JFC Travel Blog

AZ201 is Alitalia’s second flight of the day to Rome and departs at 06:50. The options for getting to the airport at this time are limited. I aimed to get to the airport before 05:30 to ensure I had enough time to clear security.A few options are available at this time of the morning. The most obvious, a taxi, is also very expensive. National Express dot2dot offers a door to door service for only £16 at the moment (usually £20) for those who live in or near Central London (or staying in a Central London hotel). This would usually be the best option but I was trying to do this trip as cheap as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

So far most of my comments about NXEC have not been positive. However, recently things have been looking up. The most important development is the introduction of a loyalty scheme to replace GNERtime. The qualification total is higher, £1800 over 3 months as opposed to £1200 with GNERtime and the exact benefits have not yet been finalised but the website does state the following:

By becoming a member you will be able to enjoy some excellent benefits, including complimentary First Class travel, offers on food and drink, access to our First Class Lounges, and more.

So we can expect benefits similar to what GNERtime had offered. Whether they’ll be as generous we’ve yet to see until the full details are announced.

It is good to see NXEC taking the first steps to reward their frequent travellers. If the scheme compares favourably with GNERtime I will certainly use NXEC more frequently.

UPDATE: It’s not so positive after all.

In May I mentioned my frustrations with NXEC and the decline in service quality over the months since they replaced GNER. Now the NXEC commuter blog has admitted something that I knew they would eventually, that things were much better under GNER. Let’s just face fact, commuting to London by any means sucks, the transport infrastructure is not designed to comfortably cope with the current peak time demand, but GNER did try better than most to offer a decent service. The GNER commuters from Peterborough would almost certainly had it worse if they lived elsewhere and had to commute with a different train company. I had a nightmare few years when I had to commute from Surrey on South West Trains. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night thousands of people took part in a party to commemorate the last day that alcohol was allowed on the tube. I didn’t attend the party but as I was working late yesterday I decided to grab a few cans before jumping on the Hammersmith and City line home, then I got a bit more curious and made a bit of a diversion. Read the rest of this entry »

I believe that most people who voted for Boris Johnson did so not because they thought he’d make a good mayor but rather they believed he was the only option to get rid of Ken. Will this be a mistake? Personally I don’t think Ken did too bad a job, he was never a brilliant mayor but was better than most other mainstream politicians. Read the rest of this entry »

I have to say that overall I’m not too happy with the first few months of the National Express East Coast franchise. In fact, the only good thing I can say about them is that gner.co.uk redirects to their website so I don’t have to type the ridiculously long nationalexpresseastcoast.com if I’m on a computer where it’s not bookmarked. I suspect the people at the NXEC commuter blog are wishing for a return of GNER, their blog was originally set up to criticise GNER and they were happy that they lost their franchise. Perhaps now they can admit that GNER wasn’t all that bad really So far I’ve noticed the following on my travels with NXEC… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s usually when things go wrong you realise how bad an airline really is, but a cancellation of a recent Air France flight really raised my opinion of the airline. I had a tight connection and was worried I’d miss the flight from Charles de Gaulle but upon arriving at the airport I discovered the flight was cancelled. So I headed straight to the lounge where they gave me boarding passes to the next flight and because they were unable to provide me an aisle seat in economy I was given an upgrade too. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written a lot about NXEC recently but I’ve not yet came to a verdict on whether they’ll live up to GNER’s standards. Today marks the launch of National Express East Anglia which is just a rebranding of the franchise formerly known as ‘one‘. In this case it’s no change of ownership, just a simple rebranding. As a name anything is an improvement over ‘one’ but I don’t know why they didn’t just use their official name London Eastern Railway.

Read the rest of this entry »

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the only problem I had with GNER’s new online booking engine (which has continued to be used by National Express) was that it did not accept American Express. I was promptly told that support for Amex was due to be added in January and, as promised, it arrived towards the end of the month. Read the rest of this entry »

The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) has created a blog in an attempt to justify their ineffective security theatre. They have a small number of bloggers writing articles and moderating the comments. Although they seem to be avoiding most of the big questions they still appear to be allowing most criticism in their comments. A quick look through the site shows how unpopular they have become with the travelling public. I look at Flyertalk’s security forum will show you why.