Are the gods of travel laughing at us?

Over Easter 2022, holidaymakers relying on trains, boats, planes and the UK road network are unwitting guinea pigs, says Simon Calder

Going places? The UK’s busiest railway station, London Waterloo, on Maundy Thursday (Simon Calder)

In normal times, the failure in the middle of the day of the Ryanair reservations system would constitute a top must-read story. As passengers tried vainly to check in online, Europe’s biggest budget airline was temporarily obliged to allow them the luxury of collecting a boarding pass at the airport without the usual £55 fee.

Yet on Maundy Thursday, as the UK’s transport infrastructure creaked under the pressure of millions of travellers desperate to be elsewhere, the IT foul-up at Europe’s biggest budget airline merited a mere sidebar.

This weekend, the irresistible force of millions of British travellers desperate for an approximation of a holiday as we used to know and love them is colliding with the immovable object of a transport system that wasn’t exactly in prime condition even before the pandemic.

The travel industry has lost billions of pounds – and, equally seriously, many excellent people whose experience and expertise is only now being properly recognised. Their absence is particularly acute at airports and airlines – with British Airways and easyJet each cancelling dozens of departures daily.

They blame high levels of Covid-19 sickness, but the inadequacy of resources goes deeper than that – just as it does with UK Border Force, which is struggling to keep up.

Add a comprehensively botched attempt by P&O Ferries to reduce its cost base, leading to three cross-Channel ships being out of commission just when they are needed most, and you might conclude the travel gods are mocking us.

Don’t we know there’s a pandemic (and a war on)? Why should we expect to be able to resume our globetrotting as though nothing significant had happened over the past two miserable years?

Even those who wish to go no further than the Lake District will find their progress dogged by a tradition that almost pre-dates Easter itself: bank holiday rail engineering work. There’s no time like a long weekend, Network Rail insists, to close large parts of the west coast main line. London Euston will remain closed until Tuesday morning.

Over Easter 2022, holidaymakers relying on trains, boats, planes and the UK road network are unwitting guinea pigs: the frontline troops whose experiences will inform the post-pandemic travel world. History tells us that the industry, and the traveller, will adapt quickly – and by May the outlook will be brighter, with little more than routine airline IT failures to challenge us.

For now: good luck, everybody.