The truth behind bargain breaks

Never walk home alone in Ibiza. If you're a gal pull a guy, if you're a guy pull a gal, and if you're butt-ugly pull a taxi." Boom, boom. When your holiday rep makes this "joke" during his welcome speech on the coach from the airport, you get a teensy weensy inkling that perhaps this isn't going to be a dream break. The rep loves his witticism. He snorts and guffaws and seems not to notice that no one is laughing with him. But then he never looks at us at all except - I'm sure of it - for a sideways glance at me when he mentioned pulling a taxi. He is dressed like the sixth member of Westlife, with spiky blond hair. He sniggers indulgently after informing us that Ibiza's main resort of San Antonio is not only dangerous but also prohibitively expensive and has hardly any beach to speak of. I can barely wait.

"Welcome to downtown Bosnia," he wisecracks, as we pull into San Antonio and fetch up outside The Confort Plaza apartment block. It could almost be a splendid Spanish joke that they have deliberately misspelled the word comfort. The accommodation, and I use the term extremely loosely, is set above a supermarket and an ugly cafè. Next door there is a bar called The Mad Cow which pumps out bad dance tunes non-stop and at top volume. I turn to the rep to lodge a protest but he has, wisely, disappeared. We never see him again.

I wasn't expecting five-star treatment as the holiday cost just £106. However, the brochure price for this First Choice holiday is just over £400 and I had booked it through the entirely reputable Thomas Cook agency, so I was cautiously optimistic that I would be getting a genuine bargain.

The apartment smelled of cigarettes and is really just a corridor divided into three deeply grim sections: a very tired-looking bathroom, the "bedroom", which is curtained off with bile-green fabric, and a self-catering bit. Judging by the positively jammy state of the utensils, no one has dared cater here in a long while. There are double doors that open onto a small balcony overlooking "Bosnia", a squalid looking piazza with a view of high-rise buildings, some of which are boarded-up and graffitied, and a crane. A quick look at the pool area confirms much of the same - it's small and grubby and seems to be at the centre of a crumbling concrete jungle. It was all truly awful. I think I may have cried, but mostly I sat in stunned silence before peeling my arms off the sticky dining table and heading for the nearest bar that wasn't full of teenagers sporting too much hair fudge and waving Bacardi Breezers.

Later that night I crawl into bed and wrap my wafer-thin pillow in my Donna Karan jacket - I thought it might make me feel better to sleep on something expensive. The bedside cabinet was covered in graffiti, which mainly attested to the sexual deviance of the bed's many former occupants.

The coverlet was strangely stained and so, putting two and two together, I kicked it onto the floor and lay there listening to the pumping music and the garbage trucks either dumping off or picking up garbage - it was hard to tell which as there was still plenty of it on the street the next morning. Clearly I was vacationing in one of the less salubrious corners of San Antonio.

I don't know what I had expected of San Antonio, perhaps a sort of Marbella with clubs, really. But in the harsh light of the next day I realised I was way off. The resort is very run down, so, so tacky and, sadly, not at all Spanish. The back streets are scruffy and at night, menacing, while the main seafront boulevard is smartish but filled with a proliferation of identical vast cafès selling full English breakfasts and hamburgers. With its "Squeeze me slow, kiss me quick" atmosphere, it is like Blackpool but without the beach, which has been washed away and is being none too hastily restored. It was once fringed with palm trees but they all seem to be dead.

There are nice parts of Ibiza, but a £106-holiday won't get you there. It was hard to find anyone who had paid the full brochure price for their break, though some poor blighters at the Confort Plaza had paid almost twice as much as I had and were, to say the least, shell-shocked. The only really happy people were a group of lads from Bristol who had come here on a £45 flight and remained consummately drunk to the end. "You can't go wrong for a hundred quid," said a friend just before I came away, and I thought so, too. But this wasn't a bargain, it was an endurance test that began on the excruciatingly cramped flight. It would have been far more uplifting to have stayed at home and had a few sunbeds.

As I lay there smelling my pillow on my last night, humming the opening strains of the theme tune to Prisoner: Cell Block H, I noticed some graffiti I had previously overlooked. I have modified some of the language used by the rather angry author. "This is the worst bloody place I have ever been and I can't wait to go home." Couldn't put it better myself.

Robert Johnston, Malta - £49

It's not often that your taxi to the airport costs more than your holiday - including flights. But if you have to be at Gatwick before the trains start running, and your week's holiday in Malta - booked two days before at www.maltabargains.com - has only set you back $49, then perhaps it's not that surprising.

Standing in the South Terminal at 4.30am, watching a group of men off on a stag weekend dressed as Vikings, I would have happily paid £149 to be tucked up in bed. I was still in the check-in queue more than an hour and a half later, listening to the final call for my flight being announced. Dreams of duty-free evaporated, and my mood wasn't improved when the signs at passport control announced that passengers should allow 20 minutes to get to the relevant gate. Sprinting, I made it in just under seven.

I needn't have bothered. The average age of the passengers was around 70. the woman behind me had a face the colour of margarine and announced she'd forgotten to take 'me pills'. The woman behind her was asked if she thought her husband could manage stairs or whether he would need a lift. I prayed there was a doctor on board.

When I picked up my voucher from Malta airport, I discovered I was staying in the resort of Qawra. On an island barely bigger then a squash court it didn't bode well that it wasn't mentioned in my guidebook. The only homework I had done was to have a drink with a geologist friend who frequently visits Malta for work. There are two enormous landfill sites on the island that have been on fire for the past 20 years and his company has been contracted to help put them out. Twenty-five minutes after the coach had left the airport we drove past one of them. Five minutes later we arrived in Qawra.

The Reuben Court is an unpromising concrete stump on a street of similar monstrosities painted in a palette of curdled milk and tangerine. My self-catering room was, well, basic. It was clean, although I wouldn't have gone near the cooker unless armed with a bottle of Cif. The balcony did have a view of the swimming pool - and a tract of wasteland, complete with old tyre and empty beer bottles. I never say anyone in the pool, although I did hear a loud splash one morning at 3am. Perhaps this had something to do with the faint odour of lavatories lurking in the adjacent corridor.

Having unpacked, I went downstairs to be greeted by an eerie silence. After a day or two I realised this was the norm. The lobby had all the atmosphere of a bank-holiday bus terminal. I managed to corner Jean from Chelsea and her friend at the bar one night, but when they learned they paid almost £100 more than me for their holiday, conversation faltered.

A poster by the lift announced that the rep could be found in the sixth-floor lounge bar (with panoramic views). The sixth-floor button on the lift mysteriously failed to work. On arriving at the fifth floor I discovered why. There wasn't a sixth floor: I double-checked outside and counted the floors. Yup, only five. I discovered later that there was sixth floor, just not in our building. It was in the hotel round the corner which the poster had failed to mention.

Qawra itself merges seamlessly into Bugibba, Malta's charmless answer to Torremolinos. The tourists are overwhelmingly British. There is no beach. Instead, there are lidos with swimming platforms and dodgem rides, including the Bognor Beach Aquatic Sports Club. Perhaps it sounds glamorous in Maltese. In any case, during my stay they are deserted. It is pouring with rain and there is a high wind.

On the front, packs of pensioners waddle like penguins, past souvenir shops selling cardigans and tea towels boasting 10 rules for a happy marriage, while in the sunlight, miles of varicose veins compete with oleanders for colour against acres of concrete. Appropriately, the famous Knights of Malta were originally an order of hospitallers. If they were to return now they'd be rushed off their feet. During my trip I saw three old ladies being carted off in oxygen masks by paramedics, and one of those was before we had left Gatwick. In the 'Everything under a Maltese pound' shop, the more able-bodied inspect a packs of doilies and buy plastic fishing frog garden ornaments.

Outside, young Maltese men circle like sharks. With cries of 'Scuse me mate, are you British?', time-share bandits pounce. It seems unbelievable that people still fall for them, but it must work. I even saw one elderly couple being told would have to cough up £79 before they could have more information on their prospective purchase.

Evening entertainment is strictly British seaside. At Watson's bar, the promised cabaret star is Danny De Vito. No, not that one. This version may be as short as his namesake, but he specialises in cover versions of Achy Breaky Heart rather than making movies. He goes down a storm. There's a lovely restaurant nearby called, appropriately, Granny's. Elsewhere, there is a Bellagio - the namesake of the luxurious Las Vegas hotel that George Clooney plans to rob in Ocean's Eleven. Rather than blackjack, the still-vacant Maltese sea-front incarnation promises 'Bingo - Coming Soon!' With the British clientele here in God's waiting room it should make a fortune.