Simon Calder: The man who pays his way

Britannia waves the rules

How much is an inflight meal on a charter airline worth? £5. How do I know? Because that is what Britannia Airways will charge for a flying feast from next summer. The UK's biggest charter airline is part of Thomson – our favourite tour operator, at least numerically speaking. Thomson has decided that from May 2003, passengers who want to be served food on board must book the meal in advance and pay £5 extra, in each direction, for the gastronomic privilege. The idea is that customers pay only for the elements of a holiday that they want.

The new system could create problems. Can a parent predict with any certainty how hungry the family is likely to be at, say, 11am on a particular morning a year from now? If a flight is delayed, and you choose to lunch in the rustic surroundings of the Gatwick Village, can you claim your fiver back in lieu of a meal for which you have no appetite? And could the move trigger a boycott of inflight catering? Judging from the behaviour of passengers on a Britannia flight last Monday morning, that is a real possibility.

While the plane was still on the ground at Naples, awaiting departure, the captain made a solemn announcement: a catering error meant the flight was 30 meals short. Would any passenger prepared to forgo their feast, he asked, press the call button? Instantly, the cabin became a clamour of dings and a blaze of call lights, as passengers rushed to decline the repast.

"Ooh, I didn't know our meals were so unpopular," said a member of the cabin crew.

The eagerness to fast in flight was all the more remarkable because no incentive was offered to passengers; indeed, a family that declined the meal was then charged nearly a fiver for a couple of Cokes and three packets of peanuts.

The airline will have saved about £150 on the missing meals, so it could have offered each passenger who declined the meal a crisp £5. But the crew might have been overwhelmed by the scramble for cash instead of chicken.

In The Great Escape, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn and Steve McQueen dream up brilliant strategies to break out of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. The travel agency chain Lunn Poly has borrowed the title of the film, and its theme tune, for an advertising campaign. One aim is to persuade us to break out of our obsession with the World Cup and go on holiday.

Lunn Poly is part of the same group as Britannia and Thomson. All are owned by Preussag, the Prussian Mining, Iron and Steel Company. All are run from the city of Hannover. Amid the usual deplorable anti-German sentiments surrounding the soccer tournament, invoking a Second World War movie is an unusual choice.

Whatever next? Perhaps Thomas Cook, also German-owned, will start using that risible war film correctly reviewed as "a surreal collaboration between actors who can't play football, and footballers who can't act": Escape to Victory.

The victors write history. Britain's low-cost aviation battle has been won by easyJet. Yet even though its £374m bid for Go has been accepted, easyJet continues to berate its erstwhile rival.

The official story of easyJet's growth is peppered with examples of the airline seeking to outwit the company that it now owns. From the outset, the history makes clear that easyJet's founder – Stelios Haji-Ioannou – abhorred the notion of British Airways setting up a no-frills operation. "February 1998: Serve High Court writ on BA seeking an injunction to stop them cross-subsidising their low-cost subsidiary, Go."

"May 1998: The orange boiler suit brigade steals the limelight and most of the publicity by booking seats on Go's inaugural flight to Rome." This was the occasion when Stelios and his colleagues dressed up to spoil the party organised by Barbara Cassani, chief executive of Go. They handed out vouchers for free easyJet flights to bemused Go passengers. By May 1999, easyJet had launched a competition asking for estimates of Go's losses; guess the figure, win a flight. "The losses were a staggering £22 million in its first 17 months," says easyJet.

Later in 1999, "Debonair, the Luton-based low-cost airline, stops trading. Stelios remarks that British Airways has 'blood on its hands'."

All is fair in no-frills wars, but a Go employee who cares to investigate the history of their new owner by logging on to the website may be dismayed by the invective that easyJet still directs at Go.

I once interviewed a celebrity about his travels. His reluctance to say where and, more particularly, when, he would next be venturing was puzzling – until he explained, "I don't want to tell the burglars when I'll be away." Last week in this column I took the opposite extreme, detailing the convoluted zig-zag required of rail travellers hoping to reach the Welsh resort of Pwllheli from London on a Sunday afternoon: four separate trains with slim connecting times, the penalty for failure being a night in Newport.

The first passengers to claim their notional £5 in the spot-the-anxious-travel-editor competition were Philip and Avis Powell. They caught up with me at Shrewsbury, despite the train from their home in Bath having been delayed. The couple arrived just in time for a game of train poker, the object of which is correctly to call the bluff of railway staff and board the right segment of a train. Think of it as the Welsh equivalent of the Radio 4 panel game, "Mornington Crescent".

The rules in brief: players are told that the train on platform three, which consists of six coaches, calls at all stations to Aberystwyth. Anyone heading for Pwllheli must change at Dovey Junction, or so we were led to believe. But at the lovely town of Machynlleth, all hell broke loose. Passengers were told variously that the front two or back two coaches were going to Pwllheli. In fact, neither was correct. When the music stopped, both ends of the train set off: the end pair retreated to Shrewsbury, while the leading couple departed for Aberystwyth, but without Mr and Mrs Powell. They had opted for the middle two carriages, which remained on the platform. I was also aboard, after hearing a rumour that the Dovey Junction change was unnecessary and that this component was heading for Pwllheli.

Luckily, the Powells had a Get Out Of Machynlleth Free card. Station staff phoned ahead to Dovey Junction, the interchange we had first thought of, and asked colleagues to hold the train.

The Railcar Named Pwllheli was, by now, 20 minutes late, but at least on the right track. I spent the rest of the journey enjoying the magnificent coastal scenery and listening to other passengers' tales of missed connections and late-night bus and taxi journeys across mid Wales. The driver made up the time, and I arrived on schedule in Pwllheli – to be met by the local GP.

Despite this long and winding railroad I had not requested a check-up. It turned out that Dr Hwyel Parry-Smith saw I was due to arrive at the time he would be passing the station on his way home from visiting his parents. After a chat, I set off by bike to my final destination, the port of Abersoch. About 10 seconds later, the heavens opened with the kind of cataclysmic downpour that is the preserve of north-west Wales in summer. About 20 seconds later, Dr Parry-Smith pulled up in his car and generously offered me a lift. Meanwhile, the starving Rottweilers at Calder Towers eagerly anticipate the arrival of the next prospective burglar.