2 April 3, 2022The Sunday Times
Travel
WILL THIS BE
THE YEAR OF
THE FLYING
STAYCATION?
T
LETTER OF THE WEEK
I enjoyed your comparison between
the two budget hotel brands (“Travelodge
v Premier Inn”, last week). However, for
dog owners Travelodge is the only choice,
because Premier Inn does not allow pets
in its establishments. Surely the company
is missing a trick here? Might I suggest a
Premier Pooch chain?
Geoff Barton, MiddlesexHaving stayed at hundreds of hotels
across the UK for business, I can firmly
say that Village Hotels knocks
Travelodge and Premier Inn out of the
water for a work stay — I just wish there
were more of them across the country.
Joshua Walker, via thetimes.co.ukI stay in Travelodge hotels a lot, and
in every customer survey I get from them
I moan about paying for wi-fi — I can go
into virtually any pub or café and get it
free, so why does Travelodge charge?
Kelvin White, via thetimes.co.ukFEEL THE BURN
The cost of holidays in the UK is the
reason my children have never had one,
apart from a few days in London (“The
inexorable rise of UK rental prices”, lastweek). Why would we spend our precious
few spare weeks a year going bankrupt in
some rainy overcrowded English town
when the rest of Europe is beckoning?
Jersey Jo, via thetimes.co.ukI let out a two-bed maisonette with
wonderful sea views on the French
Riviera for £110 a night in July and August.
Prices in the UK are insane, as lovely as
some of the places are. Covid measures
drove prices up, but I wonder whether
there will be the demand to sustain them
now that the restrictions have been lifted.
Chat-Bot, via thetimes.co.ukI thought that I would ease myself
into imminent redundancy with a week
in Cornwall in early April — not during
peak season or school holidays there —
but the prices are eye-watering, even for
self-catered breaks. I have researched
for hours online, but it’s difficult to find
much for less than £100 a night. Rory
Boland’s excellent article gave some of
the reasons for this and prompted me to
explore what a foreign break would cost
— a week’s B&B in three-star
accommodation in Turkey with a pool
for £161 each, including Bristol flights.
Come on Cornwall, you are our first
choice, don’t send us overseas!
Corrine Jamieson, DevonCRUISE CONTROL
I have a tip for saving money on a
cruise: avoid the rip-off excursions
(“The budget issue”, last week). Wait forTravel
The best of this
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and commentsYOUR
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BIG
SHOT
Battle of
the budgets
HEAD FOR HEIGHTS
Congratulations to
Graham Rowlands,
whose panoramic
view of the ceiling
at the Medici
Chapels in
Florence is this
week’s winner of
our Big Shot
competition, in
association with
the adventure
cruise specialist
Hurtigruten
Expeditions
(020 3553 9842,
hurtigruten.co.uk).
He receives a
£250 John Lewis
voucher and
makes the shortlist
for the main prizes,
which include a
northern lights
expedition cruise.
Upload shots at
thesundaytimes
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use the hashtag
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travelphotocompFor expert guides
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times.co.uk/travelT
he week before Easter seems
like an appropriate moment
for the resurrection of an
airline. On April 13 the
regional operator Flybe will
roll back the hangar doors at Birmingham
airport for its comeback flight to Belfast.
Reformed and refinanced, if not
rebranded — that livery, below, will still
be impossible to miss — Flybe has been
absent since it went into administration
in March 2020. Now, after being bought
by Thyme Opco,
linked to the US
hedge fund Cyrus
Capital, it is back with
15 domestic routes,
rolling out between
April and August this year.
It has been a tumultuous 25 months
since Flybe was grounded. The pandemic
has wreaked havoc on aviation globally
and there have been plenty of changes
in the domestic market too.
For the big names operating UK routes,
the past two years have been a mixed bag.
Last June easyJet announced 12 new
domestic routes, absorbing links once
served by Stobart Air, now defunct.
British Airways’ recent return to Gatwick
focuses on European destinations,
keeping just two UK routes, to Glasgow
and Manchester, in place. Brexit had an
impact too, with Ryanair blaming the
cancellation of 12 routes — including
UK-only services — on the Civil Aviation
Authority after a row about aircraft
registered abroad. It has been better news
for the Scottish carrier Loganair, which
kept flying throughout the pandemic as
it snaffled some of Flybe’s former links.
From announcing the routes and
opening bookings on March 22, Flybe 2.0
gave itself a little more than three weeks
before take-off. Is that long enough to get
enough bums on seats in its new lower-
emissions Dash 8-400s? We shall see.
It feels as though we’ve been here
before. Like Flybmi, which went bust
in 2019, and Virgin Atlantic’s Little Red,
scrapped in 2015, Flybe struggled to
make the sums add up.
What it and rival low-cost carriers may
have in their favour this summer is
soaring fuel costs. Drive Birmingham-
Edinburgh in a Peugeot 208 and it will
take 5 hours and 19 minutes, and cost
about £37. The same journey with Flybe
in August would take 90 minutes and, at
£29.99, cost 20 per cent less, if there’s
only one of you in the car.
Still, that could leave cash-strapped
travellers facing an awkward choice: fly
and save money and time or take the
more sustainable option. The
environmental toll is, relatively, higher forLAURA
JACKSONCommissioning Editordomestic than longer flights, according to
Dr Steve Smith, director of the Oxford Net
Zero Initiative. “When you’re flying short-
haul, a bigger chunk of your flight is the
take-off, which is the part that burns
more fuel,” he says.
For those in remote areas there’s an
added complication, as marginal lifeline
routes could be axed if demand is low.
Outside London, budget alternatives
to flying are few and far between. “Our
research shows three in five flights in the
UK are over water, and you’re not going
to do those by train,” says Jonathan
Hinkles, chief executive of Loganair.
“When you’re up in the Shetland Islands
and your nearest mainline railway station
is in Norway, it brings home how much of
a realistic option the train is.”
And what of that train travel? There
are some affordable routes in the UK, not
least from Lumo, which started services
from London to Edinburgh
last autumn with tickets
from £20. But overall the
pound-per-mile cost is
ludicrous. Buy an on-the-dayticket from London to Bristol and it can
set you back £119 — just shy of £1 a mile.
Rail travel may not always be as green
as we think either. “If we could have really
good electric train services, as in much
of continental Europe, then that’s a much
lower-carbon way to travel,” Smith says.
“France is very low-carbon, and that’s
mainly down to nuclear power.” About
14 per cent of Britain’s power is nuclear;
in France that figure is about 70 per cent.
Domestic air services are, however,
likely to be at the vanguard of efforts to
decarbonise travel. “It will be easier for
us to achieve that on regional air services,
and the industry is reinventing itself
faster than I’ve ever seen,” Hinkles says.
“That’s because the technology — most
likely hydrogen, but probably electrical
power for some of the shortest flights —
will be available well ahead of our time
frame of being carbon neutral by 2040.”
In a move that angered climate-change
activists when announced in October, air
passenger duty for domestic economy
flights will be cut by 50 per cent next April
to a flat fee of £6.50. Yet Hinkles isn’t
expecting a “bonanza” of cheap seats that
will incentivise people to fly more. “What
it will do is support the continuation of
some thinner rural air services that would
otherwise, because of the increase in fuel
costs, be under very significant economic
pressure and potentially be lost,” he says.Are rising petrol costs and train fares
encouraging you to consider low-cost
domestic flights? Email us at
[email protected] for your chance
to win a £1,000 Oliver’s Travels voucherRail travel may not always
be as green as we thinkughts
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