Travel updates for Aer Arran and Sea France

Aer Arran announced yesterday that they're starting two new Aer Lingus Regional routes including a Shannon to Rennes service that will operate throughout the summer months, complementing the existing summer service from Cork to Rennes and Dublin to Rennes.

Rennes is the capital of Brittany and the airport is about an hour's drive from our Brittany holiday home so this new service should hopefully give our Irish holiday guests a few more options to stay with us.

Aer Arran ought to update the European route map on their website though as they've rather mistakenly portrayed Rennes as being just a short distance to the South West of Paris. In reality Rennes is about 150 miles away and is much more to the West of Paris than it is to the South. Rennes looks to have transplanted Orleans on the map, much to the surprise of both cities I'm sure!

I took the opportunity to update the Brittany ferry and flight choices travel page of our website with the new Aer Arran service; also removing Aer Lingus from the page as they've now stopped their Irish flights into La Rochelle and Lorient as they're now instead acting as flight subcontractors for Aer Arran on their services into France.

Also removed from our website was Sea France who went into liquidation on the 9th January 2012. As the SeaFrance website rather sadly says:

Urgent information

On 09th of January 2012, the Commercial Court in Paris informed us of their decision to liquidate SeaFrance. From now on we are prohibited to continue trading.

Customers who have a valid reservation which has not yet been used will be refunded in full as soon as possible.
Customers who have a reservation which has been used one way will be transferred on arrival at the port to another company for the return journey

DFDS Seaways have announced on their website an intention to start a new Dover-Calais ferry service in conjunction with LD Lines - effectively taking over some of the Sea France assets - but other than the news release on the 10th January of their intent, there's been nothing more since (and there's no announcements at all on the LD Lines website).

Watch this space as they say!

AerArran reopens their Irish flight service to Brittany

Quick note to pass on news that of Aer Arran restarting on 1st June their summer route from Galway and Waterford to Lorient with a weekly Saturday service.

Fares are from €69.99 each way, and Lorient is just an hour's drive from our Brittany holiday Gite.

Details of this and other Brittany travel routes by air, road and boat are on our holiday Gite website.

A "squadron" of budget airline changes for Brittany airports

Collecting together some of the recent route and airport changes that the budget airlines have announced for flights into Brittany ...

First up is the grand-daddy of route changes, RyanAir, who continually confuse and confound me by adding routes at the start of the year and then removing them later on in the year, making it very difficult to keep up to date the travel route options page for our Brittany website.

RyanAir have recently announced new routes from Liverpool to Nantes and Bournemouth to Nantes (the latter announcement is I feel a bit of a fraud as I picked up the same "new" Bournemouth/Nantes route news on this blog in June 2007).

Next up is Irish stable-mate Aer Arran who have quietly dropped without any kind of announcement their Bristol to Nantes route, but made a splash with their first route into Brest airport by announcing a new Cork to Brest route.

To date EasyJet have not had any routes into Brittany or Normandy but following their acquisition of GB Airways last year which I predicted might lead to more routes, EasyJet have announced their first route into Brittany with a new Gatwick to Nantes route from 31st May. Actually it's not a completely new route as GB Airways have been operating this route for some time, but now you can book it via the EasyJet website.

... and finally, a completely new airline that until very recently I'd never heard of, SkyBus.

Skybus seems to have been up to now a Scilly Islands-based operator with just one route on the Skybus.co.uk website operating from Newquay in Cornwall to/from St. Mary's in the Isles of Scilly (with some flights stopping off en-route at Lands End Airport), and three additional routes on the Isles of Scilly travel website from Bristol, Exeter and Southampton to St. Mary's.

Well now Skybus are branching out with a Newquay to Cardiff route from 10th March, and relevant for me, a new Newquay to St Brieuc route from 17th March 2008. St Brieuc is the regional capital of department 22 (Cotes d'Armor) in Brittany and has grown into being a large coastal town with quaint harbour, the nearby sand-marshes of Baie des St Brieuc and miles and miles of wide sandy beaches at nearby Rosslaire. St Brieuc airport is probably closer to our Brittany Gite than any of the other Brittany airports as the town is only about 40 minutes drive from our holiday home.

Until the end of January Skybus are doing special offer introductory flights from Newquay to St Brieuc for just £55 each way, with standard fares rising to £69 afterwards. Still a good price as they're fully flexible and inclusive of airport charges.

So there you go, quite a few Brittany flight additions and subtractions, which as usual I try to keep up to date along with the other ferry and airline choices for getting to Brittany on our Gite website.

New RyanAir Bournemouth/Nantes route to Brittany starts

RyanAir routes into Brittany

I noticed from RyanAir's new routes list that they started up a new service from Bournemouth to Nantes from 14th June, which is just a couple of hours autoroute drive away from our French holiday home.

RyanAir also announced last month the opening of a 20th European base in Bristol with services to 13 different destinations including a thrice-weekly service to Dinard in North Brittany (about 1 hours drive away).

Although all the airlines make a big thing of the opening of new routes, it pays to keep an eye on their route list as they don't make the same announcements about route closure or about summer-only routes that are no longer running.

For instance, when I compared the Brittany flight details I currently had on our Gite website to the routes now showing on the airlines websites I could see that RyanAir had quietly dropped the Frankfurt/Nantes route and AerArran had dropped the London Luton/Lorient, Cardiff/Lorient and Manchester/Nantes routes whilst there was only one compensating announcement from AerArran about their new Cardiff/Nantes route.

---

Categories: AerArran, RyanAir, BudgetAirline, Brittany

cheapflights.co.uk doesn't appear to always live up to its name

Found an interesting new website today, cheapflights.co.uk, which advertises itself as a "Price comparison for cheap flights & travel from the UK & Ireland"

Cheapflights from the UK & Ireland

As well as a cheap flight news blog and a 'telephone cheat sheet' to get through to a real person when phoning different airlines, the main sections of their site are a set of flight directories for different destination airports (the A-Z destination list along the top of the page) and a flight search engine.

It's these last two that I felt sadly let the site down as they simply don't have the full range of lowcost airlines that I know exist today. I've listed the main budget airline carriers that fly to Brittany on the 'how to reach our Brittany Gite' page on our Gite website, comparing my results against cheapflights.co.uk showed a number of omissions.

For example on the Dinard airport page (which is the closest airport to our Gite at about 60 miles away), there are a number of flight options shown such as Manchester, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Birmingham; but all these are full-price flights costing £200-£600. RyanAir for instance isn't shown with their flights from Stansted or Nottingham (usually around £20 each way).

Similarly Lorient airport (an hour's drive away) isn't shown as a destination at all on cheapflights although AerArran and Air France both fly there from a number of UK and Irish destinations.

More positively, the Brest airport page (2 hours drive) shows FlyBe routes from Southampton, Exeter and Birmingham as well as more expensive flights from Gatwick, Isle of Man, Belfast City and others; however it doesn't again show RyanAir's service from London Luton to Brest.

I suppose in summary cheapflights is a useful additional site to search for flight options to Brittany (as well as to other destinations of course!) but it's clearly not totally comprehensive in its listings.

Spoke too soon about AirWales - they've gone out of business

Oops, yesterday I posted about the new low cost airline AirWales that flying into Rennes and they've ceased flying already !

Martin Selway (whose Brittany Gite is close to ours on the other side of Josselin) pointed out to me after reading my blog posting that Air Wales's website currently said:

Important Notice to all Air Wales passengers

Please note that with effect from Sunday April 23rd Air Wales have announced cessation of passenger services on all routes.

All passengers holding bookings with Air Wales for departures from April 24th 2006 onwards will be provided with a refund through the original payment method. To request a refund please contact our Reservations centre on 0870 777 3131 / IRE 1800 654193 and we will fully refund all monies paid.

A number of Air Wales' services have now been replaced by new carriers;

Cardiff- Newcastle - Eastern Airways
Cardiff - Brussels- Eastern Airways
Cardiff- Cork - Aer Arann

For services from Cardiff International Airport to Jersey and Paris CDG we recommend the following alternative services.

Cardiff- Rennes - Alternative services operate from Cardiff to Lorient with Aer Arann.
Cardiff- Jersey - Alternative services operate from Bristol to Jersey with Air Southwest or Flybe.
Cardiff- Paris CDG - Alternative services operate from Bristol to Paris CDG with BA Connect.
Exeter and Newquay - Cork - Alternative services operate from Bristol to Cork with Aer Arann.

For passengers holding reservations with Air Wales / BmiBaby to travel to Paris CDG please note that an automatic refund will be processed by booking agents bmibaby to the original payment methods. All queries regarding this should be forwarded to BmiBaby on 0870 264 2229 quoting your booking reference number and passenger name.

Air Wales apologise for any inconvenience caused. Should you have any queries please don't hesitate to contact us.

Now a few hours later, their site simply says:

With effect from Sunday 23rd April Air Wales has ceased all passenger operations. Please be assured that we are continuing to administer full refunds for all passengers affected.

I guess it's my own fault for writing the blog entry about AirWales a couple of weeks ago and not checking it before I posted it ...

This evening was spent with going through all the travel options for our French holiday website, removing AirWales, and checking that all the other routes still existed !

In doing so I found a new budget airline destination, Angers, which is about 3 hours drive from our Gite. FlyBe operate into there from Southampton as do AerArran from London Luton, Manchester and Cork.

Better do my research more thoroughly next time ...

New Aer Arran flights from London Luton to Lorient

Reading London Luton airport's news page the other day I learnt that Aer Arran have started a new 6 days-a-week service from Luton to Lorient in the Morbihan department, about an hour's drive from our Brittany holiday cottage.

Looking on Aer Arran's website I found out that they already fly regularly from four Irish airports (Waterford, Cork, Kerry and Galway) to Lorient. I added these 5 routes to the travel options page of our Gite website, so along with the existing RyanAir and FlyBe Brittany routes means a grand total of 16 different budget ways of getting there.

PS: Just after pressing 'Publish' I looked at AerArran's site again and found that they've introduced another 10 new routes including Cardiff to Lorient and Liege (in Belgium) to Lorient.
Better go and revise our website again - anyone know Dutch so I can add some website pages aimed at visitors from Holland and Belgium?