My holiday from hell: I knew the apartment block was no-frills. I did not know it was a building site | Life and style

My boyfriend and I took up tennis a couple of years ago. After 18 months of group lessons in our local park, many of them cancelled or abandoned due to rain, we started fantasising about playing somewhere sunny. Perhaps at a nice hotel with a pool, and yoga classes, and delicious food …

A quick search for tennis holidays put paid to that dream. They all seemed to be in luxury resorts and cost a fortune. Undeterred, I decided to plan a DIY tennis trip. I found a cheap aparthotel in Corfu. It looked no-frills but perfectly nice – spacious rooms, a pool, pretty gardens and, crucially, a tennis court. Best of all, it was cheap as chips in March.

We soon found out why. The whole place was a building site. When we arrived, about 20 men were busy driving diggers, knocking down walls, painting, landscaping … The pool, so inviting in the pictures, was conspicuously lacking in water; it contained a pile of rubble instead. There were no other guests.

After a tense conversation with staff at reception and a doomed look for somewhere else to stay nearby, we decided to make the best of it. The first apartment they showed us was in the thick of the building work and had twin beds. After one look at my furious face, we were moved to a double at the far end, with a terrace overlooking a pond. The noise wasn’t so bad from here, once you got used to it.

Besides, our tennis coach was arriving for our first lesson. He was fantastic and we were on a high afterwards. A lesson a day for four days, with a few hours of practise on top? We’d go home much better players. We had dinner in town, watched some live music and went to bed happy.

The next morning, there was a terrible smell. The builders had lit a bonfire and noxious fumes filled the air. Worse, our coach – who was fit as a fiddle 12 hours earlier – had cried off with a “fever”. He assured us he would be back the next day. We never heard from him again.

We decided to play on despite the smoke and the lack of a coach. Without his equipment, we had to borrow the hotel’s: rackets with broken strings, balls that didn’t bounce. When it started to rain, we gave up.

It soon brightened up a bit and we headed off on a day trip. I’d done my research and set my heart on a boat ride to a small wooded island, where we could walk, swim and picnic. Not in March we couldn’t. The jetty was deserted, the booking office boarded up. I walked up and down in disbelief, scanning the horizon for nonexistent boats, until my boyfriend made me see sense.

OK, how about a fancy lunch? I had read about a fantastic family-run place where the grandma asks your likes and dislikes and serves a personalised meze feast. You guessed it: closed in March. We ended up in a souvlaki shop.

My last remaining hope was the yoga. I had found a studio near the hotel with two classes on during our stay. Thankfully, this was the one thing that went according to plan. The owner was an excellent and welcoming teacher, and we followed along quite easily, despite the lesson being in Greek.

The other bright spot was the discovery of a new drink. Corfu, it turns out, is crazy for kumquats. Sitting in a sunny square, sipping our bright orange kumquat spritzes, it finally felt like a holiday. Not a tennis holiday, admittedly, but a holiday all the same.