Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

Arise, Sir Rail Passenger

'Dear Madam, Dear Sir Calder Simon." Courtesy is alive, well and living on the website of French Railways. Book a ticket through www.sncf.fr, and you can expect an effusive salutation from the train operator.

If you plan to travel on a Eurostar train between Britain and Paris, and are looking for good value for money, the last place you should buy your ticket is London. As with British Airways' club world flights – where starting in Vienna saves you 65 per cent on fares from London – choosing your starting point carefully buys you much more.

Booking from Leeds or York to the French capital costs £81, only £22 more than the London-Paris trip alone. GNER (which sells this deal on 08457 225 225) will throw in the Tube tickets between King's Cross and Waterloo and the option of a night's stopover in London en route.

Besides taking you a total of 400 miles further, the offer conditions are more relaxed than the £59 special available direct from Eurostar. The cheapest ticket from London must be booked at least a fortnight in advance; begin your journey in Yorkshire (or, at least, pretend to) and the minimum falls to a week.

Better still, start in France. There are plenty of ways of reaching the country on cheap one-way trips, for example on Buzz, Bmibaby or Ryanair. Some people have even indulged in some tariff abuse, as it is known – taking a cheap return by ferry or train and failing to return.

The nightclubbers' special, sold by Eurostar for evening outings to the French capital for £35 (travel out on a Saturday after 4pm, return the next morning – if you remember) is a favourite for people who want to reach Paris fast for less.

Whether you get to France by fair means or foul, you will find Eurostar prices bought there are typically 25 per cent lower than in the UK – with add-ons from the provinces at next to nothing. A return trip from Nantes, Lyon or Strasbourg to London will set you back just €95, exactly the same as that £59 return from London, but you travel twice as far for the same money. You do not need a mailing address in France to book on the internet, because you pick up the ticket before the first leg of the journey.

Using the return half of the trip – back to France – you can repeat the performance for as long as you credit limit allows. And you will get knighted in the confirmation e-mail, even if you happen to be female.

TRAVEL AND the internet are, usually, made for each other. A large number of disparate customers can access a wide range of products from a profusion of suppliers. Unlike most other businesses, there is no need to despatch anything; travellers deliver themselves to the airport, train or hotel. But some parts of the travel industry seem intent on making life difficult for the customer, and accordingly unprofitable for themselves.

When you respond to the Spanish national airline's invitation to "Look and Book" on its website, www.iberiaairlines.co.uk, it offers you a default journey. You might imagine this would be its premier route between London Heathrow and Madrid. But the first option it offers you is a flight to Alicante, where scheduled flights barely register, from Aberdeen – which Iberia does not serve.

WHAT A contrast is the encyclopaedic German Rail website, www.bahn.de, which will tell you how to get from Charing Cross (London) to Charing Cross (Glasgow) more quickly and accurately than our own national rail enquiry service.

The system has now been upgraded to include a Personal Timetable service. You can request the entire schedule between, say, Trois-Ponts in the Belgian Ardennes and Three Bridges in West Sussex.

It will be e-mailed to you, in English, within minutes, along with the cheery salutation "Liebe Nutzerin, lieber Nutzer".

At least I think it's cheery.

But the new service is so popular that the system occasionally blows a fuse. When I asked for a Persönlicher Fahrplan von Crawley nach Three Bridges, I was told, "Unfortunately there are no connections which match your requested personal timetable from Aachen to Aachen."

THE NATIONAL Rail Timetable, which comes into effect next Sunday, tells you that the journey from Crawley to Three Bridges takes three minutes – the same as it did when the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee in 1977. (The rolling stock is exactly the same, so I suppose it's only to be expected.) To try to find some kind of improvement, I looked elsewhere in the country, starting with the nation's most scenic run, from Leeds across the Pennines to Carlisle. The journey takes half an hour longer than it did 25 years ago.

What about the prime Inter-City link between London Euston and Birmingham New Street? A quarter of a century ago, it took 87 minutes. All the technological leaps forward in the second half of Her Majesty's reign have combined to increase the average trip by 15 minutes – except at weekends in August and September, when the journey will take well over three hours.

ONE JOURNEY where speed is not of the essence is the night sleeper between Paddington and Penzance. The 325-mile journey takes about eight hours, which conveniently is the duration of a decent night's sleep. A return ticket to the end of the line, including the sleeper supplement and tea and biscuits in the morning, costs £105. That's £52.50 a night, which is less than I have paid for some questionable London hotels. Any tourists appalled by high prices for beds in the capital should avoid the pirates and sleep their way to Penzance and back.

OH, TO be in Estonia now that Eurovision's there. Numerous notables have already tarried in Tallinn, from Classic FM's Natalie Wheen to Eleo Gordon, senior editor for Penguin Books.

Ms Gordon ventured beyond Estonia's capital to the enigmatic ex-Soviet Navy stronghold of Saaremaa Island. She arranged her itinerary using the internet, but tells a cautionary tale about relying on this technological miracle.

The pièce de résistance of her trip was to be a ride on a new twice-daily ferry link back to Tallinn. "The web page showed the times and fares," she says. But when Ms Gordon arrived at the quayside, "They sheepishly admitted that they hadn't got around to buying the boat yet."

travel@independent.co.uk