Back in April, I thought it was about time I had a holiday, I haven’t had one for over five years. I wanted to support Wales’ women football team in their match against Greece and experience my first away international football match. I wanted to be a good boy and do it by train, with nights in Paris, Torino and the ferry from from Bari to Patras. It sounded wonderful. However after looking into it, it proved too expensive for my meagre means and my plans were shelved. Then last month I decided to go for it and do it on the cheap, which means flying. It is ridiculous facing Climate Change that if you’re poor, this is the only way to do it.
So next week I’m going to Greece. I’m doing this from my home in Wales, which I’ve come to understand entails unconventional means. I’ve described journey planning to people from mainland Europe and North America and they’ve found the idea baffling, so I thought I’d describe it here. Wales is challenging to get to if you’re coming here on holiday, so it’s also challenging to get from. When I lived in Scotland, I lived with a Canadian from Niagara Falls, Toronto. We ‘raced’ home one Christmas, he got home two hours before me, despite a transatlantic flight.
The issue is airports. Wales has one international airport, near the capital Cardiff. It’s nice, but relatively poorly served so serves as a connecting airport for the South and takes about three hours to get to from where I live by car, or about five hours on public transport. You can also access most of the major UK airports in about 4-6 hours, in a wide arc from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, London (5), Bristol and Cardiff. This is the point, there is no local airport for me. So 6 hours to get to the airport, 2 hours to check-in and pass security and passport control, plus allow an hour or two for the inevitable delays on British public transport/ road network. Which means you have two options: Travel to near a UK airport the day before and stay in a hotel and catch an early morning flight or travel on the day and catch a late afternoon/ evening flight and stumble late into a hotel in the destination airport city before travelling on. The former is usually the best option, but does mean paying for a hotel in the UK. I used to do this for work for London meetings, travel down the night before and find an affordable (sub £100 a night) outer London hotel and tube to the meeting in the morning.
I was once with a travelling companion and our flight back to the UK involved a tranfer in Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. Our luggage didn’t make the transfer. It was hilarious to be at Heathrow airport in London giving them our addresses to courier our bags to, Wales and the Isle of Mull, Scotland. All the profits from our long haul flight gone due to not being able to transfer two bags from one aeroplane to another at the same airport in two hours!
Having to decided to travel you need to book flights and find convenient accommodation near airports. Most booking sites ask you ‘What airport are you travelling from?” “Er… any UK?” nope, not an option, this could have been really tedious. Fortunatly there is one saviour, www.skyscanner.net. This site allows you to find flights from any UK airport. Most of the best value flights are, oddly, from the London airports. I’m going to watch women’s football, Is the stadium in Athens? Thessaloniki? Patras? (the three largest Greek cities with major international airports) Nope, Volos, a small city in the middle of mainland Greece. So this enabled me to search for a flight from ‘Any UK airport to any Greek airport’ .This is apparently not how most people book flights, but I’m Welsh, this is how to do it!
I’m on a budget, and the best combination this time was the evening flight. This means leaving my local train station on the first train of the day, 5.30am to catch a 4.30pm flight. I’m allowing time for some delays but this is still worrying and stressfull as it involved 5 trains, during a summer of rail strikes. I hope I’m going to be lucky. Also, very bizarrely the train to the airport and back costs as much as the flight to Greece and back. Before you give me sympathy, I live in rural Wales, a paradise, we save so much money and time partly by being on a far end of the UK transport network, but that’s for another post
The trip back is less stressful but more of a headache. My flight back arrives at 12.10am, which means paying for a hotel airport to stumble into at one on the morning, to be followed by a day of over six hours on those five trains to get back home.
It’s insane that a large percentage of this holiday budget is paying just to get to and from airports, which is kind of the point of this post. I would heartily recommend checking the travel to and hotel prices for each airport and see when it’s worth paying for a more expensive flight route to save money. It was a London airport for me this time. Organising hotels and travel in Greece has been so much easier and is more fun anyway. I just wish the UK part of travel wasn’t so expensive and such a pain in the bum.
I’ll report back on how it all worked out upon my return.
Squimple 