Simon Calder: The man who pays his way

Russian roulette Ryanair-style

Subsidies benefit all kinds of travellers. Even though you might blanch at the fares charged by Caledonian MacBrayne or NorthLink for ferries from the Scottish mainland to the Western and Northern Isles, they would be higher still were it not for the state's subvention. Many rail passengers on Eurostar pay fares well below cost thanks to the generosity of French taxpayers, who are saddled with 62 per cent of the loss-making Channel Tunnel train company. And across in America, the Heartland Flyer doggedly trundles between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City each day with fewer passengers than an American football team, thanks to the political will and financial muscle of the state of Oklahoma.

Although it hardly flies – the average speed for the 200-mile journey is 40mph – the Heartland Flyer is a brute of a train. A huge silver locomotive hauls three passenger carriages, each about the size of a wingless jumbo jet; the middle even has an upper deck. This is the only carriage whose doors are unlocked. From the guard's caboose trailing along at the rear, the conductor explains why: "There's only a few people riding tonight, so we're only using one car."

Staff outnumber passengers, once you take into account the catering crew ("The buffet is downstairs; you must wear shoes.") No need for the announcement that you sometimes hear on British trains in the rare event of there not being a queue; on the Heartland Flyer line, there is never a line.

* Approaching Ardmore Oklahoma, another announcement: "We don't know of any passengers wanting to get off here, but we're going to stop for a short break. Ardmore will be the one and only opportunity to have a smoke, so get your things ready." At $27 (£18) for a trip longer than London to Manchester, and with rather more comfort, the Heartland Flyer's losses must be horrendous. Perhaps it is time for Ryanair's Michael O'Leary (inset) to take over.

* Did you hear the one about the British airline, the Dutch airline, and the Irish airline? The British carrier was Air UK, a fine airline that, for some years, was Stansted's sole raison d'être. Then the Dutch took it over, turning it first into KLM UK, then – when the no-frills competition from Go and Ryanair got too hot – transforming the airline into Buzz, low-cost in name if not in nature. Yellow paint does not come cheap. This week, it was revealed that in the three years of Buzz's existence, KLM's shareholders have been subsidising each Buzz passenger to the tune of £10. Buzz has been losing money like there's no tomorrow – which, sadly for 100 employees, is the case. The person who made the numbers public was the man who had just paid what he described as "petty cash" for the airline: Michael O'Leary, chief executive of Ryanair.

* "Petty cash" means less than £1 for each of the four million passengers that Mr O'Leary plans Buzz to fly this year. The trouble is, no one knows exactly where they will be going. More than 50,000 passengers who had booked on the planned routes from Bournemouth to France and Spain will be going nowhere. The Dorset base has been unceremoniously ditched.

Customers such as John Young (see Open Jaw, below) will get a refund, or a place aboard a replacement flight from Stansted operated by Buzz or Ryanair – but where to, precisely, is a mystery: "We won't know what they are until the end of February," says Mr O'Leary.

Anyone who calls the no-frills airline Buzz, or who logs on to its website, is invited to book flights this summer from Stansted to a range of airports in Europe. Half of the advertised destinations are going to disappear, but not even Mr O'Leary knows which half. Ryanair executives, not noted for the subtlety of their negotiating skills, will spend the rest of February talking to the airports that Buzz serves. The aviation asset-strippers will negotiate from a position of strength: "Give us a better deal or we'll stop flying here".

Until Ryanair concludes those negotiations, Buzz will continue to sell flights – even though it has no certainty about what it will actually fly: "Anyone who's made a booking on routes that have been cancelled will get a full refund of the fare they paid or a flight on another Buzz or Ryanair route. Nobody will suffer any loss."

But travellers who book early do so to save cash or to make sure that they get the flights on the days they want. By early March, when the shrunken network is revealed, passengers seeking alternative flights are likely to encounter higher fares and scarce availability.

COMPLETE THIS well-known saying or phrase: "Buzz passengers will be incandescent with..." No marks for rage, fury or anger. The person who began this sentence is none other than Mr O'Leary. He completes it with the word "joy", reasoning that Buzz's fares will fall as a result of the takeover: "For the last two years, they've been paying an average fare of about €60 (£40). From 1 April, they'll be paying fares of €40 (£27)."

A bold promise, considering each of those £40 fares actually cost Buzz £50 to provide. But when Mr O'Leary became deputy chief executive at Ryanair in 1991, the airline was hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. "I thought it would be a miracle if we were still in business three months later," he says.

Twelve years on, Mr O'Leary intends to repeat the trick, spreading his version of joy across the world of Buzz. But the passenger who books between now and the end of February will be playing Ryanair's version of Russian roulette: you pay your money and take a chance that your flight is not one of those for the chop.

* Rewriting the schedules is something for which the company formerly known as Airtours has some experience. Five years ago, the package holiday firm tried to persuade us that Costa Rica was the new Costa Blanca. After a few months of poor sales, the Central American republic was unceremoniously ditched.

Airtours has become MyTravel, and has sprouted its own low-cost airline: MyTravelLite, which does approximately to the English language what Airtours did to the Costa Rican economy. Like any self-respecting new airline, it came up with an imaginative new destination: Rimini. The Italian resort enjoyed a brief summer's fling with Ryanair some years ago, then vanished from the schedules. Suddenly, the lucky citizens found they were back on the map, albeit connected with Birmingham, not London.

The Adriatic evidently does not have the appeal of the Costa del Sol. The Rimini flight has been erased, and in its place MyTravelLite offers yet another flight to Malaga, which these days is awash with cheap flights from Britain.

"It wasn't a decision I took lightly," says Tim Jeans, the airline's managing director. "We were selling very strongly to Malaga, and I don't have any more capacity. So I had to pull Rimini." He says that "hundreds, not thousands" of customers have been affected, and that the cancellation was made well in advance of anyone travelling. They have been offered their money back, or a transfer to a flight from Birmingham to Pisa.

The train journey between Pisa and Rimini is a kind of Italian roulette: it involves traversing the country on three different trains, taking at least four hours.

TALKING OF lotteries: the Millennium Commission has chipped in £8m of Lotto cash to the Bath Spa Project, about one-third of the cost of revitalising the ancient spa. Visitors to the World Heritage Site will therefore receive an indirect subsidy from lottery-players. But when, exactly, will this celebration of the year 2000 be ready?

The Bath Spa Project was initiated by the Romans a couple of millennia ago. The rejuvenated relaxopolis was due to open more than a year ago.

Even four months ago, prospective visitors were assured: "From November 2002, no one will want to leave the city without experiencing the rooftop thermal pool as well."

They would be getting chilly by now. "All the ingredients for success are in place," says the Bath Tourism Bureau. But the assemblage of five historic buildings, plus a new Nicholas Grimshaw structure with that open-air pool on top, still shows no sign of opening. Yesterday, all its website would reveal was, "The current estimate for achieving completion of the construction of the Bath Spa Project is 11 April 2003." Even then, it will take days or weeks before the Spa is able to open to the public.

Until it does, the city's only railway station, Bath Spa, must be renamed Bath But No Spa.

* "Stansted Airport" was both a misnomer, and a lottery last weekend. A snow flurry of the kind that causes barely a murmur in Kajaani in Finnish Karelia (see opposite) brought Britain's fastest-growing airport to a standstill for 18 hours and caused delays all weekend.

Thousands of unlucky air travellers found their flights cancelled. Some may fondly have imagined that the fare paid will automatically be refunded. After all, with the airlines' sophisticated information databases, this should be a trivial matter: they know how much each passenger paid and which credit or debit card they used. So surely the airline just presses the big button marked "refund" and gives everyone their cash back? No: Ryanair insists that each passenger must phone to ask for reimbursement. If you have the misfortune of being a customer from continental Europe, you must call a number in Dublin, at your expense, and speak in English.