it rained and didn’t stop.

I checked various weather apps and the forecast remained rainy every day.

So, in complete disbelief, I was prepared for a week of rain.

My advice on this is that some of the weather apps are really quite wrong.

I was sat around the pool one day and the weather app was telling me it was cloudy and rainy all day – the reality was – I was sat in 27 degrees, full sunshine, with not a cloud in the sky!Although there may be an element of help looking at the weather apps for tips of what to pack, I certainly wouldn’t allow checking weather apps to put a damper on your holiday, as they really were wrong on most of our days away.We flew from Leeds Bradford on Bank Holiday Monday and what a change from travelling last year.

Check-in and security was really quick and there was no need for Fast Track through security.

The airport was heaving too, so hopefully this will remain consistent through the season.

Coming back home from Alicante Airport – it was safe to say – absolutely manic!

Since leaving the EU you have to go through separate queues to get your passport stamped.

So, again – advice is to not leave it too late as the queues are pretty lengthy, especially at peak dates.

If you spend too much time shopping, eating and drinking you may find that you are rushing to get to the boarding gates.In other travel news, and following the USA dropping the need to be vaccinated to travel to the country for holiday purposes – I am over the moon to announce that finally Virgin Atlantic have reintroduced seasonal flights direct from Manchester to Las Vegas, a route that many of our customers have been waiting for.

The Manchester to Vegas route has not operated since 2019.

The reintroduced schedule is set to be operated on Virgin Atlantics newest aircraft, the airbus A350-1000 with 16 Upper Class, 56 Premium and 325 Economy seats as well as it’s Social Space in Upper Class – The Booth.

Majorca, Tenerife and Turkey were our best sellers last week with a huge 37 per cent of bookings to travel in the next 12 weeks.