Flying the Friendly Skies

Despite being in a job that requires absolutely no travel whatsoever (unless it’s mind travelling), I seem to be on a plane at least twice a month. How this thought came to me was recently, as I sat on yet another Aer Lingus flight towards Dublin and I realised I’ve actually read the same article about what there is to do in Frankfurt so often and the authors accompanying profile, that I actually not only know every attraction listed, but also know that the author is Irish, married to an Irish man, ex-president of some ski club in Frankfurt and thinks it’s a great place to bring up a family – note to Aer Lingus, two months is a very long time to leave the same magazine in seatback pockets , I can even recite the movie listings for transatlantic flights for December and January. And that’s saying something when I haven’t flown transatlantic.

 

Moving along, October we flew to Dublin, December brought us to London for a weekend, then to Dublin again in December for Christmas, back in the New Year, only to be back in a plane again about two weeks later to head back to Dublin. Literally, I’ve spent lots of time in planes back and forth over the years, but lately it’s getting a bit much. I’m actually surprised at how slowly my Aer Lingus miles are racking up to be honest. So in all this flying, what are my top five frequent flying observations? I’ll start with the most obvious and work it from there.

 

1. Piling onto the plane in Germany is not a good idea. It is critical.

Getting onto a plane, if you appreciate comfort, is a serious case of ‘when in Rome’ when you’re leaving Germany. Anna used to always make a beeline for the gate the second they announced that families and those with small children (aren’t they normally the same group?) could board, which I never understood. Lately though, I’ve come to realise that there’s sense in all of this – Germans religiously bring hand luggage at the upper limits of the allowance, usually in the form of a Samsonite wheel-along and if you don’t race onto the plane with them, there’s not a single flight from Germany you can take where you won’t have to keep your hand luggage under the seat in front of you. Since doing that annoys me terribly, the only option is to hop up out of your seat in the departures hall like a rocket at the first sign of movement.

 

2. Dublin Airport likes surprises.

We have a new terminal in Dublin, which by all accounts is very lovely. However a few things spring to mind that the first-time flyer will wonder about and the frequent flyers will laugh about. The most obvious is the hand-dryers. In the race to make it streamlined, fancy and nice, the hand dryers are recessed into the wall by the sink. In fact a lot of people never find them and end up wiping their hands on their jeans (including myself, to be honest). But once you do find them, you find a more critical flaw – the dryer has a sort of ‘slant’ so as it blows your hands dry, the water just tips out and runs down the tiles onto the floor. The other slightly comical fact about regularly arriving to Dublin Airport, is that on my previous three occasions, there were more ‘staff’ guarding the passport control line, making sure that errant Europeans didn’t try sneaking into the ‘Other passports’ line, than there actually were passport control staff.

 

3. Frankfurt Airport is what foreigners expect.

Frankfurt Airport (terminal 2 in particular) is what airports around the world, including Dublin, strive and fail to achieve. It is absolutely, despite its size, one of the most efficient airports I’ve ever been in. To date, over easily 8 – 10 arrivals, passport control is sufficiently staffed (provided everyone’s ready), the luggage is always already waiting – in fact, sometimes the belt is already turned off – and without trying, you can’t not be out and waiting for a bus within 20 minutes of getting off the plane. Similar efforts it must be said have been made at Dublin Airport but are let down by the slowness of the baggage handling and the scandalous two (of the world’s slowest) lifts in the car park that cause delays regularly of 7 minutes or more.

 

4. Aer Lingus has improved so much; it makes me want to cry with joy.

I find it slightly ironic that it’s taken us to be deep in recession back home before the airline abandoned its flimsy half-effort at being a low cost like Ryanair and started giving people what we’d been looking for all along – decent service, friendly prices and at least some moderate benefits. Their latest departure away from being a true no-frills carrier is this weird pricing strategy where you can have bags, seat selection, etc all thrown in for an extra 20 quid to the fare price. Personally, I say make it 25 and let people get a free snack pack or something on the plane, but whatever it’s a great start. I mean they were never going to win the battle with Ryanair and at least now their service isn’t so abysmal. And passenger numbers seem to be on the up I hear, so it’s a win all round isn’t it?

 

5. Airport shops never cease to disappoint.

Here in Frankfurt city, you can buy a bottle of water for about 45 cent in a supermarket. It’s cheaper than Ireland generally, and that’s always the way it is. But for some reason, airports and the shops in them continue to hold passengers to absolute ransom for the most basic of items – a bottle of water in Frankfurt airport after passport control in departures will set you back nearly €2.50. I don’t know where people are getting this idea that this is acceptable business but if a bottle of water in Ireland costs maybe 80 cent and they charge €1.70 in an airport, this is acceptable, what with there being no other choice. But to charge nearly 6 times as much is ridiculous. I’d rather die of thirst. Similarly, I’m still waiting to see an airport shop in an airport that’s actually selling something really exciting – both my two most regular ‘visits’ have a way of forcing you to walk through a labyrinth of shops to get where you need to be, and yet both of them sell identical ranges of alcohol, electronics, shoddy souvenirs and perfume. I don’t know what it is yet, but there must be more things to sell at an airport that I can’t buy cheaper online than what we have at the moment. Anyone any ideas for this imaginary shop I want to start? Other than cheap bottles of water?

 

If you’ve any funny stories or observations on flying, passing through airports, then leave a comment below!

Let’s Fly The BA Way… – Part II

Well, for anyone who had been eagerly waiting to hear how the rest of my trip to London and back with BA went, my apologies for the delay but I think everyone accepts that me getting work done through Christmas and the New Year while back home in Dublin was evidently not going to happen!

 

In the end of course, it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that my second drink – my benchmark test of how caring airline staff are – never actually showed up and some 30 minutes later, we came to land at Heathrow’s incredible, amazing Terminal 5. Personally, the last time I passed through the place, I really didn’t get what all the fuss was about. To me, the whole terminal is more confusing than anything else, requiring a bit of a slalom after security through a series of overpriced retail outlets and down an escalator to the actual departures area – if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you then have to actually take a little train along to the right terminal of the terminal if that makes any sense (which it doesn’t, even to me and I’ve just written it). Arriving, you’ll be pleased to hear, is equally an irritation. I think arriving to somewhere is one of the best areas an airport can actually be good at, because it’s dead simple – get passengers from their plane, give them their bags, get them through passport control and customs and out the door as quickly as possible. That’s what people want – nobody’s there, after a flight, to admire the architecture or wander through corridors looking for how to get out. They just literally want to get out.

 

So I disembarked, wandered along the corridors for a few minutes before arriving at this train station (as I mentioned above) to take us from one terminal to the main terminal of Terminal 5. The train took about 7 or 8 minutes to present itself, by which time there was a number of flight-loads of passengers waiting, which wasn’t great. Then, at the other end, you go up a series of escalators for some reason, walk along a corridor, then (if you spot them) have to go back down another series of escalators to reach passport control. Where I waited 45 minutes. Somebody’s going to comment or write to me that Heathrow is a huge airport and what do I expect but no seriously, such a confusing layout and time robbery is not on at all. Example; I arrived to Frankfurt airport, also a large international airport at 19:55 last week in the midst of the New Year’s air-rush of people trying to get home and back to work. I was already standing out the front waiting for a bus by 20:17 (with my bags), and home by 20:50. Literally, it’s a model of efficiency (as you might expect from the Germans) – you get off plane, walk to passport control, the baggage belt is literally the other side of it and the bags are always already waiting and then you leave, the end. They manage it, so why can’t anywhere else? Even Dublin to be fair has made great strides in Terminal 2 with this where you get off the plane, up an escalator, and follow the same corridor to passport control, baggage, customs and even the car park without turning or changing level.

 

On the way back, things were however slightly better I suppose. I’ve gathered that Terminal 5 is one of those things I just can’t bring myself to like – it often feels designed more for aesthetics and pleasantries than actual usability. Passing through security, there’s literally just a shopping centre on the other side, which if you’ve any sense, you’ll skip right through. The only shop we did want to actually buy anything from was the WH Smith, and the queue there literally snaked from the checkout down past the drinks, looping around fiction somewhere and back to the entrance. Of course if I wanted to buy something from the Caviar House or whatever it’s called, I wouldn’t have had to wait even a second but it goes to show what most people actually want from an airport shop – a newspaper, drink and a bar chocolate. It actually took us so long to get these items from the shop, that we began to fear missing our flight and ended up taking off at a gallop to get down towards our gate, which was thankfully close by.

 

In conclusion, would I willingly choose Heathrow to transit through? Nope – I couldn’t, it’s not built to facilitate quick and fast movement around the place (or so it seems), even though Terminal 5 is a very nice building. Would I opt to deliberately go there again? I don’t know, for me, BA’s service isn’t that awe-inspiring to merit the extra few bucks travelling with them and since airspace over Heathrow always seems to be congested and causing delays, I’ll probably try Stansted or Gatwick in future and see if that’s any quicker. If anyone has any thoughts on travelling to London, the easiest or quickest ways, or comments, I’d love to hear them!

Happy New Year!

I know I haven’t written anything in quite a while – partially out of laziness, but also partially out of just having too many things to try and do before Christmas, as it always does, quickly rattled in. Anyway, after a pretty hectic year for myself and this blog, I’m really happy to bring in 2012 and wish anyone reading a Happy New Year, and what will hopefully (for all of us) be a prosperous year (I’ll let you know how that goes later in the year!).

 

Last year for me personally, was a time of pretty much all-round change in terms of moving from Malaysia back to Ireland, getting bored within about 3 weeks, and then moving on to Germany where I’ve been working in internet marketing happily ever since. While I’d like to think things will stay relatively stable for the next year, you never really know and for now, in spite of the recession/depression/rain in Ireland, it’s really lovely to be back home, even if only for a short while. And strangely, it sometimes feels like Ireland’s sort of turned a corner in terms of the ‘badness’ of the last few years – but that could be just rose-tinted spectacles and grass is greener, etc. Who knows?

 

In terms of keeping the blog going, I’ve been at this site in its varying forms, for over 3 years now and intend to keep it going, although obviously that all depends on how much time is available to put into it. And, as you’ll have seen, after 3 years of paying hosting costs out of my own pocket for it, I’ve started dabbling a bit in ways for it to maybe at least semi-fund itself. So I’m pleased to have eBookers, Expedia and Hotels.com ads on some pages, which I think makes the advertising at least more relevant and less irritating than other advertising. What do you think? Of course, I’m still always looking to hear what everyone thinks of the site, or what I could do to improve or what you’d like to see more/less of – e-mail me, andy [at] youlovethatsh.com or you can get me any of the other ways up in the menu above.

 

Anyway, I’ll be right back in a week or two with my more usual posts, but until then, have a great start into 2012!

Let’s Fly The BA Way…

A couple of years ago, the opportunity presented itself by way of sheer cheapness, to travel with British Airways from Dublin to Toronto via London Heathrow. I was excited for all the nerdy travel reasons – first up, my previous trips to Canada had been with renowned cattle-class specialists Zoom Airlines, who had since ceased to exist, and had been of a quality ranging from relatively to completely awful. Secondly, BA had only moved into the disastrously-inaugurated Terminal 5 about a year ago, and with all the problems now seemingly solved, I was keen to see this piece of aviation magnificence for my good self. Finally, BA is in theory, one of the only full-service legacy carriers still providing some degree of comfort, and since I had taken Air France to Hong Kong a few months earlier and had been suitably impressed, I was keen to see what the Brits had to offer exactly.

 

Long-time readers of You Love Thatsh will then no doubt remember that the trip, in terms of travel experience, wasn’t exactly incredible, and even though it wasn’t 100% BA’s fault, I can’t help blame them somehow for at least some of it. Firstly, in spite of any advances made for British Airways in Heathrow, the usual problems remained. Namely, flight congestion landing in Heathrow, then the ‘Irish’ gates being quite some distance from terminal 1, where the apparently land, which is in turn quite far away from BA’s home at terminal 5 and finishing at terminal 5, where nobody’s boarding card issued in their home countries was being recognised at the security screening area (and I mean nobody’s), forcing lines of people at the security screening counters, then the check-in desks, then re-joining the security line, the fronts of which now had more people trying and failing to get through. The plane ride meanwhile (the part involving BA) had three main problems from my perspective;

1. The ridiculous tightness. I asked for an additional beer and it was, on the outbound part of the flight, treated with the same enthusiasm you might treat someone asking to decant all the fuel, mid-flight, out of the plane.

2. The ridiculous heat situation. For whatever reason, the aircraft in both directions had no way individual air vents, and this coincided quite awfully with the fact that the heating was cranked right up, and we were en-route to Toronto in winter, so I was appropriately dressed.

3. The racist. I also had the very bad fortune on the way back to be sat beside an impatient racist who imparted on me his admiration for Canada and why he was considering moving there, having been there on business, because they didn’t seem to be as open to other cultures as the UK was apparently fast becoming. Then, upon our arrival in Heathrow, he was out of his seat faster than someone with explosive diarrhoea to make his connecting flight to Derry. When he realised he couldn’t actually get off, he then proceeded to verbally berate the stewardess for making the plane late; as it was surely her entire fault. Not really BA’s fault, as I say, but she then took it out on me as she knew we were sitting together and decided against saying thanks or goodbye, or whatever, when I got off, like she did with everyone else.

 

Now I don’t usually do repeats, but you can imagine that this particular story seems to be a little exceptional and not what one would normally expect. So when the opportunity presented itself to fly with BA last Friday from Frankfurt to Heathrow, I thought hey, let’s give BA and Terminal 5 a try and see if I missed something last time.

 

So here we go, user experience, Frankfurt to London. The first thing you’ll notice in Frankfurt isn’t the friendly staff waiting to greet you. On the contrary, there were two women, one dealing with someone, one on the phone. And the phone call was obviously of critical importance, because she stayed on it and didn’t acknowledge me whatsoever. I’ve been in and out of Frankfurt Airport so many times I can’t even count, but nothing remarkable there – it’s a little bit like everything in Germany, a bit bland, a touch bare but does exactly what you want it to do, which is gets you in and gets you out much faster than nearly any other large European airport I know. I can usually get home and have the coffee machine on, for example, within one hour of the plane touching down.
So, on the whole, I think it’s great.

 

Anyway, all onto the plane – the queue to get on was actually extremely long, but thankfully entertainment was generously provided by a man and his wife who were dressed like they were just returning from a shopping trip in Milan and heading home to Monaco. Their 5^th home, that is. They kept trying to queue jump me, not because they had a valid reason in particular, but because they were BA Gold members or whatever and would normally have been afforded the luxury of boarding before everyone else. Except that there was no priority boarding lane, so in the absence of that, queue jumping was obviously the next best option. I’m not sure what it is, but BA seems to keep a relatively elderly fleet of planes and it’s noticeable to be honest – but as we carried on, I let that one slip.

 

After the on-board drink was served, I decided to see if enthusiasm for second drinks was any better all these years later and so, waiting until someone actually asked if there was anything else, I made my demand and waited…would it show up? Read the Second Part now!

Have any of you had a strange travel experience, like mine with the racist? Or an airline you think is way over-rated? Leave me a comment or drop me a line, I’d love to hear…

Hello London – Part II

After what can only be described (sarcastically) as another of the most restful nights sleeps’ of my life in London, we were back up at the crack of dawn. Once again, I should emphasise, it wasn’t particularly our choice to be up at the crack of dawn – more so, somebody in the room next to us had decided to go use the toilet first thing. And as I said in the last post, all the doors were strangely spring loaded so as soon as they decided to let the door close, we were more or less resigned to getting up early.

 

So, up we go and off, once again, to the local Subway for the early breakfast special deal. London is expensive after all, and I’d much rather sacrifice the traditional British breakfast – which anyway is very similar to the traditional Irish breakfast – in favour of not spending so much.

 

We didn’t have so much time on our second day in London, so we got through the breakfast as quickly as possible and went straight out, with Anna wanting to see some of ‘real’ London this time around, so we headed off in search of Camden town and the famous market. Well, as tastes of ‘real’ London go, it was certainly that – it was so packed, that we queued about 5 minutes just to get out of the tube station, then had to try and merge with the oncoming human traffic with more care than driving on a motorway. So, surprise surprise, Camden was already packed with the streets looking like the areas around Croke Park after a GAA match. We wandered around for what must have been all of 20 minutes before getting lost, a bit frustrated and sick of looking at signs warning of pickpockets. So I’m sorry Camden town, we left almost as soon as we possibly could. But not before queuing another 5 minutes to get back into the tube station.

 

Next stop, with time getting tighter and tighter, was Notting Hill to see what it had to offer us. I won’t lie, we got off at Notting Hill (which actually looks terrible when you first emerge from the tube station), wandered down the road a bit until we came across a bunch of hardcore Russian protesters who were being steadily outnumbered by the police, then wandered back up the road a bit again until we passed the tube station going in the opposite direction. And then, quite simply, we were just out of time so we had to go back into the tube station having seen only one street of Notting Hill (but very well). We headed back in the direction of Earls Court to retrieve our luggage from the undoubtedly very safe open shed that we had been told would be fine to leave our bags in some hours earlier, and to get some lunch. Surprisingly, our luggage was still in the open shed, but that may have had more to do with the fact that the police were now swarming our former accommodation seemingly in search of a resident criminal. Yes, we truly do stay in all the classy places.

 

Moving along, the next stop was somewhere to eat, and with some money left over, we were finally able to relax a little on that front. We headed down the road from our place and came to arrive, just as the rain began to fall, at some Indian place called Masala Zone, which was really only noticeable due to the crazy artwork that was all over the inside of the place. But, as food places go, it was absolutely delicious (hence the actual mention).

 

Time was up, so bags in hand, we raced back to Heathrow as quickly as possibly as we could, checking in our bags and then seeing what else we could possibly afford in Terminal 5’s overly-expensive shops – which wasn’t much – and getting on the plane back to Frankfurt.

 

A good trip – yes; but a restful and cheap trip – absolutely not!

 

Keep an eye out in the next week or two for my review on flying with British Airways, Heathrow Airport and the missing ‘second beer’.