Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

If I'm sounding just a little bit odd, there's a good reason for that.

It is just coming up to 2 o'clock in the morning here in Montreal.

I was due into Montreal Airport at 1115 last night.

But in a move which I think makes this absolutely the worst flight of the year so far,

I am still sitting on a rather cramped commuter jet, CRJ 900, which is completely full, about 60 people or so on board.

And we landed late, about two hours, ten minutes late.

And for the last half hour we'd been waiting on the ground for the ground crew to get here

and for them to get the jetway to work.

Apparently the jetway is approaching the aircraft.

Why we simply couldn't walk down the steps I do not understand.

And unbelievably, there has been in this whole sorry saga no apology or explanation at all about what is happening. It all began last night in Chicago,

what should have been a very easy early evening flight. It turned out not to be. There was an

unexplained delay of about two hours. And then nothing I mean I've flown in the

Soviet Union quite a lot when that was a going concern and frankly you've got

much better customer service there and probably a better explanation of what is going on.

I must give great credit though to everybody else who's on this flight because

even though it's 2 o'clock in the morning, even though we're nearly three hours late,

even though there's absolutely no certainty about how anybody is going to get to their final destination.

At this time of the morning, everyone is being very nice about it.

I have no idea how they do it, but hats off to the Canadians.

However, no hats off at all to Canada.

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