Tips for Travellers

Written by Patrick Middleton and Gerald Boot - June 2006

Ryanair - Toulon-Hyères - British Airways - London Underground - easyJet Nice checkin - Salon Club Riviera - Delta: Nice to Atlanta - Third World airline crashes - health matters for travellers

- Ryanair has a very limited presence here with a flight to Stansted out of Toulon-Hyères; across most of this season also flying Marseille-Dublin twice weekly. Nice airport refused their demand, some years ago, for a special deal on landing fees. Recently, as some readers have noticed, the Irish low-cost carrier has had some unfavourable publicity with a Channel 4 documentary alleging that it cuts corners on training, safety procedures and passenger identity checks and that cabin and flight crew are overworked. As would be expected, these claims have been rejected by the company. Nevertheless the charges are being investigated by the French government.

Ryanair is famously indifferent to how it is viewed by passengers It has now introduced a charge of £5.00 or its equivalent for checked-in baggage (£2.50 if it is checked-in online or by telephone). Passengers travelling together are not allowed to pool their baggage allowance. Handling companies are told to be very strict in applying regulations. A reader has written: “Checking in for a Ryanair flight from Toulon-Hyères, I had my correctly sized hand luggage disallowed because it was 11 kilos, not 10 which is the limit. I offered to remove a file to reduce the weight but was told that would mean I had two pieces of hand baggage which is forbidden. You don’t get this kind of nonsense with easyJet.”

- This column’s comments on the drawbacks of Toulon-Hyères were confirmed by another reader who said “the car park is too small and too expensive – at 9 euros a day – for what it is”. Since mid-April, by the way, Jetairfly has flights on Friday and Sunday to Brest; the same carrier also serves Brussels.

- British Airways has added a fifth daily flight to Heathrow out of Nice which will be continued through next winter. With two flights to Gatwick, that means BA serves London seven times a day. Readers in the western Var may like to know that on Saturday they have a flight to Heathrow out of Marseille (other flights are to Gatwick). Travellers using BA in the UK will now find that conventional check-in facilities are no longer available for domestic flights. Passengers must either log on to BA.com or go to a self-service kiosk. The carrier has also hiked its fuel surcharge on long-haul flights from £30 to £35 each way.

- London’s underground is a horror but a convenient way of getting about. But watch out across the next few months. The 107-year old City and Waterloo line is closed for renovation until September 1st and there will be weekend disruptions across the summer on the Piccadilly, Northern, Central and Victoria lines. Helpfully, Kay Groark has mentioned a useful British Tourist Authority online bulletin about events in the British capital. It’s at http://www.visitlondon.com.

- Mike Kray warns that as easyJet now boards all flights from a single check-in desk at Nice’s Terminal 2 if you don’t keep an eye on the time you could end up being denied boarding, as he was waiting to go to Liverpool. “Nobody called us,”he says. We took up his case with Stéphane Fargette, the carrier’s PR man in France. He had little sympathy for Mike: “As he says, you’ve got to watch the clock and give yourself plenty of time.”

- Delta has now started its summer service from Nice to Atlanta which offers a wide range of onward flights from the city of Coca Cola to many other US destinations. One of us was there a few years ago and found it a fascinating place though hot and sticky in the summer. At the press conference to launch the flight Delta’s people were resolutely upbeat as they announced that the carrier – which made a loss of over $5 billion in 2004 – was embarking on “the biggest expansion in its history”. Sounds like something out of the case files of Debtors Anonymous – and see our letters pages.

- Nice-Côte d’Azur Airport is France’s single biggest car rental market, ahead of both Orly and CDG. Not surprisingly, complaints from customers are quite frequent. A couple of tips: when you drop off a car always insist on an acceptance slip – and you have to insist very firmly. That way you won’t get charged for a spare wheel possibly nicked by a previous hirer. If you’ve not got that acceptance signature, you might even get charged for a wheel missing from an identical vehicle. This is the Côte d’Arnaque – the rip-off Riviera – remember ... And if you get a parking ticket while driving a rental vehicle tell them at the drop-off point and it’ll cost you less than if they have to chase you up later.

- The executive lounges at Nice-Côte d’Azur are now open to all – even fliers with low-cost carriers – at a charge of €25. Sounds a bit steep? Well, if you’ve got a long wait you could recover that in free booze and snacks as well as doing your waiting in comfort and with access to a wide range of magazines and newspapers.

- Worried about bird flu, chikungunya and such like? There’s a mass of clear and practical information on health matters for travellers at www.who.int/ith.

- And finally some uncheering news: in 2005 the number of passengers killed in air crashes doubled over the previous year’s total to 1050. Most of these happened with dodgy Third World airlines – exactly the kind of carriers found on the EU’s recent black list of companies to avoid. Incidentally, these include “Comair”. Jocelyne Gram of BA in Nice was quick to tell us that this was not the company of the same name which operates a BA franchise in South Africa. Indeed not. One of us flew Johannesburg-Durban with them some time back. Excellent. The bad Comair from the DRC has the code OH, the good Comair has MN.