Last month my colleague David and myself were lucky enough to be invited to attend the ABTA conference as we were kindly hosted by Fred Olsen cruise lines.
Our group are all above, sporting our Fred Olsen polo shirts. There were some really nice people in our group and I do find the people from Fred Olsen are genuine, friendly and down to earth.
The conference this year was set in the lovely Westin Costa Navarino resort http://www.westincostanavarino.com/, this was a very large luxurious resort in the Greek Peloponnese area which was the most Southern point of Greece opposite Crete.
The main sponsor of the convention was the Telegraph, there were lots of hosted talks in the main seminar hall by various guest speakers during the day. I did feel that although many of the talks were interesting they did seem to be mainly aimed at higher business management and owners. There was talk of the economy, setting up business in China and motivational business talks. We did have a special guest speaker, rugby player Josh Lewsey who was interesting to listen to and an break out session talking about the future of cruise which I found the most relevant and interesting to me personally.
The whole event was extremely well organized and managed. We found that the hotel itself was very well run and the food and drink that was put on for us was very good indeed. The hotel complex was that large that we had to have our cases taken to and from our rooms in golf buggy’s.
On our evening of arrival we went to a welcome party which was awesome. We watched some traditional Greek dancing and were then led through a massive video archway to an area where we had to scare off a pack of birds (not real ones) with sticks to earn our dinners. This sounds strange but we were being told a local story with this theme and having to re-enact it.
Our second evening’s entertainment was in the hotel complex itself. We were entertained by Greek performer Panis Mouzourakis who was very fun to watch and paired with all of the great food and wine that was offer we had a brilliant evening.
I did manage to make a video of Panis performing a song for us on stage, you can check it out below.
We did have some time to ourselves in the afternoons too and seeing as it was sunny and about 26 degrees myself and David thought this time would be well spent sat down at the beach bar enjoying some nice cold beers.
On the final evening the team at Fred Olsen treated us all to a lovely meal at a local Greek Taverna. It was a lovely evening, still over 20 degrees and we were sat in a beautiful location right by the water, I took this photo whilst we were sat having dinner. The local food at this restaurant was amazing.
I would again like to thank Fred Olsen for hosting us at this event, it was lovely to meet you all and the rest of the people in our group. Also thanks for the meal on the final evening, it was a really nice end to a fantastic few days.
