Archive for Travel category
Off to Southampton for the weekend
It’s just gone 5am and I’m making final preparations – well getting-dressed – for my flight at 7am to Southampton. Why DO airlines insist on almost an hour to check-in for a flight that only takes just over an hour! Argh.
Myself and a few of my friends from St. Sampson’s Secondary are off to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of one of our number (no, not me).
It’ll be my third such stag night and it is to be a jam-packed weekend. Later today I should be clay pigeon shooting and karting before hitting a comedy club for the evening. Two new first-time activities in one-day being that I’ve karted a few times including winning a cup in France at one of the annual Jersey Telecom trips.
Tomorrow we’ll be clearing that hangover with a few hours of paint ball – strangely most of them have never played before.
Oh, it’ll be sweet. Especially if I get a baggy set of overalls again that prevent the paint balls exploding on impacting my body.
[)amien
An open letter to FlyBE on usability
Last night I booked some flights with your web site and must say I’m rather disappointed with the experience. We needed to book two return flights with one going out on a different day but both returning on the same flight, and ideally next to each other.
It is a little disappointing that to book two different flights that you have to book each one separately despite obviously being possible on the phone or with non-airline sites such as Amazon. To avoid booking one and finding the other not available and being left with useless tickets we decided to book each using a different computer so that we could try and make sure it went through at the same time.
Our first issue was that once you have chosen your flights there is no indication of the dates again until the payment has been processed. Other sites seem to have no problem displaying a "current itinerary" down the side at every stage yet with yours this place is instead full of such great things as "You saved £10 booking online!" in giant text and other less important details than a reminder/confirmation of what I have chosen thus far.
The next page, that of your details, then completely omits GUERNSEY as a country forcing us to choose UNITED KINGDOM. For a business that used to be called Jersey European it seems you have forgotten that the Channel Islands are not and have never been part of the UK. Would it be that hard to get it right? After all you’ve even got VATICAN CITY listed although I doubt you get many bookings from it’s residents.
The next part automatically includes travel insurance – which is of course completely unnecessary if you are booking on credit cards or have a travel policy but it there it is and switched on as default. This adds to the whole spiraling-supplements experience that seems to be FlyBe.
Also here is a "I’m a UK resident" check-box. What do I select being from Guernsey? Do I tell the truth and uncheck it or leave it checked as you forced me to choose UNITED KINGDOM as my country?
An option here lets me choose my seat for an extra £5.00. There is no indication of course that it is £5.00 PER PART not per booking so for return trip will be an extra £10. The conditions also make it clear that you can renegade without refund on this arrangement if you feel it’s not safe or that you didn’t make it to the front of the queue within the allocated check-in time.
We struggled through and elected to pay the £2.50 per-person-per-leg-per-hold-item charge. If there’s one thing that’s really annoying about commercial flights it’s the time it takes to get into your seat while people try to stuff over-sized items in their overhead lockers, other people’s overhead lockers then under the seat in front of them. With a supplement on hold baggage I can only assume it’s going to get worse.
Finally, the payment screen and one that seems okay apart from the fact that you’re about to pay for something you can’t get a refund on and there is no final confirmation as to what it is you are buying in contrast to every other e-commerce site I have ever used.
In order to ensure we both got our flights we clicked okay at the same time.
One completed, the other came back with a card error despite the details were okay. I can only assume your system was not happy about processing two different transactions with the same credit card details.
Hitting "retry" to return us to the previous payment screen led us to a page saying our booking was now invalid as that level of seat had gone and now only more expensive ones were available.
Joy, we get to do it all over again for one of our tickets.
Luckily for us we managed to get the second booking through, albeit at a more expensive price.
Using your site is like playing Russian roulette.
[)amien
Adventures in Jackson, Wyoming (part 2)
Jackson
Jackson is a rather small cowboy style town that apparently is even busier in the summer than the winter. Everybody in town is very friendly and helpful apart from the miserable bar staff in the Cowboy Village who could barely be arsed to tell us what they had available to drink. We spent more time at a bar called Sidewinders which is a sports bar with far too many televisions and watched American "Football".
The people at our hotel, The Ranch Inn, were incredibly helpful and also had a free open WiFi hotspot which my laptop made it’s new best friend.
Either Jackson has a problem with under-age drinking or they are a little paranoid about it. I was ID’ed in a bar (okay), a liquor store (not buying anything just with somebody who was) and when ordering a pint of pale ale with my meal in a restaurant. It’s kind of strange how they are so strict on alcohol yet we went to watch Underworld 2 at the cinema and some 10 year old child sat through the whole gorefest.
Jackson Hole (Teton Village)
We were a little disappointed to find that the main ski – Jackson Hole – is a 30 minute $3 bus ride away but we’ve done worse. The area only has 11 lifts and minimal grooming so you are left wondering exactly why the 10 day lift pass is over $500.
There are some great runs although many are quite steep and the masses of recent powder leave the unfit and untrained struggling. Alas, that seemed to include me but I still managed to have a lot of fun.
Inghams
Our rep was a nice woman called Nikki. Originally Scottish but having lived out in Jackson for a while she now talks with a very strange accent.
While our rep was nice it’s worth mentioning that while Inghams can provide you with a lift pass for slightly less dollars than the resort they also convert that dollars to pounds there and then at a rather pathetic $1.6 to the pound rate so it may not work out so well. My ski hire was also more expensive per-dollar than going to the place directly which I did once my 3 day rental expired and I switched equipment.
So I don’t forget I’ll leave myself a little marker here. 160cm ski’s, 8.5 US boots and release tension setting 8.
Return trip
We said our goodbyes to James who was still in hospital and attached to lots of medical equipment and to Jim who would be his entourage home now Warren had hassled the insurance enough to get them to do something other than say "yeah it will be fine". As he pointed out walking into a hotel and saying "the insurance is paying for this" doesn’t elicit a "that’ll do nicely" response without paperwork or something.
The return trip was much shorter than the one out there and we were able to fly from Jackson straight to Atlanta which cut out another flight entirely. Alas the Delta transatlantic flight was much more crowded and too cold to sleep even with the paper thin blankets they provided.
It was with little surprise that I fell asleep quite quickly when I got home having left Jackson at 11am on Saturday and arrived home 2pm on Sunday after a brief Q&A with the people at Guernsey customs.
Sleeping when I got home was, of course, the stupidest thing to do because it meant a whole night of sleeplessness followed by a day of sleeping.
The joy of time-zones.
[)amien
Adventures in Jackson, Wyoming (part 1)
Once a year I head out with a bunch of friends for a week of winter sports. This year my snowboarding buddies and I (a skier) decided to skip the unfriendly European slopes and flip over the Atlantic to Jackson, Wyoming in USA for a whole 10 days of slope mastery.
Getting there
As always our first flight landed us at Gatwick. One overnight stay led us into flight 2 to Atlanta, Georgia via Delta Airlines. The flight was a whopping 9.5 hours but luckily quiet and under booked. If they hadn’t smashed the handle on my new luggage I might have given Delta a full 5 stars.
Things got exciting at US customs when the customs officer said "Come on little buddy" to a friend ahead of me. At that point all sense went out the window and was replaced by uncontrollable giggles and a bout of amnesia as to what exactly I’d come to do in the USA. Thankfully I’d already written out all the details on the Visa waiver form and despite a few stern looks and harsh words was let in. I guess terrorists and illegal immigrants don’t break out in a laughter attack at customs checkpoints.
Tired and dazed we boarded another 4 hour flight to Salt Lake City and then a quick 1 hour to Jackson itself where we finally met our Inghams rep Nicki – imagine a Scot with an American accent…
Man down
During our first day my friend James had a nasty fall off his snowboard that left him with a very painful wrist. As the day went on we found out it was dislocated and fractured and he was soon hospitalised.
As the week went on he’d go through three operations, have a metal plate put in his wrist and require a skin graft which would leave a massive red square of bare flesh on his leg.
To make matters worse he wouldn’t be able to join us on the return journey home and one of us would need to stay out a little longer to bring him home once the doctors think he’s ready.
Travel insurance is of course invaluable when this happens but phoning them up and making them sign forms when drugged up on morphine leaves a lot to be desired.
[)amien
A German Christmas
This year I broke with my life-long tradition and spent Christmas not at my parents house with my family but with my girlfriend and her family in Germany.
The flight there was uneventful but dull thanks to Aurigny’s one-flight-per-day to Stansted at mid-day. This means 5 hours + of milling around. Thankfully Stansted isn’t quite as bad as I recalled and there are a few book and game shops to browse around in and I managed to keep my shopping down to a mere 3 books… Shame I already had 3 in my backpack.
After the introductions and a good nights sleep I put on my best "oh please" face and Clarissa drove us to Media Markt to see if they had Xbox 360′s in. Unsurprisingly they didn’t so we headed into Nuremberg to check out the shops and experience the Christmas market.
Having spent hours exploring the streets and stores of Nuremberg on a previous trip I stopped by EB Games in the mall and quickly acquired one of the two 360 core’s they had in stock as well as a wireless controller, Project Gotham 3 and Need for Speed Most Wanted. The box weighed the same as a small child but alas was not equipped with legs and so we dropped it back off at the car before my knuckles reached the floor.
The Christmas market was very atmospheric and the white lights the Germans favour over the English disco-fever multicolour bonanza felt less tacky and helped keep the descending chill of sunset at bay for a few minutes longer. We ate hot waffles and caramelised nuts whilst wandering around the multitude of stands before my feet eventually protested to further activities and we headed wearily back to the car.
Back at home we played a bit of 360 (I’ll post more on this in a future post) where I found that while the console and PGR3 will auto-switch to the language my NFS Most Wanted was decidedly German only and Clarissa had to help me every stretch as my German currently consists of telling people my stomach is empty or that I have hiccups.
We met the morning with tragic news… Clarissa’s parents had set-up the Christmas tree in the lounge where the only TV in the house and my 360 were. This meant after weeks of waiting to get one I would now have to wait 2 days before I could get back into the lounge to play it!
We had Christmas shopping to do and some friends to visit and between those two events I sunk into The Time Travellers Wife (a very good read so far and a similar core to something I had in mind a while back). Clarissa’s father had taken the plunge and installed a wifi ADSL connection so I kept up with emails and repeatedly checked for my assignment score.
On the 23rd we had a mini-grill/fondue night with friends where we ate lots and played some games. Unfortunately my German is still minimal despite evening lessons and Clarrissa’s help and her friends were only occasionally speaking English so the night went by with a rather detached feeling.
The 24th here in the UK is Christmas Eve, generally people rush around getting the final gifts they need for people before retiring for a few drinks with friends or family before a big meal and gift exchange on the 25th. In Germany the gifts and big meal happen on the 24th.
Clarissa’s parents cooked a fabulous dinner which we ate with her sister and brother-in-law and we all exchanged gifts. We even got her brother-in-law and father to have a quick go on PGR and NFS respectively with… well, mixed results.
Boxing day was a quiet affair but we took in some snow and a meal at a Chinese restaurant before packing as much as we could into our suitcases, grabbing 3 hours sleep and setting off at 4am for our flight back which involved an even longer sit at Stansted, falling asleep in departures, a nice sandwich at Pret and some woman throwing her coffee over my 360′s box.
Damn Sony fan girls.
[)amien