I don’t think most airlines batter an eyelid to most passengers carrying excess baggage.

When you’re going on holiday for a month, it’s not too easy to keep everything in your suitcase to just 20kg! Thai Airways 20kg allowance was exceeded on the way out by around 5kg each and inbound by about 7kg, yet nobody said anything to us.

Anger at ebay..!!

As some of you may know, I was victim to a fraudulent seller on ebay at the end of May. He took my cash but never sent the item. I tried telephoning him and emailing him, but he chose not to respond. Having emailed ebay several times to try and solve the problem, I tonight sent the following email since I’m still extremely angry with the situation.

I would advise all of you buying on ebay to avoid those sellers who you have little feedback, no feedback or a few negative feedbacks. I guess I’ll learn from my mistakes next time! 😀

I cannot explain my anger at the way in which ebay and Square Trade have handled my fraudulent seller who simply did not send the item I paid him for more than 5 weeks ago.

The services offered by both companies/organisations look great and reassure buyers that they are safe from fraud, when in fact, these services are completely ineffective!

Although I forked out just £6.04 (with postage), I am very dissatisfied with just how little ebay has done to even get a pound of my money back. It is clear that this case is not an isolated one… this seller (whose account has now been cancelled) also ripped others off, gaining much negative feedback for his law-breaking antics.

Surely, all of your security measures in place when even signing up for an account are a complete and utter waste of time. Why on earth do you need to know addresses, telephone numbers and even credit card details when registering? It is quite clear that you do not need this information!

Ebay is obviously a huge risk to all that use it, but the company seems to allow people to sell non-existent items and pocket the cash they get for it. The punishment for doing this is simply to have your account deleted.

As well as the seller who conned me out of £6.00, I also hold ebay partially responsible for this incident. You do absolutely nothing to stop it from happening e.g. refer the criminals to the police. To me, this seems reasonable, when you consider that these people are breaking the law and committing what we call ‘fraud’. In the real world, such situations are handled much better.

Although I would never consider doing such a thing, would it be fair for me to sell items on ebay and not send them? I think not.

Perhaps ebay should do away with the useless Square Trade and seriously revise the way in which fraudulent transactions are handled in the future.

Second episode is on tonight and tonight’s the night John Travolta is in it.

Nice to see Thai featuring in it quite a lot, but just a shame we never found out what happened in the end. They’re in it again tonight by the looks of things. HS-TGW was in the trailer for it.

thanks dc10 i hope your right and i hope it leaves on time or we could miss the cruise also is there anywhere to eat brekfast at gatwick at 5am and has anyone been on a cruise from palma?

I’ve not been on a cruise from Palma, but I’ve been on an Airtours/MyTravel cruise and it was terrible.

We went on the Sundream, which was not such a dream. Its interior was tatty, the rooms were falling apart, drinks were very overpriced and I was bored for a week. We left Montego Bay, went to Costa Rica, Panama, San Blas and Colombia. I couldn’t wait for the trip to come to an end.

I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

I saw the trailer for it this morning and the first aircraft I saw was a Thai Airways 747-300 or -400! Looking forward to it.

Concludes on Tuesday for another hour.

On the subject of aviation related TV. Is anyone getting completely fed up with Discovery Wings? I think there is a commercial aviation night once a week, but the programmes are always the same. The channel starts at 6.00pm and finishes at 2.00am, but they show the same three programmes over and over again. Tonight, it’s something like this..

1800hrs, 2100hrs and 0000hrs – Scrapping Aircraft Giants
1900hrs, 2200hrs and 0100hrs – The Flight

‘The Flight’ is the programme looking at that Air Canada flight AC876 from Toronto to Frankfurt or something like that? It’s on every week without fail!

2000hrs and 2300hrs – Flight Deck

I’m not convinced that easyJet is a budget airline.

I’ve never flown with them before, so know little about their punctuality, reliability, onboard service etc, but their prices are never right for me.

When Andy and I flew up to Glasgow with bmi earlier in the month, we paid £54 for each return ticket. However, easyJet wanted more than that to fly from Luton. Also, a flight to Edinburgh back in December was more than British Airways. Even when booking 8 weeks in advance, they wanted £84 return from Gatwick, whereas BA want £67.80.

Why on earth would the staff of MyTravel Airways want to do that?

I reckon the family had a duff passport, one which certainly would not be accepted for travel. Rather than try and sort one out, they would rather try their luck with it, blaming the airline for damaging the thing.

I watched a repeat of ITV’s Airline a few days ago (on ITV2) and it featured a girl of about 20, who was going away with a few friends. The day before travel, her car was set alight by local yobs and her passport sustained some damage. In fact, the corner of it was slightly melted. However, the photograph could be clearly seen and the passport number was still visible. The usually awkward easyJet, allowed her to travel.

Airlines can be fined if they transport a passenger and their passport is subsequently refused because of the the state it is in. I guess these airlines have to be harsh to save their own skins!

How can something like this happen?

Obviously, an aircraft makes contact with the airport a short while before it actually touches down. When speaking to the control tower, you’d have expected somebody to point out that they weren’t expected at that particular airport.