EasyJet treats Paris-Toulouse passengers to a 10-hour journey

Another tale of travel woes in France and one in which you pays your money and you takes your chances perhaps.

This time around though it's not the weather that's solely to blame and it doesn't involve Air France-KLM or the state-owned railway SNCF.

Instead it's the British-based lowcost airline easyJet and the 10 hours it took for passengers aboard one of its flights to make a trip that normally takes a maximum of one hour and 30 minutes.


It happened last Sunday as the 141 aboard the 'plane made the journey from the French capital to the southwestern city of Toulouse.

A two-hour delay in taking off because of maintenance problems certainly didn't put passengers in the best of moods, but worse was to come.

As the 'plane approached its destination the captain refused to land because apparently conditions were too windy and instead redirected 240 kilometres away to Montpellier, where passengers then boarded buses to complete their journey.

"Weather conditions" coupled with "technical problems that didn't affect flight safety", according to the airline were the reason for the diversion, but passengers aboard the flight weren't so sure they were being told the whole story.

"When we arrived at Montpellier I overheard one of the ground staff talking via two-way radio with a colleague saying that the 'plane wouldn't be taking off again," Luc Mousseaux, a passenger aboard the flight told BFM TV

"That makes me wonder if the weather really was the reason for not being able to land," he added.



That's a view backed up by an aviation expert who, according to the national daily Le Figaro, said the wind had not been particularly strong around the city on the afternoon in question but admitted that the decision about whether to land was entirely at the captain's discretion.

As is company policy, easyJet did offer any compensation apart from refreshment vouchers and passengers are not entitled to any reimbursement because, as far as the airline is concerned, it met its obligation of ensuring passengers arrived at their destination.

Toulouse or 'La Ville Rose" as it is nicknamed is one of France's largest cities. It's home to one of Europe's top rugby teams, and of course is the base of Airbus.

It's also a major destination for holidaymakers in summer as it's very much the gateway to the whole of the southwestern region of the country.

The Paris-Toulouse route is a busy one, and the city is one of the destinations for the Navette or shuttle service operated by Air France from both Orly and Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.

In total the company operates 30 scheduled flights from both Paris airports combined each day and during peak hours there's a 'plane leaving every 30 minutes.

Not surprisingly perhaps easyJet has also grabbed a piece of the action with five Toulouse-bound flights leaving Paris every day.

Break open the Bolly to fight the flu

"Feed a cold and starve a fever" goes the saying familiar to many of us.

Regardless whether it's true or not there is apparently a way to treat cold and flu symptoms that might - to say the very least - appear somewhat unorthodox, if not a little decadent.

With this season's number of flu cases in France now having reached the epidemic threshold as defined by the Groupe régional d'observation de la grippe (with the entirely appropriate acronym of Grog) it comes as a timely reminder perhaps that there is a way to beat the bug.

Well at least, according to the French health website Top santé.com, there's a surefire trick for dealing with the symptoms and aiding recovery.

It's a recipe, in all senses of the word, plucked from the pages of Remèdes de famille : Se soigner malin et naturel de A à Z by Henry Puget.


And it involves imbibing a glass of the fizzy stuff.

That's right, Champagne, albeit warm.

Just before bedtime apparently, you should pour one glass of bubbly into a saucepan, add two sugar lumps and bring to the boil.

Allow it to cool before drinking and drift off into the Land of Nod.

At this point you might be thinking a number of things. Firstly that Puget is something of a "Quack" out to make a quick Euro or two.

But rest assured he's a bona fide general practitioner living in Paris who, as the blurb tells us, "has been treating patients and successfully offering advice for the past 30 years by combining high tech with natural therapies."

And to cast aside any doubts you might have about the efficacy of the recipe (bearing in mind that it's not so far removed from a traditional rum-based grog) it works because "after drinking you'll sweat a lot throughout the night as the chemical action of the components of champagne mixed with sugar neutralise toxins from the cold or flu."

So if you feel a slight tickle in the throat or an aching in the joints, you know what to do.

Don't plunder the medicine cabinet for a bottle of linctus.

Instead follow the "natural" way of Dr Puget's advice and do as Ab Fab"s Edina and Patsy would without any hesitation.

Break open the Bolly!

A bottle of Bollinger (image from Wikipedia, author - Manchester2k6

Cheers.

SNCF report on "Hell on wheels" delay but not everyone is happy

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet is not a happy bunny - at least not when it comes to France's state-owned railway company, SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer français).

The French minister of transport (among other things) has threatened the company with sanctions and said that she had not been told the whole truth about the reasons behind that infamous 12-hour plus delay on the overnight train from Strasbourg to Nice and Port Bou just after Christmas.

The 4295 night train (screenshot from TF1 news report)

You might remember the so-called "Hell on wheels" trip on December 27 which saw the 600 passengers on board the 4295 night train endure a delay of 12 hours - the same length of time as the journey was supposed to take in the first place.

SNCF apologised (what else could it have done), offered all passengers a full refund and a free return ticket and announced that it would launch an internal inquiry and release a report on what exactly had caused the delay.

It has now published the 13-page "mea culpa", admitting that given the weather conditions and the number of personnel and logistical problems on the night in question, the train should never have left the platform at Strasbourg.

And at the top of a long list of reasons for the delay according to the report, which SNCF helpfully publishes in French on the English-language version of its site (grab a dictionary perhaps if you want to read all the details) is the time it took to find a replacement driver during a stop just 150 kilometres into its journey in the eastern French city of Belfort.

It was "a failure of planning" admits the report, a simple statement that has earned SNCF the wrath of Kosciusko-Morizet or NKM as she's commonly called here in France.

"That's not what I was told at the beginning," the minister for ecology, sustainable development, transport and housing (to give NKM her full title) said in a radio interview on Tuesday.

"When I was given the reason why it took so long for the replacement driver to arrive (he had to travel almost 350 kilometres from Lyon to Belfort) I was told he couldn't get there on time because of the weather."

As far as NKM was concerned she had been lied to (she used stronger words, but there might be children reading) and she was now going to "find out who was responsible for the error in planning and look into whether there would be sanctions to be imposed."

NKM wasn't the only person unhappy with the report.

Not surprisingly perhaps the unions were less than tender with SNCF's explanations with Sud-Rail saying in a statement that "The report is nothing more than hot air."

And a regional branch of the passengers association, Association des Usagers des Chemins de Fer de la Région Ouest (Avuc) has launched a petition "Fed up with SNCF".

So a bad PR end to 2010 for SNCF has hardly been helped by an equally miserable attempt to offer a mea culpa at the beginning of 2011.

Things can only get better - surely