In May 2001 I flew with Excel Airways from London Gatwick to Heraklion, Crete. Sadly I was supposed to be flying to Santorini some sixty miles north of our arrival point so I imagine you can tell this isn't the start of a glowing recommendation.

To make up for the delay all passengers were issued with free headphones so they could listen to the in flight entertainment. Sadly the most entertaining part about the flight was the first officer's announcement which stated that the headphone socket required 'jiggling' to work fully. I was left wondering what else on the plane needed jiggling to work fully. Landing gear? Oxygen masks? Cabin crew? The headphones would only work if you kept them firmly pressed into the socket with your knee at all times which had the added effect of continually flicking the reading light above your head on and off. Considering the film in question was 'Miss Congeniality' I decided I didn't want to draw attention to the fact that I was watching it and opted for entering the 'guess the foodstuff' competition served with the meal. (I made that bit up)

Here we were told by a rep that the reason we had to land on Crete was that the airport in Santorini was closed due to high winds. As you can imagine this didn't go down too well and one or two passengers started getting irate, complaining about the third different excuse they'd heard that day. After much confusion and lunch an operations manager from Excel arrived at the hotel to explain that the ferry would sail at 7pm (by now it was about 3pm) and coaches would arrive to take us to the port from 5pm onwards. What he didn't explain was that these coaches would be on a first come first served basis and would arrive full of passengers fresh from a Manchester flight in exactly the same position as ourselves!

If anyone is left reading this by now I'm sure you will have probably guessed the ferry didn't go anywhere. But don't worry, Excel Airways were very good and told us that they accepted it was their responsibility to get us to Santorini and would do so as effectively as they could. Well d'uh. This ferry of course now had 550 passengers on board that it wouldn't usually cater for so when Excel said we'd all be allocated a cabin what they didn't say was we'd be sharing it with total strangers. As it turned out they were perfectly pleasant total strangers, but total strangers none the less. Some people weren't even allocated cabins. This did strike me was a very cheap way of putting up a lot of people that it would be very expensive to find hotels for, maybe I'm being cynical.

Well the night passed and the ferry still remained firmly in dock the operations manager refused to accept that it was Excel's responsibility to provide food for their passengers, which seemed strange because as soon as we were taken back to the same hotel we waited at the day before we were given breakfast. Of course it would be cheaper to use the hotel than the ferry to do this...

The coach drivers refused to take bags off the coaches that had brought people from the ferry. You would assume about now Excel would say something as long the lines of; 'Do you want to get paid?' Instead they acquiesced and told everyone who had bags left on coaches from the ferry-hotel trip to get back on board and get taken to the airport for the first flight to Santorini. From this point on there was a now familiar mad dash for a seat every time the coaches going to the airport arrived and instead of prioritising the flights as they promised, the best I witnessed any representative from Excel manage was to tell a crowd of about 60 people there were 6 seats left on the coach.