Hi,

I guess no-one here has had any experience with Atlantic Holidays then! I decided to take a chance and go for it anyway, so will post back here once I'm back from holiday to let anyone else who's interested in them know how it went.

It's a few weeks still until I go, but in the meantime, as far as booking the holiday went - I found them friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. And I received all the documentation by email, within a few minutes of having put the phone down (you can of course book online, but as I had a few queries first I just did it all over the phone). Of course, the proof comes in the holiday itself, but so far am happy with them.

When I "Googled" I found that they were associated with the Pestana group who own a lot of the accommodation around Madeira -I believe that they,in turn, are associated with timeshare - be prepared !!

Hi and thanks!

I was aware they were part of the Pestana Group, but as we'd chosen a Pestana hotel we didn't think that a bad thing. I wasn't however aware of the timeshare link - many thanks for the warning. To date, no salesperson has ever been able to get me to buy or show great interest in anything I didn't want Though pestering and a hard sell is guaranteed to get my back up (as it would most people, I imagine!), so will keep my eyes open.

Am back from my hols and as promised, here is some feedback re Atlantic Holidays. (Will post other info re the hotel etc later).

Overall, I'm happy with Atlantic, and would use them again.

TRANSFERS: We booked a return airport transfer and everything went smoothly on arrival. We decided to cancel the return transfer and make our own arrangements, as we felt that their timings were potentially cutting things a bit fine. They time arrival at the airport for 2 hours before the flight, but there is no allowance for hold-ups en route. However, in my experience this is fairly standard for tour operator transfers and it's my past experience with these that made us decide to make our own plans.

WELCOME MEETING: We were advised that our meeting would be at a nearby hotel and a minibus would pick us up to take us there and bring us back to our hotel. The minibus didn't show up. We called our rep and she arranged for a driver to come and collect us and delayed giving the key information at the meeting until we arrived. (The no-show of the mini bus was another contributing factor in us cancelling the return airport transfer). Information provided was very heavily geared towards their own tours, which again is fairly normal, but seemed a bit more biased than other rep meetings I've been to with other operators.

REP: Local and enthusiastic about promoting Madeira. There were no regular scheduled meetings other than the welcome, but this could be due to it being outside the main season. Fortunately we encountered no problems on our trip, so didn't need her help for anything - though trying to contact her to cancel our return transfer proved difficult. We had to call a few times over an afternoon and following morning before getting a response. Once we got hold of her she couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.

TIMESHARE: As this has been mentioned in this thread, thought it relevant to say that we had no problems with this. There was a rep at the meeting who invited everyone to another meeting at the newest Pestana hotel, attendance at which would get us all ridiculously big discounts on various tours. Any hint of timeshare was avoided, but it was clear that's what it was about. However, there was no hard sell or pressure of any kind, and the whole speech was only about 5mins. We didn't go to that meeting so I can't comment what degree of hard sell people were subjected to at that. Timeshare touts in and around the hotel seemed to be non-existent. Or perhaps we just didn't look like likely enough candidates