Why does travel always go wrong at Christmas?

Why, an editor demanded to know, is travel at Christmas always so lousy?

You can see his point. Christmas 2021 has taken the traditional festive disruption to trains, planes and automobiles to a new dimension. Thameslink explains its failure to run trains from Brighton through central London to Cambridge on Covid-19 cases, seasonal illnesses, and – a new one here – “the side effects from booster jabs”.

This excuse has two simultaneous side effects: regrettably feeding the bizarre – and very wrong – conspiracy theories of anti-vaxxers, and adding to the belief that travel at Christmas is somehow jinxed.

There is plenty of evidence for repeated nightmares before Christmas. In December 2010, Heathrow came to a standstill after a snowstorm, the effects of which rumbled on for days. It is never a good look for a global hub to be hosting a Salvation Army van, dispensing tea, coffee and sympathy to travellers whose journeys have changed character from aspiration to desperation. I calculate that 600,000 passengers had their travel plans ruined by mismanagement, later characterised as a lack of “situational awareness” – ie no one thought to look out of the window.

In 2013, my Christmas Eve was enlivened by reporting on the flooding at Gatwick’s North Terminal – an event so damaging that the airport operator later handed out £100 in shopping vouchers to every passenger whose plans had been wrecked.

The following year, it was the turn of overrunning engineering work at London King’s Cross to scupper plans for intercity passengers, with the small suburban station of Finsbury Park unable to cope with a sudden promotion to southern hub of the east coast main line.

In the week before Christmas 2018, I was back at Gatwick – where the mysterious drone scare caused 1,000 flights to be cancelled before military hardware was called in to neutralise the threat.

Yet I can offer many counter-examples over the past 15 years. Aviation seized up as a result of the sudden “liquids ban” in mid-August 2006.

British Airways botched the opening of Terminal 5 in March 2008.

The biggest single pre-Covid grounding of planes was in relation to the week-long volcanic ash saga, which happened during the Easter holidays of 2010.

BA (and its long-suffering passengers) suffered more grief in 2017 with an IT failure that paralysed the late May bank holiday weekend. And by September that year, it was the turn of Ryanair to ground thousands of flights after its pilot rosters were messed up.

Yet Christmas disruption causes the most pain – partly because travellers have so much invested in their journeys (emotionally and financially), and partly because options start running out by teatime on 24 December. If only we had a 365-day travel system, the seasonal stress would be eased.