A volcano with a name that sounds like a Lord of the Rings character has caused travel chaos, and I can report on it first hand. Last Saturday I was due to fly back from a family skiing holiday in the French Alps. Needless to say I didn’t.
The British Airways website wouldn’t let us rebook – hardly surprisingly as BA didn’t know when it was going to be flying again – and I couldn’t get through on the phone. But a friend of a friend knew someone who owned a travel company, and knew it had a tour bus in the region. A speculative phone call secured four of the seven spare seats on an overnight drive to Calais and a ferry crossing to Dover. Another family took the others. The coach even dropped us at Heathrow – it was going on to Birmingham – so we could pick up our car. From going nowhere on Saturday morning we were home on Sunday night. But the best bit of this story is that the tour operator only charged us £50 a head for the whole journey.
The media is awash with stories of naked profiteering, yet this firm was happy to just help us get home and cover its costs. It could have asked two, three, four times as much but didn’t. Me, my wife and two children feel very, very lucky indeed.
Breakdown Cover from 
