It's HPB darling....

I've just come back from a week's holiday in Lanzarote, staying at the HPB Santa Rosa resort, and I thought I would share with you my experience of travelling HPB style. 

Until a few years ago, I'd never heard of a Holiday Property Bond. I'm not a financial expert, and I am not FSA regulated, but this is how it works as I understand it.

You basically invest in a life assurance bond with HPB and this gives you a financial interest in a portfolio of villas, cottages and apartments across Europe. Your investment gives you a certain number of points a year (depending on how much you invest), meaning you can go on holiday as many times a year as you like, until your points run out.

The next year, you get your points back, and you can start holidaying all over again. Some properties cost more points than others, and certain times of the year cost more points than others. But if you invest a good amount of money in your bond initially, and you are clever with when and where you go, you can enjoy lovely holidays a couple of times a year. And, if you want to take your money out, you can, and if you die, the money is gifted to your relatives (jolly!).

The view from our balcony at Santa Rosa in Lanzarote. The HPB terrace is in the foreground.

So, with HPB, you get an alternative to a fixed timeshare. Instead of going to the same place, year on year, you can go to a range of places with a range of accommodation types. In fact, they apparently have over 1,000 properties! The only costs, after your initial investment, are your flights, a small maintenance charge and of course your drinking money! 

And, although it means that you get a fairly cheap holiday, the accommodation certainly is not cheap. To date, I've only been to two and I've been impressed with both.

Before we went to Lanzarote, we looked at the reviews on Trip Advisor of the Santa Rosa resort. Quite a few of them mentioned that the HPB apartment and pool were much nicer than the non HPB accommodation which is situated on the same site. So much so that the phrase of the holiday became "it's not HPB darling" to describe a second rate experience or person.

One of the beaches in Costa Teguise, Lanzarote, a few minutes walk from the HPB site

Our poolside area could not be accessed by the not "HPB darling" people, which made us feel most superior! On the first day, there was a Paella cookery demonstration and we all had Paella and sangria by the pool whilst sneering at the "other" people over the fence! And every now and then, we would pop over to their side, just because we could!

When I booked the room, I was told how many steps there were to my front door, the size of my balcony and also whether I had twin or a double bed. The self catering apartments had every single utensil you could possibly require - more than in my house! There was even a wine cooler, for my El Grifo Malvasia Colleccion wine that I drank while in Lanzarote. Amazing attention to detail, and very HPB.

Oh, and did I mention about the free wifi?

The HPB St Brides property with its sweeping driveway

I've also been to a property near St Davids in Wales called HPB St Brides. We went for a family Christmas and it was lovely to stay in 99 acres of parkland, by a castle which you reached via a long, sweeping driveway, flanked with spectacular views of the sea.

As you can see, I'm a bit of a fan! I've just booked Turunc in Turkey for October, which also looks lovely so I'll let you know how I get on.

Please note. I do not work for HPB and I am not FSA regulated. Therefore, if you are interested to invest in HPB, I would suggest you visit their website or ring them to talk it all through, as I am sure there are a range of exclusions such as minimum investment etc they would have to go through with you: http://www.hpb.co.uk/howitworks/

What no Wifi in Sydney?

When I travel, I find wifi a real life saver. My ongoing obsession with social media means that I sometimes wonder if there is any point in doing something unless I can tell people about it on Twitter, Facebook or Four Square.

This applies triple fold when I go on holiday. I'm convinced that my adoring followers will be utterly bereft and lost without my constant updates (yes I do know I live in a dream world). In addition to this, as the iPhone now offers free messaging and FaceTime over the internet, access to a wifi network can significantly reduce your costs when abroad.

This metropolitan city has few wifi spots!

Although the cost of using the Internet abroad has decreased recently, especially with products such as Vodafone Passport which gives you a limited amount of data when travelling in certain countries. However, if you can tap into a free wifi network, it costs you nothing, and you're not limited to a certain data use each day.

Most tourist destinations have cottoned onto this. I recently went on holiday to Santorini in Greece and nearly all of the bars and restaurants offered free wifi and advertised this on their boards and menus. It makes sense to me as, I would be more likely to go into a bar where I can access the Internet for free, and I would probably check into the bar on Four Square and maybe load up some photos of me at the venue, giving them free advertising.

However, on a recent trip to Sydney to visit my brother, I was surprised to find that this was not the case there. I received no free data on my Vodafone phone tariff for Australia and within the first day I had racked up over £10 worth of SMS and data charges. So I was keen to find some places where I could take advantage of their wifi. To my brother's great dismay, I then embarked on a desperate endeavour whereby every bar or restaurant I went into, I would ask if they had wifi, and the answer was repeatedly "no".

View from Top Deck Cafe, one of the places with free wifi

It seems so strange to me that such a busy tourist destination as Sydney does not offer this in more venues. While I was there, someone mentioned that wifi and broadband are expensive and slow in Australia. So maybe that is why more places don't offer it. This may be true as many of the places that I found offering access to wifi limited the length of time you could use it or the amount of data you could download. On top of this though, most insisted that you logged in with a certain amount of personal details before you could used the wifi, and many of the wider schemes in operation were currently in a test phase, which indicates to me some caution around the open use of wifi.

So I thought I would let you know about some of the places I found that did offer free wifi. I hope you find this useful:

• all Mcdonalds in Sydney offer free wifi. To access it, you simply have to ask for the wifi code when you purchase your food or drink
• you can just tap into at the top of the stairs outside the Sydney Opera House
• if you are travelling by train, then the station at Circular Quay in Sydney has wifi for all travellers, you just have to log on and provide some personal details (although I believe this is a trial)
• many of the Sydney ferries have free wifi. You have to travel in a certain section of the boat, log on with your personal details, you then have a certain amount of data to use. I took the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly which takes around half an hour and used all my allowance just checking into Four Square and uploading a photo
• Sydney Airport currently has free wifi that is sponsored by one of the travel companies. Again, you have to log in, but with a huge amount of personal details, including flight number and flight time. The log on also kept crashing so it was a bit frustrating but I got there in the end
• many libraries in Sydney offer the service. I regularly tapped into the one in Balmain, which again asked for some personal details
• if you can cope with all the people and the smell, the Sydney Fish Market has a pretty quick and easy free wifi service. I found a glass of Sauvignon Blanc helps
• if you are in Balmain, the Top Deck cafe does a good coffee, has a vew of the Harbour Bridge, and also free wifi
• in Rozelle, the Bean cafe has good grub, but a pretty slow wifi service

View from the ferry to Manly with free wifi

I went to Sydney in January 2012, so this list was up to date then. If you have any other places you would like to add to help other travellers, then please leave a comment below. Or if any of the places stop their wifi service, then again, just let me know below. I would love to hear from you.