Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.

For the first time in several years, I managed to fly out of Perpignan airport straight to Belfast.

It was my first time on BMIBaby, the discount airline arm of British Midland.

As discount airlines go, they seem to have gotten several things completely wrong but hopefully they will continue in the same vein for quite some time.

For a start, they allow 20kg in checked luggage although they did get it right by charging to have the bag checked in. They didn’t even have a weight limit on carryon luggage (although there is the usual size limit).

Then they went on to be friendly and even displaying a caring attitude towards the passengers. You just can’t legitimately call yourself a discount airline and do stuff like that.

But they didn’t stop there. Those with small children (and they sensibly limit to those up to around 6 years of age) get priority in boarding. They even try to allocate a window seat as the little guys usually like to see what’s going on. Yeah, seat allocations!

Finally, you can even get airmiles on the flights (well, BMI’s version).

We’d a notionally connecting flight in Manchester but as I wasn’t too sure how long it was between flights, I booked a slightly later one. Had I been a bit sharper in getting off the previous flight I think they’d even have let me go on the earlier one but I just missed it. 

Overall, as you can probably gather, I was very impressed with them. Aside from the lack of a weight limit on carryon luggage, none of the little things which they do really cost them any money but together they add up to making the flight a much more pleasant experience.

No, I think BMIBaby will definitely have to try harder or their “discount airline” label will just have to be taken off them.

In case anyone from BMIBaby reads this… a big thanks to Sue on the 1030 flight from Perpignan to Manchester on Thursday!

Something of a packed day which kicked off with us having a test drive of the Suzuki Ignis this morning and ordering it. In theory it should arrive sometime in the next six weeks or so but then this is France so it could be somewhat longer.

The afternoon seemed pretty full as we’d pretty much all of the rooms to make up yet again. This is supposed to be a fairly slack week but it hasn’t been so far.

On the blog front, I updated the software that does the emails to subscribers to something a lot more flexible. The first fruits of that are that you won’t get the emails in the “sponsored” category (ie the paid ones) and will get the emails once per day rather than as they’re written. If you register as a user, you can change that.

Anyway, must head on as I’ve to pack for a daytrip to Belfast. Yeah, crazy, I know but it can’t be helped.

Clearly it’s normally cheaper buying stuff online where no delivery is involved so, yes, buy your software online if it can be delivered via download. However, for big stuff it’s not necessarily the case that buying online is really cheaper.

Take our planned new car for instance….

The list price is EUR 13,000, the online price is EUR 12,000. However, few people pay the list price and in fact we have already gotten the offered price down to EUR 12,600 and hope to get that down a good deal more.

Even at that price though there’s little real difference from the online price. For one thing, if we get the online car delivered, they add EUR 600 ie the price would be the same. Even if we collect it ourselves that costs a fair bit as it’s in Paris and we’re in the south of France so if we drive up to get it that’s EUR 50 each way in tolls, plus EUR 50 in petrol each way, plus at least three hotel nights at around EUR 50 each: total, a minimum of EUR 350 and more than likely over EUR 400 but even that is before you count at least three days worth of meals which could easily add another EUR 200.

OK, so a car is a pretty big item to deliver and therefore it’s none too likely that you’ll find them on Amazon anytime soon but even for relatively light things the postage charge can exceed the savings that you make online unless the discount is very substantial.

As you may recall, GAN insurance announced that our car was considered a write-off at the end of May.

Just this morning we have received the bill plus reminder that we’ve not paid the insurance for this year yet.

No, we don’t have a car at the moment but in France that doesn’t mean that you can get out of paying the insurance unless you’ve notified the insurance two months prior to the renewal that you don’t want it anymore. Yes, that is two months before they’ve told you how much it’s going to cost so the net effect is that it’s impossible to shop around for insurance in France.

In fact, if we don’t tell them by recorded delivery letter, in about two or three weeks we will receive notice that they are taking us to court for not renewing the insurance. A few weeks after that the letter giving us the court date will arrive. You might think that “obviously” they can’t win in court but in fact they can under French law. However, should it get that far, we won’t be using French law but rather European law which over-rides many French laws including this particular area of French insurance.

In that this appears to show that they haven’t acknowledged our claim, I’m tempted to ask them for a document saying that and insure our new car elsewhere.