There's First Class air travel, then there's..

..business class, premium economy and of course our old friend economy.

Did you know there was also a bog-class option?

I just hope the poor chap had something to read

4 holiday horror stories...

..by real travel writers. Not just parvenus & upstarts like your humble narrator, these are people who go on holiday for a living and know how to do it properly.

Still they endure mystery car lockouts, near-fatal poisonings, near-death bus rides and a mugging followed by a white knuckle hitch-hiking experience.

These are people who are trained to go on holiday properly. And some of them nearly died.

What chance of survival do you think you have?

Hot News: Half of all air accidents happen on landing, says survey

I guess the other half of accidents are due to planes are just crashing into the air then.

I shouldn't keep picking on air travel though. There are plenty of other terrible things to mention about holidays. It's just that the people that own airlines and airports seem to be so very good at making very large and amusing public mistakes. Like making public what an absolutely parlous state all of their planes are in.

Picture of the Day

Making maximum use of increasingly oversubscribed runway space
On the upside, wider choice of in-flight movies. As long as you're willing to watch through the window.

One more reason not to use aeroplanes

Tramps sleep in them.

I mean, apart from the fact that he could have been a bomb-crazy terrorist, eeuuuuwwww!

Air France pilot ‘showing off to boy’ has near miss at 33,000ft

No mention is made in this story of whether he actually asked the young lad if he liked gladiator movies, or whether he'd seen a grown man naked, or even whether he was a very tiny terrorist.

Still. We'll be a lot less bored next time we fly, knowing that the pilot can be talked into doing stunts for our amusement.

Tragic Travel stories: Now officially flavour of the month

This terrific bit from my Times colleague (and fellow John Murray author) Chris Ayres reiterates many of the points made in my book but, predictably, more succinctly and in a slightly funnier way.

This paragraph gives you a good sense of where Chris stands on the whole 'booking a holiday based on some vague information found on the Internet' caper:

These aren't easy times for holidaymakers, that's for sure. With jet fuel now more expensive than liquid plutonium and skin cancer practically a certainty unless you encase your entire body in concrete, more is at stake than ever. And yet there is so much information available on destinations, you need to book a holiday just to do the research necessary to book a holiday.

Of course, my book is still the only place to find lots of lists of great things you can only do at home, stuff about dangerous fish, and some vaguely libertarian musings on drug abuse &c. Sensibly priced too, at a mere £7.99