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.

Travel updates - new services from Euroferries, Celtic Link, LD Lines and RyanAir

Been making some updates to the French ferry and airline routes page for our self-catering Brittany cottage.

First up, thanks to Richy who left a comment on my last Euroferries posting, as at long last Euroferries finally launch their Ramsgate to Boulogne service with a crossing time of 1 hour 15. Bookings are now being taken for sailings from November 14th and a few searches indicate that Euroferries are being quite price competitive with return crossings coming in for £66.50.

You can book up to April 2010 (but not beyond) so whilst the peak summer crossings are not yet available you can at least book a Christmas or Easter break.

Next, I've also added newcomer Celtic Link who are operating LD Lines' Roscoff to Cherbourg service for them and additionally running a Portsmouth to Cherbourg service of their own.

There's also some been some changes to the LD Lines service as they've moved their fast cat from the Dover/Boulogne service onto Portsmouth/Le Havre - slashing the journey time from 5 ½ hours to just 3 ¼ hours. Dover/Boulogne still continues with a conventional ferry but obviously takes a little longer without the fast cat.

I also noticed that RyanAir have introduced new services from Birmingham to Dinard, Bournemouth to Nantes and Leeds Bradford to Nantes so more updates there as well.

Phew !

If anyone actually travels with Euroferries or Celtic Link then please do leave a comment to say what you thought of the new services.

La Rochelle - a new travel option for getting to our Brittany Cottage

Next week a family of four from Keighley in West Yorkshire is renting our Brittany Cottage.

This in itself is not unusual as the Cottage is rented out quite a lot and is booked pretty much solid from May through the summer season.

But it was the route they were travelling by that was a first-of-a-kind as they were flying in to La Rochelle airport as Leeds Bradford is 'just on their doorstep' and the flight times with Jet2 were quite convenient.

On the Travel routes to reach our Brittany Holiday Cottage page of our website we've listed all the different French ferry routes (P&O, LD Lines, BrittanyFerries, Eurostar, NorfolkLine, Condor, etc) from the UK and Ireland to France, and similarly there's details of all the budget and not-so-budget airlines that fly into what I thought were all the nearby French airports (Rennes, Dinard, Lorient, Nantes, Brest, etc) ... but not La Rochelle!

For all our guests we always email them a few weeks before the start of their holiday with detailed directions on how to get to the Cottage from their destination Ferryport or Airport ... but again I didn't have any directions from La Rochelle as no-one had been to the Cottage via that airport before!

So I was off on a new challenge, putting together the driving directions from La Rochelle airport to our holiday cottage. Fortunately I've done this for enough different airports and ferry ports now that I have it pretty much off pat with a combination of Google Maps (who have the best maps) and ViaMichelin (who have better turn by turn driving instructions).

As many of the different travel routes are very similar I build up the route using a series of sub-routes so in the case of La Rochelle it was simply a case of working out the directions from La Rochelle up to Nantes and then grafting these onto the existing directions I had from Nantes to the Cottage. And job done, uploaded the directions to the website and emailed the details onto our forthcoming guests.

But of course I couldn't just leave it at that, could I?

No, I then set about adding La Rochelle to the website travel options page which meant searching through each of the airlines to see if they fly into La Rochelle (turns out that RyanAir, FlyBe, AerArran, Jet2 and EasyJet all have routes into La Rochelle), adding their details to the website, finding out that other routes into France had now changed or been discontinued, which in turn ended up as more website changes ... oh but Jet2 wasn't previously on the travel options page so I had to download and resize an appropriate Icon before I could add it .... and before I knew it what had started off as a quick and simple new set of driving directions had turned into several hours sitting in front of the computer in my study!

Better not succumb to any more "simple website" updates or else Liz will be serving me with divorce papers for abandonment ...

RyanAir fly from Birmingham to Dinard

Last week RyanAir announced they're starting operations from Birmingham airport to 20 new destinations across Europe including Dinard in North-West France, about an hour's drive from our french holiday home, and offering some competition for FlyBe who also operate a Birmingham to Brittany flight, this time to Brest on the southern Brittany coast.

I find it quite amazing that RyanAir are going to run all 20 routes with initially just two new aircraft - they're going to be very busy aircraft I think!

Dinard flights commence on 17th June 2008.

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.

Easyjet acquires GB Airways - possibly more flights to Brittany as a result?

EasyJet buys GB Airways

On Friday EasyJet announced that they were buying GB Airways with effect from 30th March 2008.

GB Airways currently operates 39 routes to 31 destinations across Europe under a codeshare agreement with British Airways (BA flights with a flight number between BA6760 and BA6999 are operated by GB Airways).

Currently GB Airways only operates one flight to a one route to a French regional airport near to our Brittany Gite, Gatwick to Nantes, and EasyJet don't operate any flights to Northern France at all.

There's currently no details as to what route changes EasyJet will bring next year but potentially it may bring welcome news with an opening up of more low-cost flight options for our Gite.

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Categories: BudgetAirline, EasyJet

Auto Europe car hire - offering good prices for France and world-wide

World-wide car rental

Although roughly two-thirds of the guests that stay in our Brittany holiday home travel over in their own car through one of the many French ferry ports in Brittany, Normandy and Pas de Calais, there's the remaining third who prefer to fly and then hire a car in France.

Some time ago I looked around for a good hire car company that I could recommend through the Gite website, that offered hire cars at a reasonable price, and offered pickup at all the local French airports.

Auto Europe ticked all the right boxes for me and even though two sets of guests have now taken up our recommendation and hired through them, for reasons various (mainly I didn't put aside the time to focus on it), up until now I never added Auto Europe's details to the options page for ferry and airline routes to our Gite.

Prevarication over, this weekend I finally found the time to integrate Auto Europe into our website and added their advert to this blog.

In total they offer some 900 car hire pickup locations across France including all the nearby airports served by budget airlines (Brest, Dinard, Lorient, Lannion, Nantes, and Rennes) as well as of course all the major cities further afield in France like Paris and Nice.

Of course starting to make changes to the website then got me onto a more general update of the travel options page, correcting an external link that had stopped working, word-smithing the text, fiddling with and resizing some of the ferry and airline logos, and all in all spending far more time that I expected by making lots of minor changes that no-one will probably notice anyway!

Enjoy!

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Categories: BudgetAirline, CarHire, France

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.

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Categories: AerArran, RyanAir, BudgetAirline, Brittany

New FlyBe routes following acquisition of BA connect

FlyBe's website

Over on This French Life Craig McGinty's quick off the mark with detailing all of FlyBe's new routes that they launched yesterday.

FlyBe's press release contains further details of the new routes and price cuts on existing routes following their acquisition of BA Connect and makes their claim that they're now Europe's largest regional airport with 152 routes from 56 different airports. RyanAir would of course argue this point differently as they offer 454 routes from 130 different European airports - usual warnings about not trusting anyone's marketing statistics apply here!

In terms of options for getting to North-West France, FlyBe's announcement adds one new route from Edinburgh to Rennes which is about an hour from our french holiday home. Flights start on the 26th May and fares will be from £47.99 one way (including taxes and charges).
Significantly for me this is the first budget airline that flies direct from Scotland to a regional airport in Brittany so hope this will give me some more potential guests.

I've added the new budget airline route to the travel choices section of our website - if I've counted correctly this now means there are 29 budget airlines that fly direct into Brittany or close by.

New FlyBe routes to Brittany

FlyBe's website

FlyBe announced yesterday that following the acquisition of BA Connect it's starting a number of new routes in 2007.

Of particular interest to me of course are the new low-cost routes they're offering to Brittany:

• Manchester - Brest (three times a week from 5th April) for £34.99
• Manchester - Rennes (four times a week from 6th April) for £34.99
• Exeter - Rennes (three times a week from 8th May) for £31.99
• Belfast - Rennes (once a week from 26th May) for £39.99

Flight prices are as usual 'from' these headline rates (so usual message to book early to get these prices), are one way and include taxes and charges.

FlyBe also announced that they're recommencing the Southampton to Angers route from 26th March.

Rennes is only an hour's drive from our French Holiday Home, Brest is slightly further at about 2 hours and Angers 3.

I've now added these new routes to the travel options section of our website, if I've counted right there are now something like 30 different budget airline routes to Brittany!

Bargain Ryan Air flights to Brittany

Received an email today from Ryan Air advertising their latest cut price fares.

RyanAir

Currently they're offering flights from London Luton to Brest (which is about 2 hours drive from our Gite) for 44p, Stansted to Dinard (about an hour's drive) for 9p or Nottingham East Midlands to Dinard for 24p.

There's a number of other cheap flight offers on RyanAir's website from the UK and Ireland and even after you add the taxes (about £15) it's still a bargain.

We've still got availability in our holiday home for the week of September 12th to 19th and from the 29th September so if you fancy a cheap holiday I'm sure we can do a deal ...

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 ...

Air Wales flights from England, Wales, Channel Islands and Ireland to Brittany

Only a few weeks ago I was writing about Aer Arran's low cost flights to Brittany, now I've found about another low cost provider, Air Wales, that's started small and has now expanded with four new routes to Rennes.

Rennes is the regional capital and largest town in Brittany with lots of things to see and do such as the medieval cathedral quarter, a number of elegant 16th-18th century buildings including the Brittany parliment building, several museums, an enourmous Saturday street market, or you can take 'le Val' (a driverless metro) to the innovative 'Rennes Atalante' zone for a tour of the Citroen factory. It's well worth spending a day or two exploring the town and it's just under an hour's drive away from our Brittany Holiday Gite.

Air Wales are starting flights to Rennes from Cardiff, Manchester, Jersey and Waterford so are (to my knowledge) the only low cost airline flying to Brittany from the Channel Islands and from North West England. Maybe we'll get some guests from these areas that'll let me know how good the service is - the prices are keen with one-way flights from £19.99.

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?

New RyanAir Dublin flights to Brittany

Looking at RyanAir's website earlier today I noticed that they're adding a new flight from Dublin to Nantes, Brittany which is about 2 hours drive away from our Gite.

I've added the new flight details to the travel options section of our Gite website and was thinking that perhaps I'll have to start advertising in Dublin now.

The choice of flights is amazing really, there are now 11 low-cost routes into Brittany:

RyanAir fly

• London Stansted and Nottingham East Midlands to Dinard (1 ½ hours drive to the Gite)
• Stansted, Nottingham, Shannon and now Dublin to Nantes (2 hours drive)
• London Luton to Brest (2 hours drive)

FlyBe fly

• Birmingham, Exeter and Southampton to Brest (2 hours drive)
• Southampton to Rennes (1 hour flight)