This is a review of the Thomson fly/cruise, "Colourful Coasts" taken by my wife and I at the end of February 2014, on board the Thomson Celebration and including The Canaries, Madeira and Agadir, Morocco. It was not our first cruise, having previously enjoyed similar holidays in the Mediterranean and Bahamas. We booked on the internet rather than through a travel agent.

Firstly the booking experience. Thomson, it would be fair to say, occupies a position within the 'popular' sector of the market. The website is reasonably intuitive although when we tried to return to our booking later in order to make some adjustments, there was some difficulty in logging in as the referrence we had been given did not work. This was sorted out by the help desk and all was then well. It also proved necessary to phone the company to establish our need for a double cabin and although we could not be certain at the time that this would happen, it did in fact succeed.

We were able to view the flight booking and it appeared that we had been allocated seats at the very rear of the aircraft. We could have chosen our seats for an extra fee of £9 per person, per journey but decided that it was not worth it for this short-haul flight. Later, when we completed the online check-in, we found that we had seats further forward. I rather suspect that Thomson show everyone the worst seats on the aircraft initially in order to persuade us to pay to upgrade! Read more