This last week or so, which was really too long to leave the blogsphere, has been pretty hectic.
On a professional note: here at Holiday Extras we’ve been continuing with the updates and changing products over to their new looks.
On a personal note: I took a slightly interrupted service Eurostar over to Paris for a weekend of French cuisine, culture and other Parisian pursuits.
On a travel news note: LOTS happened.
Let’s start from the almost-personal issue of the Eurostar service issues. This is something regular readers will know I’ve been keeping up with due to my oft-use of the speedy link to the continent. After a fire in the tunnel back at the start of September the service was halted for a weekend and then gradually began operating at a slower pace.
Through September the services were reduced in frequency and lengthened in journey time. What it meant for travellers was a bit of a wait to get into the tunnel and a bit more time while you’re down there. Once the train gets out of the hole though it’s usual speediness is resumed. To be honest it wasn’t that annoying and was still preferable to the ferry+train=loooooong journey that could serves as alternative.
While I was speculating that, come the end of September, normal services would resume it appears otherwise. Eurostar will be offering 93% of services, about one less a day with variations on usual stops, and the altered time table is expected to go into 2009.
More bad news for the service today though as strikes in Belgium mean that Eurostar will not be operating any trains to Brussels on Monday. Nor will there be a service from the UK to Lille on Monday 6th October either.
Ryanair have also been affected by strikes this week, shame, though of a different nature. They’ve had to cancel 25 return flights to and from Birmingham due to strike action at Boeing which have delayed the delivery of new aircraft. No flights on 21 routes in and out of the hub from October 24th to October 28th. If you were unlucky enough to have journeys booked for these dates give ‘em a tinkle and you’ll get a full refund.
Enough of the gloom, eh? There’s some good news in the travel world too. There’s expansion news for Premier Travel who have opened seven new Travel Centre branches.
Also hoping for expansion is Hilton. They have hotels not just trashy waste-of-press blondes named after my favourite European city and now they’re hoping to knock up 150 new properties in the next five years in locations including the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.
With an eye on adding 1,000 hotels to their international chain in the next 10 years it’s got to mean a bit of work for a lot of construction companies and Leisure and Tourism graduates in need of a reception desk to stand behind. Right? Too harsh a joke?
Airlines…. Well, lately that word and all that it suggests has usually been followed by news of a collapse. However, I have some positive news. Jet2.com – who, if you remember, recently announced flights to one of my desired destinations – have announced they’ll be dropping their Barcelona route. BUT, they have started two new routes with services to both Dubrovnik in Croatia and Cornwall in, well, England.
Keeping the expansion news rolling just a paragraph longer, work has begun on a £45 million expansion project at Bournemouth Airport. The work on redeveloping the terminal is underway and is expected to be completed within a few more weeks. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know there was a Bournemouth Airport but, then, there’s a lot of things I don’t know.
When I know more things of note you can bet your London to Brussels Monday 6th October Eurostar tickets on my placing them here.
In the meantime I’ll leave you with one of my sights from the weekend. I’ll admit I didn’t take this as I failed to take a camera with any battery charge.
Where is it? What’s the film? Answers on a postcard.
