Annecy; Thursday, 02 May, 2024

As it was a late flight I had worked from home until the end of the working day and then made my way over to Heathrow, in a surprisingly quick time, reaching the lounge less than 90 minutes after I’d logged off my laptop.

It was a smooth journey through the airport and onto the plane, not something that anyone else flying with BA to Geneva had experienced that day. The earlier 11am departure had made it as far as the English Channel coast before circling a few times and then heading back to London, with some stacking, with the flight being cancelled on landing about an hour after they had originally departed.

Some of those on board had been booked onto the early afternoon flight, which did get away ok, some had been booked onto my 8pm flight, which in the end was only a few minutes late, and some of the poor travellers had been booked on the 6pm flight, which turned out was going to be operated by exactly the same plane as earlier once it had been fixed.

The repair job clearly took longer than expected with that plane not leaving Heathrow until nearly half an hour after we did.

Landing in Geneva quite late at night is always a bit of a gamble with immigration as they normally only have a couple of people on the non-EU-EEA-CH channel and depending on other flights landing it can take some time. We’d landed a bit behind a flight coming in from Albania so of course the majority of passengers from that flight were also in the same queue with Swiss border guards taking a good couple of minutes to process each person – so a bit of a surprise when I got up to the counter, had my passport scanned, stamped and waived through in less than 30 seconds!

From the airport it was about a 10-minute walk to my hotel for the evening, located in the exhibition centre that is attached to the airport. Thankfully, given the less than pleasant weather, most of that walk can be done under cover initially through the station and then under the awnings of the expo, it was just the last couple of hundred meters on the bridge over the motorway that passes under the expo and past the airport that was exposed to the elements, so I was only mildly damp when I made it to my room and headed straight for bed.