British tourists are “getting better” at complaining and standing up for their rights, but some are taking their grievances a little too far, according to the Association of British Travel Agents.

The Halkin Hotel in London received a written complaint that “the lavatory paper was not folded and it was difficult to unravel”, while a customer at the Malmaison hotel in Birmingham claimed that the night-lights in his room left him confused: “I accidentally thought the walk-in wardrobe was the loo.”

Overseas, a holidaymaker in St Kitts demanded to move to another hotel after saying that she “could hear the sea waves breaking on the shore”, while a customer on the Pelion peninsula in Greece asked “why is there is no pizza delivery service?” and a man on his honeymoon in Kenya was shocked when “a passing (excited) elephant came to drink from the river and made me feel very inadequate”.

An Abta spokesman agreed that many complaints received by travel companies were “ridiculous”, but said that a culture of complaining was positive: “ We should complain more. If you don't complain, the tour operator doesn't get the chance to put things right.”

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Perhaps the most bizarre complaint was at the Roxburghe Hotel in Edinburgh, where a woman threatened to call police after claiming that she had been locked in by staff.

In fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room. “We eventually calmed her down and she enjoyed her stay,” the general manager, Chris Wayne-Wills, said.

A customer on a Marsdens Cottage Holiday was aggrieved that “the sea was a lot farther away than the pictures in the brochure”.

It transpired that this was because the tide was out. A guest at Hell Bay hotel on the Scilly Isles was upset when “a seagull tried to eat my Pekinese”.

A traveller in the Dominican Republic told TripAdvisor.com that his resort “had cockroaches the size of lions”. And a guest at the Park Plaza County Hall in London moaned: “Surely if I'm English, I'm entitled to the English breakfast.”

A survey conducted by the travel company Isango.com this summer found that 19 per cent of people “dislike going away because foreigners don't want to speak English”.

However, when an angry British traveller told a waiter in Méribel in France that he should treat his customers as kings - “le client est roi” - the waiter replied calmly, in perfect English: “But don't you know what we did to our kings?”

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