[Travel] France’s Plan To Ban Short-Haul Domestic Flights

[Icy Gull]

YQ & ‘Surcharges’ are a fake ‘tax’ by airlines though rather than an actual tax

YQ tax is a fuel surcharge and often more than the price of the ticket! How that is possible is beyond me

Anyway French motorways and train services make Englands feel like a third world country. It is normally a pleasure to drive there and take trains

 

[mikeyjh]

Wow...Where do I start..?

First issue is getting a bus from Bordeaux Airport to the main train station. It runs every hour and "only" nine Euros.

Train goes to Saintes( and god help you if you don't sit in your allocated seat )


The train stops at Saintes and then anything up to two and a half hour wait for a train to St Jean D,Angely ( my nearest town ).


Once there a mere 14 miles to my home. There used to be one bus a week, but sadly not even that now. Taxi,s almost impossible to find.

A total distance of roughly 100 miles and journey time of anything from 4 to 6 hours. ( Assuming you get a lift from St. Jean D,Angely ).

I do like it here, but have to smile at the often distorted view of how "good" people think other countries are.

I think you have to be fair and compare like with like - As with you, I have no choice but to drive 30 mins to my closest station which would also by my closest bus service, it'll then take me 2.5 hours to get to Birmingham, 66 miles away.

It's from there that the chaos starts. Checking up, if I wanted to go to Edinburgh from New St (244 miles) now, it would be £138 one way and take 5 hours (there is a faster train a few minutes later but that is, of course, cancelled). A journey I've done a couple of times is Avignon to Paris, if I wanted to do that journey (350 miles), I can do it in 2 hours 40 and for 33 Euros. There will be many similar examples.

I would add, buying tickets online here is a stressful, deliberately confusing process, it's very easy to end up with the 'wrong' kind of ticket.

Oddly, we tend to drive to Shrewsbury to catch a train to London but buy the tickets from our 50 mile further away station because an off-peak return doing it that way is £40 cheaper than an 'Advance' ticket from Shrewsbury. It's a shambles.

 

[Pavilionaire]

Well done the French for taking a brave decision. I hope other countries follow suit.