Holiday admin: why protected mail is worth it

The best South Devon holidays tend to be assembled rather than bought. A cottage near Salcombe from one site, a boat trip from another, a table booked at a place in Totnes somebody recommended, the steam railway tickets, the parking permit for the week. It's how you end up with a trip that feels like yours rather than one off a shelf, and it's also how you end up with dozens of separate confirmation emails scattered through months of inbox.

Getting the admin in order before you travel is the least glamorous part of planning, but easily one of the most useful.

One email account for the trip

Set up a separate account and book everything through it. Accommodation, travel, attractions, restaurants, the lot. When you arrive, a single search brings up your week in date order rather than mixed in with work messages and supermarket offers. It costs 20 minutes at the start and saves far more than that across a week.

Download before you lose signal

Coverage across South Devon is good in the towns and unreliable on the cliffs, the estuaries and stretches of Dartmoor.

Open your confirmations the night before you set out so they're cached on your phone. Screenshots of check-in details and address directions are worth having too, because a paper backup has never once failed to load.

Booking scams follow a pattern

Holiday lets are a well-worked target, and the giveaways are consistent. The government's Stop! Think Fraud guidance sets them out plainly: unexpected contact offering an unusually good price, pressure to pay by bank transfer, photos that turn up elsewhere online, reviews that don't exist.

Using protected mail with two-step verification switched on adds a further layer, because a lot of booking fraud depends on getting into someone's account and intercepting a real confirmation.

Keep the inspiration separate from the admin

Sign up to the newsletters, by all means. Local event listings, tide times, festival announcements and seasonal offers are genuinely useful when you're planning. They're considerably less useful landing in the same place as your work email in February. A second account takes them all and you read it when you're in planning mode.

Then go and enjoy the coast

With the paperwork sorted, the rest is the easy part. Our guide to travel tips and planning the perfect South Devon visit covers where to base yourself, which towns reward a slow morning and how to build a week that doesn't involve driving everywhere.

There's a version of a holiday here where you spend the first hour of every day sorting something out, and a version where you don't. The second one takes a bit of preparation and no money at all. Set it up on a wet evening at home, and the only thing you'll need to think about when you arrive is whether it's a beach day or a Dartmoor one.

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