Only the savviest travellers can spot all 10 getaway essentials in this busy beach brain teaser – can you find them?
WITH summer just about cresting our horizons, how can you resist a sunny seaside spot-the-items brainteaser.
Remembering everything you need is not easy when jetting off – but this puzzle promises to get you into the right frame of mind.
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Hidden away in this busy beach scene are 10 items many of us will need in order to have fun abroad by the sea.
Can you find a sun hat, a pair of sunglasses, sun cream, flip flops, beach ball, a plane ticket, a fan, a book, a bikini, and a camera.
The brainteaser was commissioned by holiday package and travel tech platform, lastminute.com, which also carried out research of 2,000 travellers to reveal the top 30 things they do before every getaway.
These include getting their haircut especially for the trip, obsessively checking the weather, and arranging plant care.
Doing a big clothes wash, packing lots of snacks 'just in case', and changing the bedsheets so they're fresh to return home to are also key activities prior to do a break.
As are packing, unpacking, and packing again, buying new underwear, and worrying multiple times they've successfully packed their passport.
The poll also found those who do any prep ahead of a getaway will spend an average of seven-and-a-half hours doing so.
And 34 per cent say they actively enjoy it, with half have even taken time off work especially to get everything in order ahead of a much-deserved break.
Taking annual leave is more common in younger respondents with 77 per cent of Gen Zs and Millennials having done this.
In contrast, just 49 per cent of Gen X, 21 per cent of Boomers, and eight per cent of those from the Silent generation have taken time away from their jobs to get everything in order.
I travelled to the hidden gem US region that's better than Florida it's filled bucket list tourist activities
But 19 per cent don't factor in the cost of getting ready for a holiday when planning their travel budget.
Spokesperson Zoe Fidler said: 'Between work, childcare, DIY projects and endless life admin, actually booking a holiday often ends up as a last-minute task – bringing with it the stress of wondering if you've missed out on the best deals.
'Then comes the 'holiday prep' itself – from hair appointments to packing enough snacks to keep the kids happy.'
The study also revealed loading tablets or e-readers with movies, books, games or podcasts, cleaning out the fridge, purchasing travel-sized toiletries and weighing suitcases several times are also key activities for many.
It also emerged 54 per cent consider themselves to be someone who gets everything sorted well in advance of a trip.
With those who do prepare spending a total of seven-and-a-half hours doing so.
Millennials spend the longest prepping for a getaway at nine hours and 14 minutes on average, but the Silent generation spend the least – five hours and 20 minutes.
While women take seven hours and 57 minutes getting ready, with men spending six hours and 59 minutes to prep.
The research, commissioned via OnePoll, also found 25 per cent tend to overpack 'massively' and 21 per cent leave at least some of their pre-getaway prep to the last minute.
But 23 per cent selflessly put the needs of others ahead of their own when getting ready for a break.
Lastminute.com's spokesperson added: 'We know that preparing for a holiday can be time consuming, stressful and expensive - but worth it in the end, which is why we commissioned this research to fully understand what Brits need from their summer getaway.
'We firmly believe it's never too late to book a getaway and our booking data shows this happens more often than you think.'
TOP 30 HOLIDAY PREPARATION TASKS:
1. Secure travel documents in one place
2. Purchase sun cream/after sun
3. Exchange currency or order travel money
4. Check passport/visa requirements and renew if needed
5. Pack any prescription medication and travel health kit
6. Make a packing checklist
7. Clean out the fridge
8. Secure the house
9. Get your hair cut
10. Read reviews
11. Clean the whole house
12. Buy medicines/tablets
13. Charge every possible device and pack two portable chargers
14. Arrange pet care
15. Buy travel-sized toiletries
16. Do a big pre-holiday clothes wash
17. Repeatedly worry whether you've packed your passport
18. Weigh their suitcases multiple times
19. Change the bedsheets
20. Obsessively check the weather at your destination
21. Research health precautions (e.g. vaccinations, water safety)
22. Load your tablet or e-reader with movies, books, or podcasts
23. Pack a 'just in case' kit with mini sewing kits, painkillers, duct tape, and safety pins
24. Take pictures of your passport and insurance
25. Pack lots of snacks "just in case"
26. Buy new underwear
27. Download offline maps/apps
28. Decide at the last second to pack several more items
29. Arrange plant care
30. Pack, unpack, and pack again
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The Guardian
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Tim Dowling: Why are my friends erasing me from their holiday memories?
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Times
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9 of the best sleeper trains in Europe
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Eat a small breakfast of coffee and a sweet and savoury snack in your cabin while admiring the coastal views around the toe of Italy's boot, before the train is divided into sections of four carriages and shunted on to a special ferry that takes you across the Straits of Messina to Sicily; you'll reach Palermo late that afternoon. Choose from four-berth compartments with couchettes (which can be converted to seats during the day) or one, two or three-bed compartments (with basins) in the sleeping car. The journey takes the best part of 20 hours; there's a trolley service with snacks and drinks, but no bar or restaurant car, so take provisions and fill up at the ferry café if you're running low. • Best hotels in Milan• Best hotels in Sicily Linking London Paddington and the West Country, the Night Riviera Sleeper runs back and forth between the bright lights of the capital and the beaches, fishing villages and wild corners of Cornwall. Services leave London shortly before midnight, taking a little over eight hours to reach the end stop at Penzance, where you can stroll across to the tidal island of St Michael's Mount. Trains the other way leave earlier in the evening and get into Paddington at around 5am, but cabin guests can remain on board until 6.45am, so you needn't rise with the lark. The train has a slick lounge area complete with art deco-style bar where you can stock up on snacks and drinks. Cabins have washbasins and are available in singles and twins; bookings include breakfast and access to first-class lounges (with showers) at Paddington, Truro and Penzance. Pets are welcome on board. • Best places to visit in Cornwall• Best hotels in Cornwall This route links two of Europe's grandest, most romantic cities. Taking just under 15 hours, the train leaves Vienna in the early evening and reaches Rome at the civilised hour of 10.05am, giving you the whole day to explore the sights. 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Today, it whisks you from Edinburgh into the romantic wildness of the Scottish Highlands, with a series of experience-led itineraries ranging across two-night trips focused on food, four-night journeys into the world of malt whisky, and week-long extravaganzas taking you on a looping tour right around the Highlands. Choose an ensuite twin cabin, or properly splash out on a Grand Suite, complete with personal butler service and a complimentary treatment at the onboard spa. The two mahogany-panelled dining cars offer haute cuisine that focuses on fresh Scottish produce, together with a selection of more than 50 whiskies. Prepare yourself for ancient castles, rugged landscapes and a dram or two of Scotland's finest. • Best affordable hotels in Edinburgh• Best restaurants in Edinburgh This is a double-decker train that charts a 12-hour northward course from the capital of Finland up to the heart of Finnish Lapland. The night journey takes you above the Arctic Circle, offering a chance to see the midnight sun or the northern lights (depending on when you travel) as well as meet Father Christmas at his village in Rovaniemi, where most passengers alight. There are cabins that sleep up to two and three passengers, and pairs of '2+2' connected cabins downstairs for groups of four. All cabins have bunk beds; those on the upper deck have en suite bathrooms. Cabins on the lower deck share facilities, but can be a better bet for families due to the adjoining rooms. Accessible and pet-frieldy cabins are available. The cheapest ticket is simply a seat only and there's a restaurant carriage that sells snacks and drinks. • Best northern lights igloos• Best northern lights tours Take an 11-day journey gliding through nine countries to tick off some of the world's most historic cities, including Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Skopje and Sofia. Most nights are spent aboard your hotel on wheels: the Golden Eagle Danube Express, which is firmly in the five-star category. Choose between deluxe (twin beds) and superior deluxe sleeper cabins (king-size doubles), each with wood-panelled rooms for relaxing during the day that are converted to bedrooms come night time. The restaurant serves up fine dining and you can enjoy a digestif in the bar lounge car, where a pianist plays in the evening. This is an inspiring, high-end trip with a price-tag to match. • Best affordable hotels in Istanbul• Read our full guide to Istanbul
Times
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The Côte d'Azur has reinvented cool — and it's stylishly affordable
There you'd be, driving past a screen of high hedges and electric gates on the French Riviera, wondering when you'll get another glimpse of the Mediterranean, and the hotel would zip past your window like a misplaced dental clinic from the 1950s. Straight out of Palm Springs, perhaps, or even Las Vegas. Long-slung, flat-topped and ever so modernist, the single-storey street front in the town of St Raphaël, between St Tropez and Cannes, is certainly eye-catching but it doesn't break the wall of overdevelopment that hems in so much of the Côte d'Azur. Nor does it promise anything approaching coastal splendour. A split second later, you'd put your foot down and accelerate off towards the glitzy Cap d'Antibes or the rocky grandeur of the Massif de l'Esterel. But you'd be missing out. Because that austere whitewashed façade hides one of the loveliest seafronts in the south of France — and one of the coolest Côte d'Azur hotels to have opened in the past ten years. Les Roches Rouges has just had an £11 million growth spurt too, expanding into a secret cove along the coast, and last month I was first in to have a look at what's new. The appeal is obvious as soon as you open the hotel's front door. Framed by a glass wall at the far end of its reception yawns a widescreen strip of sea and sky — and as you walk first towards it, then out onto the balcony, you realise you're not on the ground floor but right at the top of the building. Everything else (apart from one of its restaurants) drops away below you, clinging to the side of a cliff. Three floors of bedrooms, a small spa, another restaurant, a sizeable terrace: they're all there, layered up in a brilliant white slab of concrete that butts straight out into the glittering sea. It's so close, the waves seem to break right underneath your feet. 'It was built as a three-star in the 1950s and it was way past its best when we found it,' Billy Skelli-Cohen tells me when I join him for a drink on the terrace shortly after I check in. Skelli-Cohen is chief executive of the boutique hotel brand Beaumier, which rescued Les Roches Rouges from obscurity in 2018. 'Rescued' is the word, because this was not a rebuild. Beaumier's trick is to find dated but distinctive properties in extraordinary places and then work with what's already there — 'respecting the building's DNA', as Skelli-Cohen puts it. Elsewhere that means celebrating the playful, art nouveau architecture of the Grand Hotel Belvedere in Wengen, Switzerland, and preserving the muscular simplicity of a former watermill that is now La Moulin at Lourmarin in Provence. In Les Roches Rouges' case, it's about showing off its mid-century concrete rather than trying to conceal it — and then setting it against richly textured details. The library of hardback art books, the butterfly chairs and the alarmingly moreish cocktails all seem to have more impact when placed amid such architectural rigour. The colours, meanwhile, are muted. Think white walls, terracotta table lamps, ochre rugs and lots of cadmium red in the abstract art. Which is just as it should be when nearly every floor-to-ceiling window is a slab of dazzling blue. Almost all of them look straight out to sea. Add two swimming pools into the mix, as well as Michelin-starred food and room rates, including breakfast, that start from £338 a night (which counts as mid-range in these parts), and it's no wonder Les Roches Rouges quickly found its way on to many top ten Côte d'Azur hotel lists. Now Beaumier has gone a step further and invested in a second phase of expansion. Central to this new project has been an extension of the site westwards to incorporate a snack bar (focaccia sandwiches from £12), a place to launch the hotel's paddleboards and kayaks, a yoga studio and an annexe that adds 25 bedrooms, bringing the total to 67. Not surprisingly, on a coast where property prices can easily top those in Paris, it has cost a small fortune. But the money has been well spent. Les Roches Rouges can now extend its sense of ease and comfort along the whole length of this hidden (and nameless) cove. When half of Europe is jostling for elbow room hereabouts, that seems nothing short of miraculous. Inside, the new bedrooms are as zesty as the red tuna ceviche at the hotel's main Estelo restaurant, which they serve with a sidekick of chilli (mains from £27). Designed by the Parisian architecture studio Atelier St Lazare, the rooms have the same sense of restraint as those in the main building, with polished concrete floors, more books and pops of colourful art. They have the same sense of quiet luxury too, courtesy of their lush bed linen and Grown Alchemist soaps and smells. But here the dazzling intensity of sea and sunlight seems to wash in with even greater force. Leave the floor-to-ceiling windows open at night and you worry you'll wake up with the waves breaking over your feet. • The best European cities for art lovers Meanwhile, there's a new chef cooking up a storm in Récif, the top-floor gastronomic restaurant (six-course menus from £126). Previously, Alexandre Baule was at L'Alpaga, a Beaumier property in Megève in the French Alps, whose restaurant won its first Michelin star in 2023. Now he's brought his love of seasonality to the coast and is playing with the way its flavours arrive at different speeds in your mouth. Never more so than with his jelly of pastis and sea water served with a jasmine emulsion, which starts salty but suddenly turns floral across your tongue. But don't set your heart on any particular dish. Thanks to his collaboration with the sustainable St Raphaël fisherman Olivier Bardoux, Baule's menus change daily. It comes as no surprise to learn that, once they get their electronic-wristband room keys, most guests at Les Roches Rouges don't step beyond the front door until it's time to settle the bill. For the most part they're design-conscious couples from London and America in their late twenties or early thirties, and many are honeymooning. But there are empty nesters sprinkled among them too, relishing their hard-won freedom. Usually, all are stretched out on sunloungers by the two pools, equipped with a cocktail and a little light holiday reading. Every now and again, however, one of them walks to the end of the hotel's jetty and dives into the sea. I don't blame them for not exploring. When you've got front-row seats like this, the Med is mesmerising. All the same, it's a crying shame because half a mile up the coast Mother Nature has her own surprise to share. Up there, at Cap Dramont, the mountains of the Massif de l'Esterel break through the coast road's cordon of villas, bars and marinas to plunge their red-rocked feet straight into the sea. I wander over on my final afternoon and as soon as I leave the main forest track, the world turns raw and wild. Overgrown footpaths weave through thickets of laurel, olive trees and pine. Deep channels of seawater sparkle invitingly between the cliffs and, occasionally, I use hands as well as feet to climb. In other words, it is just like Les Roches Rouges — a wake-up call for anyone who, like me, has ever written off the Riviera as samey and soulless. Suddenly, the only thing I don't like about it is having to Newsom was a guest of Les Roches Rouges, which has B&B doubles from £388 ( Fly to Nice Les Roches Rouges isn't the only hotel in Provence and the Côte d'Azur making a fuss of its 20th-century architecture. In Nice, the 35-room Hotel Gounod has been reborn in a shimmering, boudoir style that's the perfect match for its intricate art deco façade (B&B doubles from £138; Keep it in mind if you're visiting the Matisse Méditerranées show at the city's Matisse Museum this summer (until September 8; The exhibition includes loans from MoMA in New York and the Pompidou in Paris. It's part of Nice's Year of the Sea ( that also includes The Midnight Zone, an immersive installation that explores the deepest parts of the ocean. • More top hotels in Nice Meanwhile, inland from St Raphaël, two 19th-century properties are flying the flag for stylish B&B-keeping. Two years ago, the former coaching inn Le Gabriel put the hilltop village of Claviers on the map with its mix of zesty colours, big windows and playful decoration. Its five arty bedrooms and suites start from £190 a night B&B ( Nearby, in Draguignan, the five-suite Château Pimo opened this year with a more subdued colour scheme, but the same eye for detail as well as its own spa (B&B suites from £230; Both lie within striking distance of the spectacular Gorges du Verdon canyon. Further west, Aix-en-Provence's tight historic streets are always gorgeous and atmospheric. But this year the city is also honouring Cézanne, its most famous son, with a blockbuster exhibition at the Musée Granet (June 28 to October 12; as well as the reopening of the Jas de Bouffan, his parents' surprisingly highfalutin' home. The gardens at the recently refurbished Hôtel Le Pigonnet offer a welcome refuge from the gallery-going (B&B doubles from £233; while the town's thriving restaurant scene is strong with plenty of mid-priced menus. In the centre, Les Galinas has just been awarded one of Michelin's coveted Bib Gourmands for affordable, Provençal gastronomy that includes bourride (fish stew) (mains from £18; The newly opened O'père on the outskirts, has a growing reputation for its deeply flavoured sauces (mains from £20; • Great restaurants in Nice Finally, to the north of Aix lies a corner of Provence that's less touristy but no less delightful. The town of Carpentras is one of its stars, thanks to its sprawling Friday market — the perfect place to scoff the divine local nectarines, as soon as you've bought them. But it's also home to spectacular hiking beneath the limestone crags of the Dentelles de Montmirail, and two top-notch wine areas. Head to the villages of Gigondas and Vacqueyras for succulent, fruity reds, and to the new tasting cellar at the Domaine de Coyeux for sweet and fragrant Muscat de Beaumes de Venise ( Ten miles south of Carpentras, in the riverside town of L'Isle Sur La Sorgue, the L'Isle de Leos is a new, five-star MGallery property in a former watermill, decked out in a rich cinnamon-and-chocolate colour scheme. It opens next month with enticing introductory pricing (B&B doubles from £298;
