Steve <stevepatria...@hotmail.com>

As an Ango Austrian Society we should perhaps take note of just how
hard it is actually to travel between the UK and Austria. Outside
London, Austria becomes one of the remotest countries in Europe!

It is curious that Austria - UK routes are so poorly served,
especially from outside the London area. With the uncertainties over
the future of Sky Europe and the route Manchester to Bratislava we are
likely to see the situation worsen again. Manchester once had two
airlines flying to Vienna - BA and Lauda - now there is none!

There is a fairly good routing form Vienna to most major UK airports
via Munich - but the Vienna to Munich leg is notoriously subject to
delays. Although Munich airport is excellently run and every effort is
made to enable passengers to access connections, sometimes things go
wrong. Duesseldorf, Hamburg and if pushed - Frankfurt - all offer
oportunities for connecting flights (though Frankfurt demands an
additional security check with resultant queuing and UK passengers are
isolated at a gate in a crowded basement with no facilties - it is a
herding cattle philosophy at Frankfurt).

Swiss via Zurich is just about the worst imaginable experience. It
begins with an inability to check in online because of the
inadequacies of the Swiss computer system. This is further exacerbated
by the fact that in Vienna they are also unable to print a boarding
pass for a flight out of Zurich. Ask the kindly Lufthansa counter
staff and they will phone thorugh and check you in from Zurich by
phone but still you have no boarding pass. They will also tell you
they get several complaints a day about Swiss check in. In Vienna
don't try to use the machines as they don't work with Swiss, you have
to join one of those interminable queues instead.

Further once in Zurich, long queues for passport control and the
demand to repeat security procedures with queues backed up on
staircases and escalators, makes the whole process nightmarish. One
simply cannot recommend anyone routing through Zurich flying to or
from Vienna and going out of Schengen. Flying via London is always
miserable because of the perils of Heathrow - but it is particularly
dismal if your connecting flight is with BMI outward as they will not
check your luggage through unless you have a single through ticket.
Flying into UK, Austrian are much more helpful and will check luggage
through to any UK provincial airport. But depart with BMI and you have
to allow an hour in Heathrow to collect luggage and then time to
transfer and check in. In short - travelling to Vienna from the UK
outside London can be an all-day journey.

Yet Manchester airport has flights to almost every major European city
- and certainly to the capitals - although Vienna is impossible, you
can easily fly to Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and every major German
city.

Vienna is the cultural capital of Europe - maybe it says more about
the UK than about Austria that actually getting there is such a
challenge!

Austrian Airlines offer excellent links to Eastern Europe - and a
superb daily flight to Cyprus - a great alternative to charters, but
until we can get some decent flights into Vienna the market remains
closed to the UK. Even London to Vienna is at best, satisfactory, with
some new airbuses, but some flights are operated by Tyrollean with
relatively small aircraft making the flight pretty cramped and
uncomfortable.

So, why not turn to rail? Well Austrian railways have just stopped
their overnight car service to and from Duesseldorf. The only services
out of Vienna now operate to Italy and the Balkans or internally to
Feldkirch. There is now no overnight train to Austria from the Channel
or even form Paris or Brussels. So Eurostar is not much help either.

Basically Austria is pretty isolated from the west - and try getting
on the Munich - Salzburg motorway any summer weekend and you won't
find that a happy experience either. From the East, oddly enough the
links are better - direct flights to most major East European cities,
direct rail out to Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Roumania and Bulgaria,
plenty of trains to Italy, cheap flights to Roumania and Italy - as
well as all the usual holiday hot spots.

So my fellow members - should we not campaign to open up routes to
Austria? Or maybe we should maintain the status quo - keep it the most
difficult country in Europe to access from UK - and hence keep it to
ourselves!