Grumbling about travel has become a social-media and conversational staple. The world is overcrowded and too hot, airports are awful, flights get delayed or cancelled, service is un-obliging, and hotels and restaurants never seem quite up to standard. These may sometimes be legitimate complaints, but the whole of travel gets tainted by association, until it begins to seem like a chore.
Yet, the reality is that travel now has never been easier or offered more choices compared to any other time in human history. We ought to be glad we live in such happy times. We ought to caper in delight at our ability to whiz across the globe in comfort and safety, and access even the remotest places.
The past casts a sentimental glow, and so perhaps we’ve simply chosen to forget all the challenges that travel entailed just a few decades ago. Almost everything about it has changed for the better. We’ve never had it so good.
.. or have we? With mostly national airlines operating in the skies and little competition, route networks were once modest, and airlines could charge what they wanted.
A change for the better came in the 1960s with the likes of Southwest Airlines in America, and in the 1980s in Europe, when Irish carrier Ryanair started flying. Generations of discount airlines began making air travel much cheaper. Ryanair now flies more than 50 million passengers a year on 543 routes around Europe.
No matter what unusual route you may want to fly, airlines with funny-sounding names (Bu.