Ways to spend a lump sum on a special holiday

Hi

I am looking for advice and wonder if anyone else has encountered and overcome a similar problem. I tired to post this on the credit card forum but kept getting a warning saying that I was posting on the "grabbit" forum, so am posting here instead. This is my first post so apologies if this is inappropriate.

I have just retired so have been paid a lump sum. However, we are having difficulty spending our own money! We wish to spend it on an expensive, once in a lifetime holiday, with lying down (expensive) airline seats and a holiday lasting a number of weeks. We currently have two credit cards, Halifax Clarity which has a credit limit of £12,000 and Nationwide cash reward which has a credit limit of £14,000. We telephoned the Halifax to ask for an increased credit limit but they would only allow us to increase it by £500. I suspect that the problem is that our monthly income is now a pension so it appears to their algorithm that we cannot afford a higher limit, but it does not take into account that we have a large, one off lump sum.

We have direct debits set up so that we always pay our monthly bill in full.

We can pay for the flights using our current account debit cards. But we wish to use the credit cards to pay for accomodation, and car hire and other expenses, over a couple of months. Hotels often "lock off" a sum of money greater than the accomodation that you don't get back until you have left and they know you have left the TV and bath towels behind. So we need to have more credit available on our cards than we currently have.

A number of years ago we paid a sum of money into a credit card account, putting it into a positive balance to increase the amount we could spend. But the credit card company then lost all record of this. Fortunately we were able to prove that we had made the payment but it was a real palaver getting it sorted out.

Things that we could do but do not want to do:
1. Internet/telephone banking due to accounts we have heard of banks blaming innocent customers when they are hacked/scammed and using this blame as an excuse for not reimbursing the customer.
2. Use a debit card to make payments abroad as there may be a charge and/or a poor exchange rate.
3. Use a pre-paid card. Travel ones are too limited - often cannot be used for car hire or petrol. And with all prepaid you need to load them with more money than needed to allow for the hotel to "lock off" an excess that we would not be able to use until we had left, leaving us with foreign currency on a card.

We would be happy to have a credit card that we had to pay a fee for, along the lines of American Express, but wonder whether this would allow us a higher credit limit or not?

Giving the increasing availabilty of long and expensive cruises we cannot be the first people to encounter this problem and wonder what others do.

Does anyone have any advice/experience that may help us to spend our own money!

Thank you.