• family travel insurance for up to two adults and six children, worth around £250 a year according to Sainsbury’s
• no fees for foreign currency exchange
• interest-free cash withdrawals provided the balance is paid in full and on time
• no charges for cash advances in the UK or overseas
• no charges for balance transfers
• double Nectar points on purchases from Sainsbury’s

The card comes with an annual interest rate of 9.94 per cent on purchases and transfers. Brilliant. Sounds wonderful. Where do we sign? There’s only the matter of the devil in the detail:

• not only is comprehensive travel insurance increasingly less of an incentive due to certain bank accounts offering it as standard, but you’ve got to put substantial effort into spending £250 on it, because it usually costs far, far less

• there’s a £5 monthly fee, which adds up to £60 per year; unless you’re travelling several times a year, you’re unlikely to pay that in fees for cash while abroad or exchanging currency

Perhaps you can transfer a balance from a higher APR to Sainsbury’s lower APR, but then you’d probably try for a 0 per cent APR card first. So it looks shiny, and there are those double Nectar points, after all. Oh year, you want to shop there all the time now there’s double points. Odd that.

[MyFinances.co.uk]

Virgin Atlantic had been at loggerheads with the pilot’s union BALPA over the reduction of holidays for pilots, amongst other issues, but the dispute has been resolved and there’ll be no industrial action as a result.

What’s interesting is the view of the union; this is BALPA’s Jim McAuslan speaking about the negotiations:

“Both sides have conducted talks that were frank, to the point and creative. Whilst the issue has created much debate, we are now happy with both the agreement and the ground that has been laid for our future relationship with the company.”

Happy. To the point. Creative. Perhaps Virgin Atlantic really are unlike any other company, or maybe this union goes about business differently. Regardless, paid-up passengers to British Airways are no doubt hoping their dispute will be resolved in a similar fashion.

The airline and union Unite are due to meet again next week to negotiate over cabin crew pay and conditions, with further disruptions to flights threatened if the matter isn’t resolved.

[LiveLeak]

The London Underground, today

If you’re a Londoner, you might be feeling some pain today thanks to the Tube strike. Perhaps you haven’t bothered even trying to get to work, such is your reliance on the capital’s network of underground metal snakes. If that’s the case, you might like to spend part of your day off reading about an email battle between a man and London Underground.

That man is writer Stan Cattermole, or Graham Pond as he was calling himself at the time of the correspondence, back in 2001. Graham was stressed at the time, and sick of the incompetence of the Tube network, he fired off a long, long email of gripes to London Underground. Choice phrases include…

“I was on one of your cattle-truck trains this morning and I screamed.”
“…you are driving me mad, you are bleeding me dry and you are making me want to kill”
“The poor quality of your service is a serious problem and one which sooner or later will lead to violence”

In reply, Graham received some vaguely humanistic replies to his gripes from Patrick Green at the London Underground customer service centre and a vaguely humorous game of email tennis ensued.

That was until Green accidentally replied to Graham while also including a series of emails to his friends and colleagues, all about the ongoing battle of wits he’d been enjoying with the irate passenger.

Graham (clearly a man with too much time on his hands back in 2001) then called out each and every one of them in an email sent to the entire group. Much ignoring, covering up and back-tracking then followed as Graham’s subsequent emails were more or less stonewalled.

That was almost a decade ago, but Graham has only just decided to recount the tale, as much for the amusement of frustrated Tube passengers as anything else. Happily, the post has gone viral and there is talk of the guilty email gossipers involved being smoked out by the good citizens of the internet. The fearsome name of 4Chan has even been mentioned.

Watch this space for further developments – or at the very least have a seat and enjoy some beautifully-crafted complaint emails from a man who was on the brink of cracking up.

There are a couple of potential issues with it. One is coverage; the US is massive, obviously, so check coverage first – Virgin Mobile US is owned by Sprint, who have reasonable data coverage in most major conurbations.

Secondly, the data you buy has an expiry date; $10 (£6.70) buys you 100 MB which must be used with 10 days of purchase; $40 (£27) buys you unlimited data which must be used within one month. That’s not too unreasonable, but it would far more useful if the low tariff could be carried over.

The real issue is the price of the MiFi unit; it’s $149, so roughly £100 – twice the price of 3’s unit. Gah. That’s extortionate for a one-off trip, but then if you’re staying in hotels for a month, it may still work out cheaper than the hotel WiFi charges.

Of course, if you don’t mind hanging around Starbucks all day long like a dickish hipster, then your luck’s in – the corporate coffee chain recently announced that in the US it no longer requires customers to log-in with a Starbucks card and offers unlimited WiFi usage, rather than limit usage to two hours.

Toddlers, it’s time for you to grow up and stand up – if there’s someone around who’s packing an iPad, they get first crack at parking their arses instead of you. They’ll obviously be doing something important with it, like fannying about on Twitter or, or, or… whatever else you can do on the frigging thing.

From Bloomberg

“Why does every plane have two pilots?” asks Michael O’Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair Holdings Plc, the largest low-cost airline in Europe. Wearing sneakers, jeans, and an off-the-rack short-sleeved shirt, O’Leary is pontificating in his office at the company’s headquarters on the outskirts of Dublin Airport.

“Really, you only need one pilot,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek in the Sept. 6 edition. “Let’s take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.” What happens if the pilot has a heart attack? One member of the cabin crew on all Ryanair flights would be trained to land a plane. “If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in,” O’Leary says. “She could take over.”

We appreciate the Sky Marshall is saying the first thought that pops into his skull for the sake of a headline. We get it. We just don’t trust a man who even thinks that sort of thing.

Beyond the 24 hour strike which starts on Monday evening and continue throughout Tuesday, there are three further 24 hour strikes planned – on 3 October, 2 November and 28 November. In a separate dispute, members of the TSSA union are taking industrial action on Tuesday, and depot works on the Northern and Jubilee lines are striking for 24 hours from Sunday evening onwards, which is also likely to cause problems. Excuse my French, but for fuck’s sake, people.

What does it all mean for you? The walkouts begin on Monday from 5pm but are staggered, and not all drivers are members of the RMT union, so there should be at some trains running throughout the 24 hour period. However, any significant reduction in services will create pandemonium at rush hour, so London Underground has announced a list of additional services on major buses routes and river crossings.  There’s also the new cycle hire scheme, but expect that to descend into playground fighting.

There’s more information on travel alternatives on the Transport for London website.

First off, they’re pulling out of Belfast City Airport (aka The George Best airport with jaundiced views out of the windows). So says Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary in a press conference held at the Europa Hotel in Belfast.

He says: “It is very disappointing that the promised runway extension at Belfast City Airport has still not materialised more than three years after we opened the base at Belfast City. It makes no sense for Ryanair to continue to invest in Belfast City, operating restricted routes with less than full payloads between Belfast and other UK airports unless there is clear and immediate prospect of Ryanair being enabled to safely operate longer European routes from Belfast City Airport, and for this we need the runway extension.”

This is bad news for Belfast City Airport as a third of their business came from the company (possibly leaving another budget airline to go and steal the customers?). It certainly looks like O’Leary is throwing his toys out of the pram because he can’t get his own way over the new runway.

If you have any flights booked with Ryanair after 31st October, it is worth getting in touch with the airline. And whatever you do, don’t try and sneak on one of their planes with a violin. 12 year-old Francesca Rijks had planned to take her instrument on as hand luggage, however, Ryanair workers told them that her that she’d need to buy an extra seat for it to the tune of £190.

This is not the first time Ryanair have narked musicians as the Daily Mail reports of a group of violinists had to pay £1,340 for extra seats for their instruments on a flight from Frankfurt. Sounds like there may be a musician’s boycott on Ryanair flights if they’re not careful.

Lazy hacks are comparing it to Ryanair, because if you expect anything beyond the basics, you have to pay ancillary charges. So does staying there feel as cheap as the price (from £35 per room per night for a double), or does it live up to Tune Hotel’s boasts of ‘5 star beds at 1 star prices’? Your avid and thoroughly frugal Bitterwallet editor checked in last night to investigate.

So what’s good about it?

• The location; it’s next to North Lambeth tube station, meaning you’re just five stops from Piccadilly Circus, and ten minutes walk from Waterloo station. It’s South of the River, you slaaaag, but it’s easy to get about. The hotel itself looks like a 1970s office block for photocopier wholesales, but it’s what inside that counts.

• It’s new! I was probably the first person to sleep in my bed – there’s no way they stuck the bird from the BBC on the first floor. So while the rooms are tiny, all the fixtures and fittings are brand spanking new, the walls are unscuffed and everything works. Winner.

• It does what it says on the tin. The beds may be five-star (they’re very high quality and amazingly comfortable) although it’s hardly a five-star experience, obviously; ‘new’ doesn’t equate to service, value or stature. But compared to what you’d get for the same price elsewhere in London – I’m thinking of the shitholes around Paddington that’ll stick a bed in a kitchen and hope you don’t notice – the Tune Hotel wins hands down. The bathroom is actually a child-sized wet room, but it is en-suite.

For that reason, it’ll appeal to students and frugal travellers – £35 for a double with en-suite is a brilliant price. If all you need is a place to sleep, then that’s exactly what the Tune Hotel offers – nothing more, nothing less.

Right then. So what can possibly be wrong about a hotel that costs £35 a night? There are a couple of issues:

• You can’t pay the ancillary charges by debit or credit card. If you want the extras, you’ll be sent to the cash machine over the road. More of an irritation than a problem, but it’ll catch people out.

• You can’t have a shit with the bathroom door shut. Well you probably can, but you’ll have to be shorter than six foot. Otherwise your husband, wife, partner or one-night stand will have to watch you sit there bollock naked while you crimp one out.

• There’s no wardrobe, which isn’t a problem in itself. There’s next-to-no floor space, which isn’t an issue in itself either. Together though, it means there’s nowhere to put anything. If you’ve any more than hand luggage with you, you’re screwed.

• The front door isn’t flush with the ground, and consequently there’s a gap just large enough for a mouse to fit through. And at half past two this morning, after I got up to visit the all-night supermarket across the road (as you do), a mouse slipped under the front door, scurried across reception and disappeared behind the vending machines. It may have been lost, of course, but those little buggers do like to breed.

Overall, then? Assuming there isn’t a vermin problem, the Tune Hotel does a top job of offering the budget traveller a cheap, frills-free night in London. Just make sure you share the room with somebody you’re well acquianted with.

Back in July, 31,356 people applied for refunds, bagging themselves a total of £84,661. But crucially, almost a million more passengers who were victims of late Tube journeys didn’t try and get their money back, either through lack of awareness or because the process was too laborious.

Helpfully, there’s a website that supposedly acts as a one-stop shop for late journey claims – mytubewaslate.com. The site lists all late Tube journeys and once you find the one you were on, click on it and they’ll do the rest for you. Then you simply sit back and wait for your compensation vouchers, that you can then use on another cramped, uncomfortable trundle through the darkness of our capital’s detestable rat-infested underground network.

Here’s the newsdudes at local station KATU-TV reporting the story – we love how the cyclists seem loathe to actually ride over the banana skins in case it makes them spin off into oncoming traffic.

Your move Banksy… if you even can…

Hardly Bill Hicks, but excellent use of ‘feck‘, ‘fecking’, ‘feckers’ and ‘feckity’ through out, however.

Watch til the end to see what the Middle England audience think of Fascinating Aida; it’s clearly the sort of act that’ll have female readers of the Daily Mail moist in moments (“it’s never to late to be famous, having a roast with Callum Best and both of the Proclaimers”). Thanks to avid Bitterwallet reader Olly for the tip!

You’re not going to be caught out by the threat of possible strike action by flying with British Airways, are you? That’s why you’ve booked with Virgin Atlantic, to guarantee you’re plans won’t be the victim of union or management politics.

Clever you! Unless Virgin Atlantic flights are threatened with potential strike action, too. Bollocks.

In a bid to send you into a Bruce Banner-style apoplectic rage of ages, the Mail on Sunday reports that the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) are claiming Virgin Atlantic is attempting to reduce their annual entitlement of days off, from 120 days to 106. 106 days still sounds exceptionally generous, but since pilots are in charge of a 600mph metal missile full of aviation fuel, it’s difficult to make a call on it.

According to the newspaper, management and union representatives are due to begin negotiations this week. The nightmare scenario would be for both BA and Virgin to find themselves at the mercy of the unions and have their Autumn schedules unravelled by strike action at the same time. That’s incredibly unlikely to occur (and even if it does, there are still plenty of options for transatlantic and longhaul flights) but let’s see if any hysteria breaks out amongst the media to that effect.