Ann Anglesea, managing director of Delmar World, picked up the phone to her client Victoria Seaton at 2.30am on 1 Match after the family arrived into Dubai the previous morning just as the first explosions could be heard.

“This was different to the clients being inconvenienced by delays,” said Anglesea. “The family’s nights were being interrupted by being told to hide in the hotel basement – the missiles were going off around them and they were really frightened.

“At this point, the eldest boy had a panic attack. Victoria just said, ‘Ann – please just get us out'."

Anglesea explained the family had been booking with the 60-year-old agency, based in Gresford, for three generations. “Victoria's parents book with us and so the grandparents were contacting us from Wrexham saying, ‘here’s my credit card, please help, I don’t care how much it costs’,” she told TTG.

'Go, go, go!'

Anglesea jumped into action right away searching for Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, KLM and Air France flights while she was on hold to Emirates for two hours.

Emirates eventually picked up and Anglesea was able to tell them exactly what the family’s situation was and how upset they were. “I said, ‘please, please don’t give me a standard answer’,” she recalled.

“The guy on the other end of the phone was fantastic. He put me on hold for half an hour and I thought I’d lost him until he came back and said he’d managed to get them five seats on the Monday night flight.

“But then the worry was whether it was going to be cancelled as in the days leading up, flights were getting cancelled at an alarming rate.

"When it was time for them to leave for the airport, the husband, James, rang me and said, 'we're going to get the taxi now, but the missiles are going off in Dubai – should we get in a taxi?’

“It was very tense but I was checking every half an hour – the flights were all turning red [cancelled] but, miraculously, theirs stayed green. I said, ‘go, go, you’re going to be fine’. They made it to the airport, but it was still a scary take off as there were military aircraft taking off with them.

“Plus, A380s normally take off quite gradually, but this was straight up into the sky. They felt the aircraft move because missiles were going off in the sky and that has an impact on the air pressure.”

Anglesea said when the family landed back in Manchester, the grandparents went to collect them and the whole crew called on speakerphone shouting that they’d got home safely. “I got very emotional about it actually,” she admitted. “You get wrapped up in the moment.”

Confidence

Anglesea has now offered to counsel the Seaton children by inviting them into the agency to explain how this was “very much a one-off situation and that they should look forward to their holidays in the future”.

“They were unfortunate,” she says. “Victoria is coming in next week to book Tenerife for October half-yerm because she doesn't want the children to develop a fear.”

Since returning from Dubai, Seaton has told Anglesea she wants to spread the message of using a travel agent far and wide. “She told me she wants to put us [Delmar World] at the forefront of that because they had made friends in the hotel who were not in the fortunate position of having got a flight home.

“She said, ‘we know it was because of you that happened – I want people to know the value of booking with a good travel agent, I want them to know exactly what that means’, which was nice to hear,” Anglesea continued.

“And she did put the story out there in the local press [the story was carried online in the Whitchurch Herald]. I didn’t even know it was out there until I was away in Amsterdam and she brought the newspaper into the office. One of the girls photographed it and sent it over to me.”

Team effort

Anglesea stressed it was not just her who managed to get the Seatons home, and that it was a team effort shared between the agency's staff and Emirates too.

“I just happened to have been mentioned [in the press], but honestly, I've got the most amazing team. I'm not the only one that's been involved in solving people's problems,” she adds. “When the travel industry joins hands, it can work magic for people.”