The party was on the Circle line and for those who don’t know, the Circle and Hammersmith and City share lines through Central London so I could see what was going on in the stations. Most people seemed very good natured, just having a laugh and drinking. I was not happy with some of the heavy handed policing I saw when going through stations, I noticed the police removing people who seemed drunk but were not causing any trouble, this caused a lot of boos from the crowd. It must be very hard to police events like this but considering the occasion the police need to be careful with their actions.

The main stations were very busy, the platforms were packed but most of the drinkers were following the advice of the organisers and only boarding the rear two carriages of the trains. The BBC described the outcome of the party as ‘mayhem‘ but I think 17 arrests doesn’t seem that much considering the many thousands that turned up. There was always going to be troublemakers, and hopefully those who assaulted the staff are sitting in a cell right now, but from what I seen everything was in good nature.

So was this party irresponsible? No, I think it was a great success. There’s always going to be people who’ll spoil it, but considering the amount of people who turned up most were just enjoying themselves and not causing any trouble. Trouble caused by a minority of people should not influence policies that affect many people. Banning alcohol in the tube won’t solve anything, those who cause trouble when drunk will just drink before getting on the train.

Boris was elected on a platform of lies and unimaginative policies. The lies being the routemasters, Boris claims that he will introduce a modern version of the routemaster that combines the open platform for easy access for the able bodied and step free access for the disabled. There’s no way he’s going to introduce a bus with an open platform, health and safety law would almost certainly not approve a bus with an open platform in this day and age. The best we can expect is maybe a few extra heritage routes (short routemaster services aimed at tourists). Remember Ken Livingstone had originally said he’d save the routemaster before he got elected in 2000 but the buses were scrapped due to a combination of litigation (people suing when they’d get injured jumping off a moving bus) and disabled access. Personally I don’t think Boris even knew what a Routemaster was before he started the election campaign.

His other policies weren’t particularly innovative and are just the usual things any new politician would say but without substance. More police, ban booze on tube, weed out corruption, etc. I predict no real changes to the amount of crime in the city, higher bus and tube fares and no new routemasters.

• Less reliability, I’ve already made 3 delay claims for compensation since the new franchise started.
• No loyalty scheme - although it was nice that they honoured GNERtime until its expiry, there’s no sign of an NXECtime or any other loyalty scheme to replace the GNER scheme. In fact they seem to prefer rewarding people who choose to fly with free tickets rather than their regular travellers.
• Fare rises - the price of flexible tickets go up yet again. Train travel is cheap for those who book restrictive tickets but for me the main benefit of the train is flexibility. With the increasing delays and lack of a loyalty scheme it makes the fares look even less value for money.
• Restaurant - my favourite part of travelling on the east coast route is the on-board restaurant. However, a number of trains I’ve been on that are supposed to be running a restaurant have not been running for various reasons (staff shortages, the ingredients are not on board and the oven wasn’t working are reasons that I’ve been given). These things happen, but it seems more frequent with NXEC.
• Total lack of style - we lose the stylish livery of GNER and the attention to detail they had when designing the covers for the on board menus. In it’s place we get ugly grey trains and menus that look like they come from a transport caff. The covers look so cheap but when you open the menu you realise it’s anything but.

So there’s the things I think they do worse than GNER, can anyone think of anything that they do better?

I was only slightly annoyed about the delay because the next flight was only three hours away so I had time to relax in the lounge. The lounge had a massage service which made things more relaxing and after that there was time for a few beers. I was happy with the hassle free means they rebooked me and provided me with a better seat without me needing to make a fuss.

When I returned home I sent a message to the customer services complementing the performance of the staff and their ability to have removed any potential hassle from this cancellation. I was surprised when I got a reply saying that I was also entitled to compensation under EU guidelines due to the cancellation being the fault of Air France. The EU compensation is greater than the cost of the ticket.

So was I lucky or do Air France provide this level of service as a matter of course. I didn’t consider the delay I experienced long enough to warrant such compensation, I was quietly hoping for a few thousand miles although I never asked for them in my letter, but I’m not going to say no to money when they offer it to me. You hear stories of airlines usually dodging their obligations for much worse cancellations and delays so perhaps I just got lucky?

The biggest surprise for me was that they still use thetrainline as the booking engine on the NXEA site despite NXEC using an improved booking engine that was developed by GNER and Atos Origin. It would make sense that if they’re standardising on a brand they’d standardise on the booking engine.

The website also looks different to the other National Express websites. In January nationalexpress.com portal and coach site was redesigned to look like the NXEC website, the layout of the East Anglia site is different.

National Express has the motto: Making Travel Simpler, it seemed like they were slowly starting to reach their goals but first impressions with the NXEA launch suggest otherwise.

As there appears to be someone reading my blog from either NXEC or Atos (the creators of the site) I wonder if they could answer the following questions:

• Will the booking engine be used by other National Express rail operators such as East Anglia (one) and c2c?
• Any plans to make this available to other operators to compete with thetrainline? (National Express used to own qjump but it was merged with thetrainline and sold)
• thetrainline has affiliate links via TradeDoubler which allow webmasters to link to their site and place search boxes on their own pages. Any plans for this? Even without affiliate money some people may want to put up a NXEC search widget on their page.
• For those that Amex support isn’t enough is there any news about support for other cards such as Diners Club?

Whatever the future of this booking engine it certainly helps National Express with their aim to ‘make travel simpler‘.

Flight KQ 103 departs Heathrow Terminal 4 at 08:15 so I decided to spend the night at the airport Hilton which is attached to Terminal 4 by a walkway so no need to mess around with airport buses in the morning. Check-in at the Hilton was smooth, as a gold member I had been upgraded to the club level and had free access to the lounge which had a selection of complimentary drinks. The lounge was closed the next day in preparation for the Christmas holidays so I was given a voucher in the morning for breakfast.

Woke up at 6am, decided on a very quick breakfast and then to drop the bags off at the check-in desks, I’d already checked in online so I’d already chosen my seat. I enjoyed the breakfast, mostly because they had haggis available which is very unusual for what was described as a ‘Full English’ breakfast, perhaps the ‘Great British Breakfast’ would have been a better description. There was no queue at the baggage drop off point and after that it was off to the fast track security lane. I was in the queue for about 15 minutes which is longer than I usually experience in fast track but it was a major improvement over the regular security line. Despite all the signs I forgot to take my shoes off when walking through the metal detector (they only ask you to remove your shoes in London City if they alarm the metal detector) but this was spotted and they had to be x-rayed.

By the time I got through security the flight had started boarding so I decided to skip the lounge even though I may have had time for a quick orange juice. There didn’t appear to be any special line for business class passengers but the boarding process was fairly quick with 4 separate gate agents.

I was travelling business class (called Premier World by Kenya Airways) and I happened to be the first business class passenger on the plane, the blankets, headphones and amenity kits were already placed on the seats. After a few more people boarded a member of the crew came round with some pre-flight drinks. I took an orange juice but there was also water and champagne  (well some sort of sparkling wine) available.

The cabin layout in business class on this 777 was 2-3-2 which is the same configuration that KLM uses. The problem with this layout is that you could get a middle seat if the aircraft is busy and you’ve not chosen your seat early enough - always secure your seat as soon as online checkin opens.

While waiting for the aircraft to finish boarding they played a SkyTeam promotional video (the same one that Alitalia plays on some of their flights), once boarding was compete and doors were closed the crew offered another drink. Once we were ready to leave our parking stand the glasses were collected and the safety video was played, as is common with Heathrow we had a bit of a queue before take off.

TO BE CONTINUED - check back on 9th January for the rest.

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).

Not much is known about the merger yet so we can’t be sure whether the VLM brand will survive or will the airlines operations be merged into that of KLM or Air France. Whatever happens it seems likely that VLM routes will be eligible for Flying Blue miles which will be a great bonus for those who currently fly regularly with Air France or KLM.

VLM offers better service than most other short-haul airlines with a high quality catering offering (by short haul standards), will these be replaced with KLM’s ‘Trattoria’ sandwiches (which are decent as far as sandwiches go but not very filling) or CityJet’s unimpressive sandwiches? As well as better food, cold drinks are served in real glasses and hot drinks in china which is something you do not get on CityJet or KLM Cityhopper.

The high level of service is what has made VLM move from a small regional Belgian carrier based in Antwerp to the largest airline at London City (although as CityJet has larger aircraft they have more seats available). I think it’s important for KLM to recognise that this level of service will be important particularly on routes where they compete with rail travel such as London - Manchester, Brussels or Antwerp. In the past competition between KLM and VLM on the London City - Amsterdam route has made KLM improve its service on this route. Hopefully these improvements will stay as BA are launching a London City - Amsterdam service in 2008, both KLM and VLM offer a better frequency to Amsterdam than BA is planning on offering so BA will have a hard job competing on this route unless they can offer a better service.