JFC Travel Blog

A weekend in Glasgow means that I’ll be travelling NXEC for the first time since they’ve taken over the GNER franchise. Money is tight after the Christmas so I’ll be travelling standard class. It’s frustrating to see how much the prices for flexible tickets has risen over the last few years, I wanted to travel sometime after 3pm on the Friday - the cheapest flexible return for that time of day is £158.50 return (£126 single) so I decided to book a cheap webfare instead for £40.50 single on the 15:00. As there’s engineering works on the East Coast over the weekend my return on Sunday was either going to be by plane or Virgin Trains, so for the first time ever I decided to give easyJet a try.

Why easyJet? Well I can’t stand Virgin’s Pendolino’s in standard class (not tried first yet) - the trains are poorly designed, hardly any luggage space, often overcrowded because they have too few standard coaches and too many first class coaches and the seats don’t seem as comfortable. There was a Virgin First Class advance fare which was only slightly more expensive than the easyJet ticket, I was tempted to take this and experience Virgin First Class but before I booked I did a little research. According to the Virgin Trains website service in first class is non-existent on weekends. Well in their words “On weekends and bank holidays, First Class customers will receive complimentary tea, coffee, water and biscuits, which are available to collect from our onboard Shop in coach C“, so unlike GNER (and I assume NXEC) there’s no at seat service in first class on a weekends, to make things worse their shop isn’t even located between standard and first so you have to walk through part of standard to reach it (not good if train is crowded).

I considered three options for flights. BA flies to London City from Glasgow and if I wasn’t on a tight budget at the moment I would have chose that, BMI fly to Heathrow and easyJet fly to Gatwick. As Gatwick is slightly easier for me to get home and easyJet was half the price of BMI at the time of booking I decided to give it a go.

I’ve long been a believer in rail travel offering better quality and value over domestic air travel, however, with prices constantly rising I can see myself flying more often on trips to Scotland (I still think the train is less hassle for shorter journeys though).

Hopefully NXEC will impress me enough that I will still want to use the train at least for journeys as far as Edinburgh. (Air France is running a treble miles promotion in January for flights between London City and Edinburgh).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 1:29 am and is filed under Misc, GNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.