Booking flights early this year - along with your Dominique’s villa of course - can save a large amount of money on fares and avoid some large airports vulnerable to industrial action at peak holiday times.

The sheer volume of passengers during the summer, especially, at
Heathrow and Gatwick, means that even a minor work-to-rule by airport or airline staff has a huge knock-on effect in bringing about
delays. However, by a degree of lateral thinking, it is possible to
arrange travel from slightly less frenetic UK airports and to arrive at unfamiliar French airports that may also prove much closer to your villa.

For example, Ryanair has a number of new routes to France starting in April and May 2008, taking passengers from Bristol to Bergerac in the Dordogne, from Bournemouth to Marseille, from Luton to Brest in Brittany; and from Bristol to Pau near the Pyrénées.  Flybe has a new route from Glasgow to La Rochelle beginning in May, adding to its existing flights from Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton.

Flybe uses Southampton as its main gateway for many other existing routes, including to Avignon, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Limoges in Haute-Vienne, Rennes in Brittany and Perpignan in Languedoc-Roussillon. Exeter has Flybe services to Avignon and Bergerac during the summer months.

For a small airport, Avignon is well served, with flights from three
other UK destinations. Apart from its year-round service from
Southampton, it enjoys seasonal services from Edinburgh and
Leeds-Bradford. London City Airport has a connecting flight to
Orly in Paris, from where Air France flies to Avignon, four times each weekday and three times daily at weekends.

Stansted, usually the least congested London airport – although some passengers may be forgiven for feeling that it is not really in London at all – offers a large number of existing Ryanair destinations. They include Angoulême, Biarritz, Bergerac, Carcassonne, Dinard, Grenoble, La Rochelle, Limoges, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Pau, Perpignan, Poitiers, Rodez, Toulon and Tours.

One note of caution. The so-called cut-price airlines can be quick to close routes that prove uneconomic, so make sure you
take out your travel insurance before you book, in order to be
protected from the consequences of unexpected changes to
the timetable. If the flights are in the peak months of July and August, they may prove not to be budget fares at all, especially if you put off booking, but at least the risk of cancellation is greatly reduced because they are invariably full. The frequency of flights on provincial routes increases during summer, but most operators fly only three times a week to each destination, almost always including Saturdays.

Some small French airports seem too close to the UK to succeed. In 2005 Flybe made an abortive attempt to start services to Cherbourg in Normandy, better known of course as a ferry port, but only a 40-minute hop across the Channel by air. The schedule
was revived with more success in May 2006 but you will look in vain for the Southampton- Cherbourg service on its route map this summer. Another previously advertised Flybe route, Norwich to Cherbourg, literally never got off the ground; it has since been withdrawn, probably for good. However, Sky South is optimistic about its service from Shoreham, renamed Brighton City airport, to Le Havre and Caen in Normandy.

The motorail stop of Brive in the Corrèze will shortly have a brand
new airport with services from London. Although originally intended to draw its passengers from Brive itself, Brive-Souillac
airport lies between the two towns. The Souillac connection has made this airport an attractive proposition for all the inhabitants of the Périgord Noir, and competition for Bergerac.

Despite the increase in flights from the UK, Bergerac’s Roumanière airport runs at a loss, and its sponsors, the Dordogne Chamber of Commerce, are threatening to hand it back to the town. If that happens, once Brive-Souillac is up and running, Roumanière airport could before long go the way of the old airport at Bassillac.  Located just outside Périgueux, it was once a favoured route for Parisians visiting their weekend retreats but has now lost all its scheduled services.

From our January 2008 newsletter