Author: Bob Cartwright
It's tough trying to balance environmental responsibility with the urge to travel. The one hundred new budget airline routes that have arrived in recent months may be polluting but they do make travel so much easier for millions.
It's particularly useful for those that live well away from London and the South East. Only a few years ago, it was often a long car or coach trip, in itself polluting, to Gatwick or Luton. Yes, there were charter flights from Manchester and Glasgow - and they cost more - but it was often a long drive to catch a plane from many parts of the UK.
Today, the situation has changed dramatically as smaller airports like Newcastle, Blackpool, Liverpool, Leeds Bradford, East Midlands, Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol and Bournemouth all attract extra flights. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are getting ever more routes too.
Some of the services that have come on stream reflect the number of Britons with second homes abroad. So flights now go to a choice of Brittany destinations - Brest, Dinard, Rennes and Nantes. The Dordogne is served by extra services to Angouleme and Bergerac while South West France and Languedoc has UK flights into Biarritz, Beziers, Pau and Perpignan. Just a few years ago Toulouse and perhaps Nimes was the limited choice.
For many, this wider choice of destinations also means a shorter drive to their second home or holiday destination after their flight. Clearly that won't completely cancel out the environmental impact of the flight, but every little helps.
Some of the new flights seem to be serving a specialist market. Liverpool, a city with a large Catholic population, now has a direct link with Santiago de Compostela, the shrine to St James in north west Spain. Whether those that fly will feel as deserving as those walking across northern Spain on the pilgrims' footpaths to Santiago is another matter, but the new service might add to Galicia's and northern Portugal's tourist appeal.
The French airport that seems to be getting the largest number of UK flights is Nice. The arrivals board at Nice airport can often look like a list of British cities as easyJet and Ryanair flights land every few minutes. Sitting on Nice beach, you wonder how many planes easyJet now have in their fleet as they come in to land in a steady stream.
Yes, the impact on the environment is a concern but the appeal of a stay in Nice at any time of year is always going to be hard to resist. Fortunately, for those that really do keep to their environmental principles, train services across France and Spain are also improving rapidly.