Travel: Brochures of the week

You have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy a sailing holiday in the Med. Unless you're happy squeezing into a toilet that could give a leprechaun claustrophobia, or sleeping in a bed that Kate Moss would find narrow, the experience is going to start to grate before a fortnight is up. Having said that, the first time I went sailing along the Turkish coast about 10 years ago, it was still a pretty novel thing to do. The last time I went, four years ago, it was losing its cult status but the facilities had become far more sophisticated. And with Turkey, you can still savour local hospitality of the kind that the tourist-weary Greeks abandoned a long time ago.

Top Yacht's brochure, with a variety of sailing holidays in Turkey amongst other places, is the typically glossy sailing brochure. This is one publication where pictures are everything: beautiful people breakfasting on board their yachts, leavened with shots of eccentrically friendly locals and their donkeys. It's virtually impossible not to be seduced. For people who haven't sailed before, the best bet is one of their crewed yacht charters, offering holidays for anything from four to eight guests.

The company also offers bareboat yachts allowing you to set off on your own two-week odyssey, in theory sailing where the mood takes you, although in practice, it's far more rewarding to set out an itinerary at the start, with as much or as little sailing as you want.

Sunworld's CD-Rom brochure offers exactly the same as you'd expect on paper but is a slick example of what you can do with a multimedia brochure. It too offers sailing holidays in Turkey, again around the Bodrum peninsula, although it also promotes heavily along the Greek coast. I'm not a huge fan of interactive holiday brochures but this one is simple and easy to navigate, even for novice sailors.

Top Yacht: 01753 646636; e-mail: topyacht@aol.com

Sunworld sailing: 01273 626 283; e-mail: sales@sunworld.co.uk