July 8th – Navigating flight cancellations
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yet more carnage of airline schedules on Sunday, with British Airways and easyJet both cancelling 32 flights in and out of their main hubs, London Heathrow and London Gatwick respectively.
Booking a flight departing early in the day is a good plan – but if your trip is grounded your airline must get you to your destination as soon as possible.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon, Calder speaking to you from an interesting location, I think anyway, which is 100 metres south of the Swiss-Italian frontier. I've been battling my way across Europe despite all the many storms which caused such chaos yesterday. |
| 0:24.1 | And that's what I want to talk about in terms of flight disruption. |
| 0:27.8 | Just to give you a picture, I'm in a lovely shady cafe by what used to be the main road |
| 0:33.9 | going from Italy into Switzerland in the town of Kiyaso. The border post, even though both |
| 0:42.3 | countries are in the Schengen area, is quite heavily staffed at the moment, cars and people |
| 0:47.6 | being checked. But the reason I'm here is because, well, I was hoping to get further into |
| 0:53.9 | Switzerland yesterday, |
| 0:55.0 | but I simply couldn't. And that was because my flight on whizair from the Greek island of |
| 1:00.8 | Zachinthos to Milan was two hours late. That was due to basically thunderstorms, keeping the airport |
| 1:10.1 | closed for a long time and on top of that |
| 1:13.6 | i got to italy and found there was a rail strike on i tried blah blah car but that didn't work for me |
| 1:21.9 | that's a lift sharing service i booked a total of three rides the The first two said they were cancelled. They weren't |
| 1:29.6 | making the journey anymore. The third one simply didn't respond. So I managed to find a train |
| 1:34.7 | running which got me as far as the border, but no further I should be carrying on from here. |
| 1:41.5 | Meanwhile, though, I've been seeing what's been happening in the rest of Europe, |
| 1:47.0 | and in particular the UK, in terms of high numbers of flight cancellations. We've had |
| 1:54.0 | British Airways at Heathrow and EasyJet at Gatwick canceling mostly at very late notice last night. |
| 2:02.8 | A total of 64 flights between them, and that represents upwards of 10,000 people waking up |
| 2:09.9 | where they didn't intend to be this morning. |
| 2:13.0 | I want to look at why that has happened, and it's basically,, well EasyJet is based at Gowick, |
| 2:18.8 | the busiest single runway airport in the world, and British Airways is based at Heathrow, |
| 2:24.8 | the busiest two runway airport in the world. |
... |
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