In 2003 GNER surpassed my expectations by a long shot. GNER customer services by this time had already impressed me on a number of occasions but this time customer services and the on board crew had really gone out of their way to make my parents anniversary special. Read the rest of this entry »
In most of the UK the trains look a mess thanks to the way the franchising process works. When a new company takes over a franchise it always takes a few years before all their trains are rebranded. In many cases it’s even longer, in London you still often see trains in the old British Rail Network SouthEast colour scheme or the colour scheme of the past franchisee, many times you see a mix of colour schemes over various carriages on the same train. It doesn’t do a good job of setting brand identity. Read the rest of this entry »
The White Rose was originally a GNER service between London Kings Cross and York stations operated with trains leased from Eurostar. The leaflet GNER produced promoting this service said that they planned to eventually run these services north of York. This never happened, perhaps it was because of the sharp bend on the approach to Newcastle may have been awkward for such a long train. Read the rest of this entry »
Standard Plus was GNER’s answer to what airlines call Premium Economy. The GNER Standard Plus product basically offered first class service in a standard class seat. Standard Plus was initially introduced on the London – Leeds services, it was then extended to the services towards Newcastle but was relatively quickly withdrawn on this route and finally scrapped altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
Up until 2003 GNER offered a guest ale as part of their on board menu. The guest ale was always priced at £2.50 a bottle which was the most expensive beer on board at the time. The pricing was convenient as you (still) can buy buffet vouchers at GNER ticket offices which cost £7.50 for a £10 voucher and £4 for a £5 voucher effectively meaning you could buy 4 for the price of 3. It became an even better deal once I qualified for their loyalty scheme GNER Excel (later replaced by GNERtime) which gives you two drinks for the price of one – combined with a buffet voucher you could then effectively get 8 beers for the price of 3. However, the 2 for 1 deal was good enough on its own so most of the time I didn’t bother with buffet vouchers anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been known for a few months that GNER has been planning to roll out a new and improved online booking engine, but what came as a surprise to me was they have rolled out an entirely new website today despite their franchise coming to an end on the 9th December. Read the rest of this entry »
This year I’ll be in Munich for Oktoberfest from the 28th September – 1st October. I didn’t book the flights until a month ago and as you can probably imagine it was very difficult getting reasonably priced tickets was almost impossible. Even the budget airlines such as easyJet and Air Berlin were charging over £250 at this late stage. KLM was slightly cheaper than this but still well over £200. Surprisingly I managed to book flights on Alitalia for about £165, the drawback is the flight is from Heathrow Terminal 2 and via Milan Malpensa possibly two of the worst airports in Europe. On the plus side it’s more miles for me as Alitalia is part of SkyTeam 
It’s been a while since I’ve travelled GNER but I’ve always considered them one of the better train operators in the UK. I missed the news that National Express had been awarded the new franchise in August. The new franchise will start on 9th December 2007.
My main concern for this franchise is that National Express seem to have made the same mistake in bidding for the franchise as GNER, that is they’re paying too high a premium to offer services on this line. GNER were to pay the government £1.3 billion to run the franchise until March 2015, according to the BBC, National Express will be paying £1.4 billion to run the franchise also until March 2015. Therefore National Express are paying more for a shorter franchise as the franchise ends 10 years after GNER was given the renewed franchise rather than 10 years after National Express takes it over.
GNER struggled with these high payments to the government and I can’t see how National Express are going to do any better unless they sacrifice service quality or they raise fares. No doubt if fares rise it’ll be the flexible tickets that suffer the most, one of the things I like about rail travel is its turn up and go nature but these days rail companies are concentrating too much on getting the advance purchase tickets down in price and raising the flexible ticket prices.
The term ‘mileage run’ is often used on frequent flyer sites such as FlyerTalk, a mileage run is when someone books an itinerary for the sole purpose of earning frequent flyer miles, usually to reach a higher level of status in the programme and to gain the associated benefits from this. Some frequent flyer programmes such as Flying Blue also allow you to earn status based on the number of segments flown rather than the total mileage flown. This is the ideal way of earning status for those who regularly fly short haul flights. Every year my travel patterns get me enough segments to reach gold level comfortably but I usually fall a few segments short of reaching platinum. This day trip to Italy was designed to fix that.
KLM Cityhopper flight KL 1340 from London Heathrow Terminal 4 to Rotterdam. As someone who enjoys flying from London City it may seem a bit odd that I decided to take the KLM flight to Rotterdam from Heathrow rather than taking the numerous VLM flights from London City. The reason was purely for miles, if I was not a member of Flying Blue I would have taken the VLM flight from London City (KLM does not fly to Rotterdam from London City). My Flying Blue gold membership does make Heathrow less of a pain, at least when travelling KLM. Read the rest of this entry »