‘Our mystery Paris hotel was next door to a sex shop'

Telegraph

14-03-2025

You might have clocked the mystery holiday trend at railway station promotional raffles, or on TikTok, where video diarists record their 'big reveal' after parting with just £99 for a holiday – the catch being that their destination remains unknown until the last minute.
'Honest to God I am so happy!!' squeals Scottish 'content creator' Maria Marshall, of her £89 flight and hotel deal booked through Wowcher on February 3. 'Look, it's a 4.5-star [hotel] on TripAdvisor and RIGHT BY THE BEACH!' She's all smiles and jiggly dancing as she points to images of Hotel IPV Palace in the Costa del Sol, its swimming pool fringed by loungers and palms. Seven-night flight and hotel deals to the Fuengirola four-star typically cost from £369pp, so Marshall has cause for celebration.
@mummadiaries_ FLIGHT AND HOTEL 🛫🏝️🏖️ #dayinmylife #wowchermysteryholiday #wowcher #wowcherholiday #wowchermystery ♬ original sound - Maria Marshall
On February 13, over on Facebook, travel firm HolidayPirates trumpets an even cheaper deal.
'Go on a mystery holiday including flights and hotel from £89,' it reads. 'Could be New York, Mexico, Dubai, Bali, Dominican Republic, Toronto, Iceland, Northern Lights, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, Egypt & more.'
Mystery holiday deals, of course, are nothing new. They were a staple of 1980s Ceefax travel offers and from the 1960s to 1990s travellers could arrive at airport travel agents with a carry-on of bikinis and sun lotion and leave for the next sunshine flight with empty spaces, paying dirt-cheap rates.
But are the 2020s mystery holiday deals – offered by voucher sites such as Wowcher and Groupon, coach tour providers Caledonian Travel and JustGo, plus the likes of HolidayPirates – all they are cracked up to be?
Uphill struggles
Facebook activist group WOWCHER RIP OFF was set up in 2015 to document users' experience of receiving what administrator Colin Parry refers to as 'tat' in the Wowcher's mystery gift bundles (presents of tech and other goodies sent through the post), but is today dominated by complaints about £99 mystery holiday deals.
Group members tell of uphill struggles to secure refunds, holiday flights arriving late one night and leaving in the early hours of the following morning, and strange out-of-the-way flight connections, including London-Copenhagen-Malaga.
Among them is Scottish holidaymaker Gill Devlin, who booked a break to Paris with her teenage daughter through Wowcher and Travelodeal in May 2024 but found that when she was expected to fly from an airport 98 miles from her home on early-morning flights and that her Paris hotel was in the depths of the banlieues and had stinking reviews.
'It was going to cost another £360 to change hotels and flight times and even then the hotel we were being offered was not a nice area and next to sex shops,' she explains. 'I realised for that price I could book via easyJet and or Booking.com and get what I wanted.' Devlin eventually secured a refund after leaving her own negative verdict of Wowcher and Travelodeal on review website TrustPilot, as well as Facebook.
How do travellers who go ahead with these bargain-basement breaks get on? Glasgow-based traveller Darren Howie, 37, has taken trips through Wowcher to Budapest and Krakow. He paid supplements each time to travel from Glasgow rather than airports in England, but is broadly happy.
'It probably works out to be the same cost as booking a break yourself, but my family and I really like the idea of a surprise,' he says. 'The hotels have been fine, we had Ibis in Krakow and an apartment in Budapest. I doubt we would have looked at Budapest if we weren't doing a mystery deal but we had an amazing time and highly recommend it there.'
Georgina Hawkins and husband Paul, retired 70-somethings based in Staffordshire, recently travelled to Malta through Wowcher from Birmingham Airport, paying a £60 supplement for an extra night's stay. 'We had a lovely time and are heading off next month to Riga in Latvia, which is not somewhere we would have chosen but you only live once,' Hawkins says. She advises bookers to only go for the deals if they can be flexible on dates and cope with 'ungodly' departure and arrival times. 'It's when you upgrade or change anything that it starts to get pricey and not really worth it,' she advises.
Julie Bird from Oldham, aged 69, has taken three mystery holiday deals with coach tour provider National Holidays, which offers breaks to British favourites including Harrogate, Torquay and Whitby. She told Telegraph Travel that her most recent trip, in January, would be her last.
'Never again,' she said, after finding that she had been sent to Birmingham for the third time on the £99 two-night deal, which includes return coach travel, accommodation, dinner and breakfast and 'two visits to mystery places of interest'.
'Birmingham is not a nice place and there's nothing to do unless you want to shop,' she complains of the much-maligned second city. 'I'm never doing another one of those rip-off deals.'
Anne Ross, 74 and based in Whitby, also booked a mystery break with National Holidays, departing from Middlesborough. 'I paid for a £40 taxi to catch the coach from Middlesbrough bus station and once I was on the bus I discovered the holiday was back in Whitby staying at The Royal Hotel, a ten-minute walk from where I lived,' she laughs. On this occasion JustGo graciously refunded Ross's taxi fare.
In recent adverts, HolidayPirates has cheekily poked fun at the risks of destination disappointment with mystery holidays: 'Go on a mystery holiday including flights and hotel from £89,' read an advert on February 16. 'Don't blame us if you end up in Leeds, though!'
Mike Collins is Managing Director of travel company Tropical Sky and a travel industry veteran of 30 years. He says mystery holidays are means for travel companies to sell 'distressed stock', but can backfire for the companies who use this sales strategy.
'When customers don't know where they're going, they build up all these expectations in their heads,' Collins says. 'Then when the big reveal happens it's not what they imagined but is rather a sub-standard holiday which basically no one else wanted to buy. Travel companies are then stuck dealing with disappointed customers, bad reviews, and people who won't book with you again.'
Limited rights
Compared to the Ceefax heyday, Collins says that mystery holiday deals are rife with logistical headaches in the 2020s, with strict airline rules around pre-departure API information for many destinations, as well as visa requirements (though not, of course, where Whitby is concerned).
Consumer rights expert Helen Dewdney, aka The Complaining Cow, advises that buyers are aware of their rights. 'Under the Package Travel and Linked Arrangements Regulations 2018 regulations, travel organisers must not provide misleading information and must provide details about changes as soon as possible,' Dewdney told Telegraph Travel. 'So while a mystery holiday provider cannot advertise a five-star hotel in an unknown destination when it is a three-star, for example, or a sunshine deal that's in the snow, consumers do not have the right to change a destination if they find out they have been sold a place they do not like.'
Howie and his family are off to Milan on their next £99 Wowcher deal, where they are booked in a four-star hotel on a bed-and-breakfast basis. The Howies are looking forward to the trip, while keeping their expectations around luxurious accommodation and added extras firmly in check. 'We're taking our seven-year-old son Grayson on this one who's excited for pizza, ice cream and to visit the San Siro [the football stadium],' he says.