Holiday is cancelled!

[gintonic]

Tourism and visiting far away relatives don't fall under a category of "essential" travel.

neither does much business travel.....

I spent about a dozen years of my working life, flying - 40, 50 and sometimes 60+ flights per year. Always east, many many long haul to HKG, India, Africa, Pakistan, China, etc etc (pretty much everywhere east of the uk past Jordan to Japan) and like.... business class was always a necessity on anything longer than about 7 or 8 hours. I could get to Delhi J class. I once p!ssed off my then boss as we were boarding a BA flight to Delhi, when my boarding J class boarding pass was exchanged for an F class. He went mental, embarrassingly shouting etc... that he was my boss and should get the upgrade. As it happened I got it as a crew member recognised my frequent flyer status - and bumped me. I think it was my 6th visit to India that year.

Anyway after about a dozen years, and being asked to hot foot it to Delhi from Lagos!! I decided enough was enough. The straw that broke me - was on a return from a 3 month trip, was my darling wife booking a 5* J class trip to HKG, Singapore and Bali.....when all i wanted was a camping trip to Scotland.

I gave up flying for work (re-oriented my career), returned to tolerating long haul flying for holidays - luckily my airmiles could be spent on J class tickets....but in the end, i learned to hate flying and aeroplanes...I could tolerate a flight to Europe these days - we go to Spain or Portugal..... But if i can help it airports are a thing of the past for me.

I feel very privileged to have visited so many places (many very unusual destinations) and managed to take time off in many of those locations.

 

[ks.234]

I'm not sure if you have taken offence at my comment but it was made in good faith. I'm not suggesting the event didn't occur but that I'd expect a cause other than overbooking owing to her being turned away at the gate. Perhaps they discovered late on that some of the seats were unusable for some reason?

My apologies, Mother, Father and G/daughter now at destination after a stressfully night booking alternative flights, hotels, baby supplies etc etc. Sorry for rushing to judgement

K

 

[Richard Lines]

neither does much business travel.....

I'd be intrigued to see an analysis or breakdown of the necessity of much "business" travel in the modern era.

Unless we took a considerable backward step in the seafaring world like increasing trip lengths (which happened a lot during the pandemic) and people want ships to do what ships do then we need to fly. There are moves afoot to make larger ocean going ship's autonomous but I feel it is a still a few years away yet. Specialist purpose vessels will always need real people.

Regards

Richard

 

[zarniwoop]

My apologies, Mother, Father and G/daughter now at destination after a stressfully night booking alternative flights, hotels, baby supplies etc etc. Sorry for rushing to judgement

K

No worries.

 

[lawrence001]

i have seen this on Easyjet before a few years ago. A missing cabin crew member, meant they could only fly with three cabin crew instead of four. Thus a reduced passenger capacity. In the queue i was in, they were offering money to come off the flight.

I don't think they know the law then (or chose to break it in order to fly) as it's the number of seats rather than passengers for whatever reason, which is why they are taking seats out of their planes.

 

[lawrence001]

You are going to have to fight tooth and nail to get compensation for anything these days.
I can’t even contact BA to discuss matters, I think they could afford at least one other person to help the poor sod they currently have manning their vast banks of phones.

But it's a package tour which should be covered by ABTA or whoever.

 

[Bart]

But it's a package tour which should be covered by ABTA or whoever.

Well I hope for DV’s sake it’s that simple.

 

[Joco]

The trope that these Business trips were essential for building relationships and trust were, with exceptions, just an excuse for getting away from the office and visiting foreign climes were baloney? Perhaps nowadays, phone calls and new style Team calls are now sufficient for.most overseas comms and fulfil the latter without the need for air travel?
If so, then the major collapse in Business travel will certainly cause a significant rise in the lower Classes of travel.

 

[cutting42]

The trope that these Business trips were essential for building relationships and trust were, with exceptions, just an excuse for getting away from the office and visiting foreign climes were baloney? Perhaps nowadays, phone calls and new style Team calls are now sufficient for.most overseas comms and fulfil the latter without the need for air travel?
If so, then the major collapse in Business travel will certainly cause a significant rise in the lower Classes of travel.

I am living this world right now. Like many companies and businesses especially in B2B relationships, we relied hugely on F2F contact with customers and internal contacts. We had to learn to become fluent in remote communication via Teams and Zoom during COVID. Could we do it? Yes we could. Is it as good as F2F? Hmmm, mixed but overall no I don't think so. For an established relationship yet you can carry on for a while with minimal to no impact but creating new relationships and challenging negotiations, virtually impossible to do it effectively and it is much harder work.

We will be doing less business travel for the next couple of years for sure but that is being driven more by budgets more than desire. Nothing but nothing beats the clarity of sitting in the same room as someone.