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.

I just don't believe RyanAir's headline grabbing "Air-tax causes cancellation of a third of flights"

I just don't believe RyanAir ... but they are very clever with their press releases.

Last week I wrote about RyanAir asking if you'd be prepared to stand up on your flight I mused afterwards that they were being very clever with getting press (and Blog!) column inches.

Well they've surpassed that announcement as yesterday RyanAir announced that they were cutting flights out of Stansted by 40%, blaming high handling fees at Stansted and the impending £1 increase in Air Passenger Duty that comes into force in November this year.

Many newspapers and TV channels have picked up on this and RyanAir must have been delighted to have grabbed both the front page and page 1 of today's paper and the full article about 'Airlines cut flights in tax-hike protest' on their website.

I just don't believe a word of the RyanAir announcement. RyanAir is simply cutting capacity over the winter period when less people want to fly (as they did last year) and then I can predict with absolute certainty that come the Spring there'll be a host of press releases on RyanAir's website that "RyanAir announces major expansion with flights to X, Y and Z".

Headline grabbing and nothing more in my opinion. And its worked!

Air Passenger Duty is a flat rate "green" tax based on the distance flown - shorthaul flights are currently £10, rising to £11 in November 2009 and then £20 in November 2010 (long-haul flights are up to £40 now, rising to £90 next year).

I do agree that APD isn't being properly reinvested in green initiatives and I also agree that isn't a fairly levied tax, it should be based upon the actual CO2 of the planes in use to encourage airlines to run modern more efficient aircraft ... but then the cynic in me says that they'd then claim that the government regulations were over-bureaucratic!

RyanAir asks - would you stand for a free flight?

In typical RyanAir headline-grabbing style I notice they put out a press announcement on Thursday to gauge whether customers will be prepared to literally 'stand up' on a short-haul flight (instead of sitting) if the fare was free, or if it was half that of the sitting passengers.

There's even a mock-up of what the "secure standing seats" might look like:



Given how cheap RyanAir tickets are anyway I couldn't see how a half-price standing-only seat could actually be any cheaper??

Further details of announement and a poll to see how interested customers are in this novel idea are over at RyanAir's press releases.

PS: Watch the RyanAir standing seats video on YouTube and you might realise that this announcement may not be entirely genuine ...

Update 22nd July: RyanAir announced today that 120,000 voted in their online poll about whether they would accept standing on short-haul flights. Apparently 66% people voted for the proposal. See the RyanAir press release for more details.

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.

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

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.

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)