many reasons why surface travel rocks

[devi]

- Out the window you will not see clouds, which are pretty but get old fast. You will see rolling hills, spring buds, gambolling lambs, picturesque canals with colourful boats, interestingly decrepit old factories and rusting industry, daffodils, castles, primroses, ponies and rainbows.
- And the windows are bigger.
- Train food is a hell of a lot nicer and cheaper than plane food. Or you can bring your own yummy food and eat it when you like, when you feel hungry...
- because you have your bag with you for almost the whole journey.
- You know your bag is in the same country as you.
- You can throw your razor, your tweezers, hairspray and a bottle of perfume in it without getting arrested.
- Less than 10 minutes standing in queues, total.
- No one will make you take your shoes off.
- No one will search right down to inside the caps of your markers in your pencil case, while you hold your trousers up with one hand and hold your shoes in the other, because you've been told not to put them back on yet as there's a secondary shoe check up ahead.
- Generally, you will not be treated like a strange hybrid of potential terrorist and cash cow.
- You spend most of the journey actually getting closer to your destination, not rattling round in a consumer Habitrail with nothing to entertain your eyes but ads for stupid aspirational shit you don't need.
- You can bring a musical instrument or other fragile thing without it being taken from you, losing its Fragile sticker as it bumps down the belt, and tumbling out on to the baggage carousel in several pieces at the far end.
- No one is going to make you listen to tinny jingles that go 'let's fly let's fly let's fly Ryanair' over the most mindless stupid-house beat you can imagine, while you sit trapped in a narrow seat with your elbows scrunched in, unable to escape.
- You can listen to music when you want, not just in a twenty-minute window in the middle of the flight while the seatbelt sign is briefly off and you can barely hear it anyway.
- They won't charge you ten quid to check in and twenty for each of your bags.
- You can sprawl in the bigger seats and put your stuff all over the table.
- Tables.
- You get to go on an actual boat! On the actual sea!
- Catamaran go wheeeee! Crosses Irish Sea in two hours!
- Sailing into Dublin Bay on a beautiful cloudy-bright evening is, just, wow.
- You will actually get a sense of the size and the texture of the land you're passing through.
- It doesn't cost £25 just to get to your train.
- Drinks on trains and boats don't come in disturbing let's-patronise-the-poor foil bags with "BUY ONE GET ONE FREE FREE FREE FREE!!!!" written all over them. Also, they are normal size.
- No weird nose-desiccating dry stale air or ear-popping.
- If the airport bus gets snarled up on the M25 and you miss your plane, you have to pay loads of money to change your flight. If you miss your boat, you shrug and get on the next one.
- Counting airport taxes, baggage charges and airport bus, it works out about the same price as if you'd got 1p flights each way. Except it always costs that, no matter when you book. (Edit: this is just for the Oxford-Dublin journey. For some reason the sail/rail price is much less than just rail to Holyhead, and it seems to be fixed at £58.)
- It took me six hours door-to-door to fly home for Christmas, and I was left a frazzled rage-filled sore-eared wreck. Oxford to Dublin over land takes eight to ten hours, not that much of a difference, and I floated off the boat like a blissed-out Buddha.

Seriously, guys, it was awesome. And that's without even going near the greenness of it. I want to go on trains all over Europe now.

Comments

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Air travel is eating itself with its general awfulness.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

It is actually getting more awful, isn't it? It isn't just the romance of childhood holidays fading away?

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

"Are we are trying to blow-up the notion that it [flying] is some kind of orgasmic experience rather than a glorified bus service? Yes, we are" - Michael O'Leary, Ryanair.

I have highly mixed views about low-cost airlines. I'm glad that low-cost travel exists in ways that it didn't before, and I'm glad that airlines have forced the train companies to improve their value in some ways - for instance, National Express East Coast have started to price many of their advance-purchase single tickets at half the return fare, rather than "barely less than the return fare" as used to be the case. It's also got to be a good thing, from an egalitarian perspective, that more people get to travel than ever before, and that travel is no longer the preserve of the rich. From that point of view, I can see O'Leary's point.

That said, I hate the cynicism and outright lack of respect for the customer that his airline embodies (for instance, the whole concept of hitting the customer with either an airport check-in fee or a web check-in fee and no way to avoid them both, yet saying that that is not part of "the fare") and the "race to the bottom" that he has started. Furthermore, I fear that low-cost airlines will drive out full-service ones, though, and we soon won't have the option of full service if we want to pay for it. (For instance, while I can't be bothered with TV shows about amazing mansions, fast cars or gorgeous holiday destinations, I love reading about just how much airlines indulge their highest-paying passengers - for instance, Singapore's "Suites" super-first class in its A380s.) Given that it's much easier for airlines to compete with each other on the same routes than train companies, that's less of a concern for train travel.

Urban rail systems may yet be cooler than all of the above.

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

I'm not aware that there is an online check in fee - I've never heard of that one.

The one I dislike is the "optional" payment fee, which applies to all credit/debit cards except Electron, which is what makes it, theoretically at least, "optional". So I'm applying for an Electron card for just this purpose...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Coming next month (http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/news.php?yr=09&month=mar&story=gen-en-100309), as part of Phase 2 towards Ryanair's move towards 100% web check-in! *shakes fist*

To be unduly fair, it won't apply to promotional fares, so you may sometimes be able to get a fare for 0.01 all-in, if you have no luggage, no priority boarding and Electron. Non-promotional fares will be about as expensive as pre-low-cost flights ever were, in practice.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Yes, all of this. I'm OK with the cheapness (though I wish more investment was happening in good fast rail travel and/or aviation fuel that doesn't kill the planet in the face), but god, the cavalier disregard for passengers. And the sneakiness of their pricing.

Surely, though, there'll always be a market for ultra-luxury travel? I can't see people who were used to that sort of travel deciding to fly budget airlines because they're cheaper.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

To be fair, you only really get luxury travel for long-haul flights - and, Air Asia X aside, the case for low-cost long-haul has not yet been made. Compare the service that used to be offered by British Airways on quite a few British domestic and short-haul European legs, before they pulled out of the routes, with that offered by FlyBe who have replaced them.