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...

Japan Rail Pass My week in Japan was the part of my trip that I most looked forward to. Having arrived at Shimonoseki station off the ferry from Busan, South Korea, my first task was to collect my Japan Rail Pass. The rail pass could easily have been delivered digitally, like how InterRail passes in Europe can now be instantly delivered as a QR code on an app, but instead the purchase process was: Buy the pass online through an online travel agent (charging its own commission) A few days later, receive a physical paper voucher with a reference code on it through (compulsory extra-paid) international post Bring the voucher with me to Japan Go to one of a small subset (!) of Japanese rail ticket offices to have my passport photocopied (onto paper, with other paper forms that the ticket office bloke had to spend a while filling in and stapling) to then exchange the voucher for a physical ticket.  Even if it needed a foreign ID, I don't see any good reason why there can't ...

Cité de Carcassonne, the very archetype of a medieval fortress. December 2019.  Ryanair's way of negotiating cheap handling fees at small airports is simply to threaten to leave: they are often the only airline serving the airport, so if they leave then the airport will simply cease to exist . Carcassonne is a good example, where it becomes a much more significant tourist attraction simply because Ryanair has cheap flights there - there are so many things that cost more than our £10 tickets from Carcassonne back to Stansted.  Most importantly, it opened up an opportunity to play Carcassonne (the board game) in Carcassonne (the medieval fortress city from which the game is named), and spend a day thinking about trebuchets along the way.  View of the fortress from the Old Bridge.  The fortress itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is one of the best-preserved Roman citadels in Europe. Founded in the Gallo-Roman period in the 3rd Century, it has been a defensive f...

Liechtensteiner Alps, March 2020 We had originally planned a hiking-through-microstates holiday where we would fly to Ancona, Italy, then go hiking through San Marino. We would then take a sleeper train from Bologna to Salzburg and connect through to Feldkirch, whence we would hike through the whole width of Liechtenstein. That was the plan, until Covid-19 hit Northern Italy and this whole chunk of the journey fell through.  But Liechtenstein and Switzerland were still fine at this point, and I had already booked a day pass for the Swiss railways for the journey, so at the last minute I booked a cheap flight from London to Geneva to spend the day seeing the scenery through Switzerland and Liechtenstein.  Southwold, Suffolk from a light aircraft.  My Saturday morning that week started with leaving home at 7am, and included two local buses, a cross-country flight in a light aircraft, another bus, a train, a rail replacement bus service, the Tube, a visit to the British...