You don’t have to love the budget airlines to find them useful for travelling in Europe. Since I belatedly discovered them I’ve become a habitué and fly to and from Italy several times a year. At first it was from Stansted to Rome Ciampino which receives Ryanair, easyJet and others, then Bristol which is closer. Recently Thomsonfly began cheap flights from our nearest airport, dear old Bournemouth International (as it grandly calls itself), to Pisa, and what an old-fashioned pleasure that is. The terminal is small and staffed by friendly people who’ve yet to become disillusioned by handling large numbers of travellers. The man checking our boarding passes actually wished us a good trip. I was so shocked by this courtesy that I forgot to buy The Spectator from the bookstall. The departure lounge was small and light, a simple Portakabin-type structure just yards from the aircraft. There was none of the bossiness and offhand rudeness you find at the wasps’ nests of our larger airports. Selfishly, we’re just hoping that the airline will one day fly to Perugia, our nearest airport in Italy. It’s odd that no airline goes there direct from Britain as it has two universities, one for foreigners (Iain Duncan Smith was there briefly) and is just down the road from Assisi, the haunt both of pilgrims and tourists.
Actually, it was while sitting at Ciampino in February reading the worthy but dull International Herald Tribune that I realised that ‘old Europe’, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s apt phrase, was doomed economically. I’d thought this for some time but when I read that the EU Commission had decided that airlines should pay compensation to passengers for certain delayed or cancelled flights I had to conclude that the Eurozone had had it.
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