Who you are actually dealing with

We are a Kandy family. In our village in Matale there is a statue of my grandmother. It is there because she gave the land the village school stands on — not lent it, gave it. My grandfather was a lawyer. My mother is a lawyer too, and spent twenty-eight years working for the Hong Kong government, through the handover and out the other side; the pension still arrives.

I spent twenty years running an events company in Hong Kong, working with the Hong Kong Tourism Board. That is why this site has published kilometres, a price engine you can interrogate and a seasonal rule written down, instead of a contact form and a promise.

My stepfather, Charles Montgomery, flew for the RAF, and co-wrote Farewell Brave Babylon, the memoirs of Captain Ali Al-Wahabi — once Saddam Hussein’s presidential pilot. Perhaps that is why this whole business is organised around the hour your flight actually lands rather than the hour the timetable says it should.

A booking with us is kept. On this island a driver under real financial strain can take a better fare on the morning and ask you to cancel — it happens more than anyone admits, and it has never happened to a guest of ours. Nobody here needs your booking badly enough to break their word for it, and the family’s name has been on that word for a long time.

We built this because we kept hearing what happens to people here — the quoted price that changes, the shop you did not ask to visit, the car that never came. We are not blaming anyone for it. Most of it is somebody trying to survive a hard trade. But we would rather a few thousand visitors a year found their way to people who simply do what they said they would, and went home telling a different story about this country.