Flying into trouble

Today we heard of the collapse of the airline XL, which was apparently "a fundamental link in Britain's package holiday industry". Lots of people, apparently, now can't go on their holidays or, in at least one case, get to their own wedding. This is, of course, a bad thing for them, though most of them are entitled to alternative flights or a refund, so they'll get over it.

What surprised me about this news, other than the fact that BBC News seem to consider it their top story, is that I've never heard of XL. The company only has 21 planes, which isn't very many. BA have something like 233 in service at the moment, and even Portugal's relatively small national airline TAP has nearly sixty. So they're not huge players, but even so, their business model was clearly ropey, or they wouldn't have collapsed because fuel got more expensive. And this this brings me on to my point: booking with cheap airlines or package operators carries with it an obvious risk. They are cheap for a reason, so we shouldn't be shocked when, occasionally, they fail.

I fly fairly frequently to Lisbon, and from London you have three options: BA, TAP or easyJet. The latter (who, incidentally, have 166 aircraft in operation last I looked) have the advantage that the airport they fly from, London Luton (which is, of course, not in London in any way), is actually easy to get to from where we live. On every other front, the others win hands down. To help you understand why, let me describe for you the experience of flying with easyJet:

Before you go to the airport, you can check in online. Unless you have hold baggage, that is, and given the current ridiculous restrictions on what you can take in the cabin, most people will. In this case, you have to check in at the airport. This means you have to stand in an enormous queue with a lot of horrible holidaymakers (for some reason, the Lisbon flight always seems to be checking in at the same time as one to Tenerife) who have already painted themselves orange in preparation and who spend most of their time shouting at their feral children, until they finally reach the desk, where they shout at each other about who has the passports and the tickets. This all takes an almost unbelievable amount of time, but finally, minus your hold bag and plus a headache, you are allowed to go to security. This is even more fun.

At security you will be interrogated as to what liquids you may or may not have in your bag, forced to stand in another long queue with various differently orange people, and then made to take off most of your clothes and put them in a tray for the x-ray machine. When they are satisfied that you are not carrying anything sharp or explosive, you are allowed to put your clothes back on and proceed to departures.

Once in departures, you can avail yourself of all the wonderful facilities that Luton airport has to offer. Now, in fairness, it is slightly better than Heathrow Terminal 2, but then so is a Sudanese refugee camp - and you're more likely to get something to eat. But I digress: Luton is pretty dull, as airports go, but it's not quite the worst. Nevertheless, if you've taken easyJet's published timings seriously, you are early. No, really, you are. If you go to the gate when they ask you to, you will regret it. Go to the gate about twenty minutes or so before takeoff if you've checked in online (you'll be in the early boarding group). Otherwise, get there with fifteen minutes to spare and you'll find it's ample.

The experience at the gate is probably the worst bit of all, because easyJet refuse to allocate seats. So you board in priority order, and if you checked in at the airport you are almost bound to be in group B, which is last and biggest and has all the orange people in it. The experience of boarding is horrendous, as the bulk of the passengers can no more choose where to sit than they can prove Fermat's last theorem. So they dither, people stand around getting wet (no nice covered walkways here, you walk across the tarmac and up some steps, so it's always raining) outside the plane and the poor stewardess makes increasingly irritable announcements over the PA. When, eventually, everyone is sat down, the plane will think about taking off. And then the trolley service starts.

The trolley service is another offensive thing about easyJet. You have to pay for everything. Now, I wouldn't mind if their pricing policy on flights (cheap as possible) extended to the food and drink but it doesn't. A 33ml can of lager costs £3.20. An 18.5ml bottle of wine is also £3.20, or two for £6. A can of tango is £1.50. The sandwiches, which, incidentally are horrible, cost £3.50. So buy food and drink before you fly.

Eventually, you land so far from the airport building that the plane has to taxi for ten minutes just to reach the bus which will take another ten minutes to get you to the terminal where you will have to wait for half an hour for the bags which the paralytically lazy ground staff will have done their best to destroy. Then, when you've retrieved your bag, you are at last free to leave the airport. Drained, irritable and impecunious you have arrived. And you promise yourself that you'll fly with a proper airline next time.