Tours And Travels In Delhi

However good a holiday you have booked there is first the small matter of getting there. Travel any distance overseas and this will inevitably involve a flight. Ignoring the hassle and tedium that combine to create the horror of the airport experience, what about the plane? The airlines are always at pains to tell us how wonderful the experience of flying is. Flight announcements as you leave always end with the words, Enjoy your flight, and, though some airlines have the good grace to say that they “hope” you enjoy it, so many things conspire to render this about as likely as winning the lottery that the words never ring true. After all, how can several hours crushed in a tiny seat inside a metal tube, being dehydrated, watching a cut-down version of a film of which the best review called “dire” and eating dinner at breakfast time be in any small way pleasurable?

You have a significant choice when you make a flight booking. Will you turn right or left as you enter the plane? Bearing in mind that on long haul flights you need a mortgage (if you can get one) even to fly economy, and that business class needs a budget like the GNP of a small country, the choice may very well be made for you – by your bank manager. If financially you can run to the upper classes however it certainly helps a tad, but even then there is one obstacle to a smooth flight that is difficult to control.

What’s that?

It is who sits next to you.

Problem neighbours

Think about it. Half the population seem to make unpleasant travelling companions: the overweight, intoxicated, and those with verbal diarrhea or flatulence; also insomniacs, fidgets, babies and small unruly children, and many more. Watch the scene in any airport lounge. No one makes goo-goo eyes at babies or pulls faces at other people’s children, especially in these days of reducing parental discipline. Me, I just hope some kind of seat selection god exists and pray silently for any obnoxious ankle biter to be at the other end of the plane from me; or, better still, left behind. Perhaps the airlines could clamp down a little: I am sorry Mrs Stephens, but little Wayne is too noisy and will have to be checked into the hold. I once saw a sign in an airport saying “Parents’ Room”, maybe it was so that parents could hide away as their children roamed the airport wreaking havoc.

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