offpeakfang

Valletta Harbour as viewed from the Upper Barrakka bastion, May 2024 Norwich is an airfield that I have personally piloted a light aircraft into*, so when I noticed that there were £13 tickets available from Norwich Airport to Malta International Airport - one of the few countries that I hadn't yet visited on my medium-term project to visit every European country - I was delighted to take the opportunity.  Ryanair is well known for using its loss-leader ticket prices as bait to then gouge the customer elsewhere. The real marginal cost of filling a seat on an already-scheduled flight instead of leaving it empty is the sum of £13 Air Passenger Duty, ~£3 extra fuel to lift another passenger's mass into the air, ~£5 per passenger to use airport terminals, and another ~£10 in the cost of the risk of rebooking/accommodation/compensation if flights are delayed or cancelled. Each airline's marginal break-even ticket price is commercially sensitive, but if a flight ticket is less th...

Crossing the Seine by métro, August 2024 Paris is a very extravagant day trip from London, and I'd certainly recommend much more time there for a first-time visitor, but for those who've already been plenty of times then it can be a day trip. About a week before the start of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, I noticed that there were still quite a lot of reasonably-priced tickets still available - including in table tennis, a sport that I do occasionally enjoy and am alright at. So, for €44.50, I bought a ticket to a Table Tennis Team Quarter-Final.  There are plenty of ways of travelling between London and Paris - over the years, I've done all of them. The Eurostar is by far the best, but is expensive at short notice. Flights are usually relatively cheap, but price-inflated at Olympic time and an exceptionally poor environmental choice especially when the overall city-centre to city-centre price is the same as the train and the journey time is in practice slower by air. I'...