From London Gatwick to Holguin

Unfortunately Cubana doesn’t connect with any UK domestic airlines, so we didn’t have the luxury of being able to check our bags all the way through to Cuba. We were also told that if we missed our flight we would be responsible for the cost and arrangements of a new flight. For this reason we made sure that we booked a flight that arrived well in advance of the 3.45pm take off time.

We arrived in Gatwick just before 10am, with over 5 hours of fun ahead of us, only to find that our Cubana flight was delayed by 5 hours. So we had the joy of 10 hours in the airport followed by an 8 hour flight to Cuba and a 1 hour bus journey to the resort - a total of 24 hours, without any sleep.

Luckily Gatwick airport is pretty good with plenty of shops, bars and restaurants, so we kept ourselves busy by eating, drinking lots of vino and shopping.

Our flight to Holguin went smoothly, despite the 5-hour delay, but the plane was an old looking Boeing 747, rather than the nice new airbus that we’d been told about. It had “Air Atlantica Europa” on the side and writing on the back of the seat tables in a language that looked like Malay. One advantage of the plane being old was that it seemed to have much more legroom than the newer 747s and because the plane wasn’t very busy we were able to stretch out on the three seats we had between us. The airline served us crappy food and showed us a film that was a few years old, but I was expecting that anyway and had come prepared with my MP3 player, books, magazines and food, so it didn’t bother me too much. The most important thing was that the airline got us to Cuba in one piece, despite it being the most accident-prone airline in the world.

On arrival at Holguin airport, only some of the passengers got off as the flight was going on to Havana. We disembarked down some steps and for the first time in my life I walked under the nose of a Boeing 747. I don’t think I’ve ever stood beside such a big plane in my life. I was surprised that they were allowing us to walk so close to the engines – as normally even with the smaller planes they rope off the wing area or at least direct you away from the engines.

Holguin airport resembled an old bus station, but we weren’t there for too long. Once we had gone through passport control and collected our bags we were met by a Holiday Place rep and whisked away in an air-conditioned coach to our hotel. We didn’t see much since it was almost 1am and the place was dark. The journey took about an hour and we were checked into the hotel quickly and taken off in a golf cart to our room.

Cubana Airways

Have you ever heard of Cubana airways before? No? Me neither. When I booked my holiday to Cuba, the sales person on the phone emphasised to me that it was a good thing that we were flying Cubana airways, because they are a scheduled airline rather than a charter.

After paying the deposit for my holiday I decided to find out a little more about Cubana. Yes, I know, I should have really checked this out first, but I was so excited about the thought of going to Cuba that I didn’t really think about this.

So, I typed “Cubana” into Google, expecting to be returned the airline’s website as the first result.

Instead I was rewarded with pages of reviews about Cubana. And these were not good reviews. The more I read about Cubana, the more worried I got – especially after reading one person’s account of his flight’s on Cubana airways – http://www.bootsnall.com/travelstories/na/mar02cubana.shtml Reading this account for the second time, now that I’m back, I find the whole story quite hilarious, but at the time the main emotion I felt was fear.

In summary, Cubana has the worst safety record of any airline in the world. If you’re into airline crash statistics you can take a closer look at this on http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ It makes very interesting reading, as long as you’re not reading it just before taking a flight.

The figures on this site are just for international airlines. Apparently it is not a requirement to report statistics for domestic flights, so you can probably imagine that the statistics for Cubana’s domestic flights could well be even worse.

Just to add to this, I also read that most of Cubana’s fleet of aircraft are made up of old Russian planes and the service (cabin crew, entertainment, food etc) is pretty bad.

To be honest, I wasn’t too bothered about the service of the airline, but I was very bothered about the safety rating, especially as I was also flying on an internal flight.

Stuart phoned up the holiday place to find out some more about the type of aircraft that we were flying and we were relieved to find out that they used new Airbus 330 aircraft for the flight from Gatwick and our internal flight was actually on the same plane that came from Gatwick. As a bonus, the airline was also operated and maintained by a Swedish company.

A quick final look at those air crash statistics showed that all the crashes had happened on flights to South America on Russian aircraft, so I was suitably relived about this new information and we decided that there was no need to do anything drastic such as cancel the holiday!

To find out which other airlines fly to Cuba have a look at TripAdvisor's Cheap Flights to Cuba

Booking the trip to Cuba

Normally I book the all my holidays independently – searching the internet and booking multiple hotels, flights and car hire. I then end up with some complex itinerary staying in 4 or 5 hotels, flying to my destination with one airline, using another airline to get to another part of the country, perhaps with a car hire or a bus or train journey thrown in somewhere.

This year I decided that it would be nice to have a holiday where everything was all arranged for us. No hassles of booking all the different parts of the holiday separately – just decide where to go and find out where we can get the best price. So my boyfriend Stuart and I set to work looking through the Caribbean brochures to find our ideal all inclusive holiday destination, for a cost of less than £1000 each.

After many hours of looking at Caribbean brochures till my eyes glazed over I came up with the idea of Cuba. This is a country that I’ve always wanted to visit, and the thought of combining a city break in Havana with lazy days on an all-inclusive resort really appealed to me. I don’t think I’d want to spend a whole fortnight on a resort without seeing the real country. It would be a shame to travel so far and only see the inside of a resort.

After looking at the hotels in the brochure and reading reviews on websites I went in search of the cheapest price, checking out a few of my favourite websites for finding holidays such as lastminute.com and TripAdvisor In the end I found a holiday I liked the look of on a site called http://www.theholidayplace.co.uk and ended up booking a 13 night holiday for £880, travelling on May 11th from Gatwick. The price included return flights with Cubana Airways, 10 nights all inclusive in the 5 star Playa Pesquero resort, internal flight from Holguin airport to Havana, 3 nights in the 5 start Hotel Nacional in Havana and all transfers to and from the airport by coach. Although this is slightly more money than I normally spend upfront for a holiday, this price included all my meals and alcoholic drinks for 10 nights, so I figured that in the end it would actually work out mucho cheapo, due to the fact that I’d hardly need any spending money for the first 10 days.

I was very happy with the The Holiday Place for booking the trip. You have to speak to them on the phone to actually make your booking, but they’re very helpful and friendly and I received my tickets and my tourist visa (extra £25) on time.

Welcome to Suzanne's Cuba Blog

Welcome to my Cuba Blog!

A couple of weeks ago I returned from a 2 week holiday in Cuba, where I spent 10 days in an all inclusive resort in Guardalavaca and 3 days in the capital city of Havana.

Before I booked my trip I did a lot of research on the internet and read many reviews of hotels and places to visit on sites such as and TripAdvisor and Debbie's Caribbean Resort Reviews. I got so much valuable information from these sites that I decided that I better take some time to write about my own trip, show you a few of my photos, tell you my thoughts on Cuba and review the hotels that I stayed in and the airlines that I used. Nothing beats getting other people’s personal opinion about holiday destinations before you book a trip. As you may well already know, you can’t always trust the opinion of the tour operator or the brochures or websites that you book the holidays with.

First a little bit about me…. My name is Suzanne Morrison, I’m 31 years old (at the time of writing this) and I live in the beautiful capital city of Edinburgh, Scotland. I work full time as a software engineer, but I love to travel and try to make sure that I use as much of my vacation time as possible travelling the world. In the last couple of years I’ve travelled to Thailand, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, Ireland and the USA. Just over 6 years ago I took 8 months off work and travelled round the world – you can read all about that trip at my Round the World Journal page.