Go Consumer: Ronan McGreevyargues that travelling by ferry is infinitely more pleasant than by air - particularly if you have children with you
THE PUBLIC ARE mad as hell. How long more are they going to take it? Airlines, airports and Government are playing a dangerous game. They have calculated that however much we may be annoyed at sneaky charges and travel constraints, our anger will be trumped by our desire to get from A to B as quickly as possible.
The imposition of a €10 tax on almost all airline travel is based on that premise. The Government has watched as the airlines have continued to soak their passengers with ever more outrageous and shameless charges. The public grumble, they swear never again and then they dutifully pay the baggage charges, the "payment-handling fee", the "airport check-in fee", the "priority boarding fee", the "infant fee" and all the other charges.
Airline passengers are soft targets and don't all the parties that fleece us just know it. Passengers, they surmise correctly, pay up. Airlines don't deserve our respect or our custom anymore, but get it anyway because passengers feel they have no choice.
What if there was a choice? Three times in the last year, we, as a family, have taken the ferry and driven to London, twice with Irish Ferries on its high-speed Jonathan Swift service and once with PO overnight to Liverpool.
The principal reasons are cost and convenience. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the low-fares, high-charges airlines don't like families. Families have the temerity to want to sit together - for which they now must pay - and the baggage and payment handling fees affect families disproportionately.
Taking an infant, a car seat and a travel cot will add €80 to the cost of travelling with Ryanair or Aer Lingus. With a ferry, you pay the fare and the only other charge is the cost of petrol. A ferry journey to London for a family of four costs the same as an air journey, even allowing for a €1.99 air fare each way. When the price of car parking at Dublin Airport and car hire at Stansted are factored in, the cost of flying is doubled.
Travelling by ferry is an altogether more pleasant experience. You turn up a half-an-hour beforehand, queue for a short time and get on the ferry. There is space for children to run around and the staff do not look like they are overwhelmed and overworked. Critically, you can believe your holiday starts on board. The road journey is a long one and the M25 is not for the faint-hearted, but there is a sense of having really travelled.
The ferry companies have had a hard time in recent years with the onslaught from the so-called "low fares airlines". They have not lost the respect for their passengers because they still need it. In contrast, the "low fare airlines" have killed their own raison d'être with their mounting extra charges.
The Dublin-London route is the busiest in Europe and the second busiest in the world. Most of the 4.4 million people who fly between the two cities don't consider the alternative of driving to the city because of the time factor involved.
A journey from Dublin Port to London takes around 10 hours - a half-an-hour queue to embark, two hours sailing, 15 minutes disembarkation and seven to eight hours driving depending on what part of London you are visiting.
The equivalent journey by plane takes between five and six hours when you factor in all the delays - the flight itself has now become only a small part of the journey. The delays in parking in the long-stay carpark, the journey to the airport, the interminable check-out and security queues and, on the other side, waiting for baggage, going through passport control and getting from the airport to your destination all take their toll.
The difference in time is about four hours, significant in terms of a weekend journey, but not for stays longer than that. For cities in the north of England, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, the ferries can compete on time as well as price.
A new book, Flight-Free Europe, illustrates how high-speed rail links are now making rail travel a viable alternative when it comes to time as well as price. The high-speed link opened up at St Pancreas Station in London last year has put journey times to Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels within two-and-a-half hours, Cologne within four-and-a-half hours and the south of France within seven hours.
By 2010, there will be 6,000kms of a high-speed rail network across Europe. Ireland, for obvious reasons, is not connected to this grid, but there are proposals to build a tunnel under the Irish Sea from Holyhead to Dublin and another from the Institute of Engineers of Ireland (IEI) for a tunnel between Fishguard and Rosslare with a high-speed rail link between Dublin and London.
Such tunnels sound preposterous in the present economic climate and, indeed, the IEI does not believe they will be built before the middle of this century - if at all.
• Ronan McGreevy travelled as a guest of Irish Ferries.Flight-Free Europe by Time Out is £14.99.