Having just had a very negative experience with a Ryanair flight I think I should provide a warning to people – some of the airports Ryanair fly to are not actually properly equipped to offer a reliable international service. The case in point is "Brussels South" but this also applies to others such as Eindhooven.

My first major issue with "Brussels South" airport is the name, personally I find it sufficiently miss-leading to be an outright lie but I’m sure Ryanair would not agree with that. It is not in Brussels, it is not even NEAR Brussels, it is in a place called Charleroi, which, as seen from Brussels is literally half way to France! Personally I’d rather pay more airport tax and actually get to Brussels!

So, why are these airports so bad? Well, firstly the actual facilities are of course not great because these are simply tiny airports, fair enough, that I can live with. For me the problem starts when the airports do not actually have the facilities needed for performing the basic function of an airport – allowing planes to land and take off.

In the case of Charleroi the problem is two-fold: Firstly, the runway is short. It is long enough to land a 737 in normal conditions, problem is it is no longer than that so if the conditions are not good then planes cannot land and have to divert somewhere else. I’ve had direct experience of this with a snow-shower that deposited a mere 2cm of snow over about an hour. The conditions were not spectacular, it was a very small amount of snow over a long period, FAR from a blizzard and the kind of thing any proper international airport would have shrugged off without even a delay. Another problem seems to be a lack of proper equipment for dealing with snow and this also affects Eindhooven where about 4cm of snow also stranded me. I was talking to some Canadians who were in shock that that little snow could possibly cause an international airport problems. You might say that these were acts of god but did Brussels International airport have to close for these conditions – no! Also, these conditions are NORMAL in Belgium/Holland in the wintertime, they happen quite regularly so airports cannot say these conditions are unexpected and should be able to cope with them.

The other problem Charleroi (Brussels South) suffers from is a lack of equipment. They don’t have the gizmo that allows planes to land in fog so each time it is foggy the airport closes, again this is COMMON in Belgium!

What really compounds all these problems problems is that when Ryanir have to divert a plane they just cancel it’s return leg without even attempting to get the passengers to the plane, or, if the weather problem is temporary, the plane to the passengers. They just seem to cancel stuff at the drop of a hat so you, as the customer get shafted because Ryanair choose to fly to sub-standard airports (if planes can’t take off and land then they are sub standard in my book). In the case of Charleroi planes get diverted to Liege, 40 mins away by car. Ryanair put on busses to get the people to Charleroi and then send the busses on their way rather than using the same buses to bring the people to Liege so they can get home. IMO that is disgraceful.

Basically, beware of "Brussels South", you could be in for a lot of trouble if the weather does what it is bound to do in winter! To put this into perspective I have used Brussels South for four holidays to Belgium and of those four only two have gone right, basically half have been messed up by SMALL amounts of snow, and fog.