Service: Vistajet Learjet 60XR flight London-Nice-London
Price: 4,333 euros
Online: http://www.vistajet.com

Travelling by private jet is a luxury few of us will ever pay for out of our own pockets. It is typically paid for by multinational companies, who then might bestow their generosity on the rest of us little people with an occasional jolly in their planes.

So it was for me as I was invited to interview Thomas Flohr, the owner of Vistajet, a private jet leasing business, on his 42 metre yacht moored in Monaco, the heart of the French Riviera.

I approached the trip with journalistic cynicism: Mr Flohr has something to sell to the readers of Arabian Business and he’s sparing no expense to get a glowing report.

The chauffer-driven top-of-the-line Mercedes S-Class that picked me up from home was a reasonable start. But given that it was 5.30am when we set off, my first thought was not so much, ‘thanks for the luxury ride,’ but more, ‘who on earth woke me up at this time in the morning?’

I thought private jet travel was about building the schedule around the individual. I would have preferred my schedule to begin after 8am.

By the time I’d arrived at the private terminal at Farnborough, a medium-sized town south-west of London, at 7am, I’d snatched another hour’s sleep and was ready to face the day.

VistaJet’s Bombardier Learjet  60XR accommodates up to six passengers, two pilots and a flight attendant. Four individual seats and a bench seat for three people, all in cream leather are comfortable enough, if a little cramped. There is considerably less leg room than a commercial business class seat, and few other frills for individual passengers. There are no individual TV screens or phones, although there are two screens showing the flight path, and an onboard phone that any passenger can use.

With a range of just under 4500km - a flight that will get you from Dubai to Moscow or the east coast of India, but not to Zurich or Singapore - this is not a plane for the long haul. Its top speed of 863km/h, almost as fast as a commercial airliner, is what will interest busy executives most. It rocketed us from London to Nice in just over an hour and a half and will do the Middle East to central Europe in around five hours.

If you want to reach London from the Middle East, Vistajet can offer the Challenger 605 or the largest plane in its fleet, the Global Express, which will get from the Middle East to Australia, non-stop, and offers considerably more space and comfort, including flat beds.

Our flight was full: three reporters, a TV presenter, her camerawoman, our PR host, the flight attendant and two pilots. We were all travelling light, but the only place to put laptop cases and cameras was in the toilet, an inconvenience for anybody needing the convenience.

Breakfast was business class standard, and the uneventful flight was forgettable. There is little opportunity to wow passengers in a cabin measuring 1.2m by 5.4m. Perhaps the only perk is access to the flight deck, so you can get a truly bird’s eye view of proceedings.

We landed at Nice airport and whizzed through a private security channel, but then found ourselves in the same terminal as the Easyjet passengers who had just paid around 4,200 euros less for the same journey.

The price of the flight is an interesting equation. Vistajet wants people to buy “programmes”, which give them a certain number of flying hours for a fixed annual price. This, the company claims, allows them to offer a better quality of service at a lower price than the market’s biggest player, Netjets.

The minimum programme of 100 hours per year costs 625,000 euros. Our return trip used up four hours flying time, costing 26,000 euros, or 4,333 euros per person (you pay per hour for the plane, not per person).

The actual cost over the course of a year is more complicated than this, but it gives you a rough idea of affordability. Booking ad hoc flights on demand is typically more expensive.

Despite the fact that we enjoyed a delicious lunch in glorious sunshine with impeccable hosts and hospitality on Mr Flohr’s staggeringly beautiful boat in Monaco, I still had a niggling feeling of being underwhelmed by the whole private jet experience.

Yes, we got to Monaco comfortably before lunch, but so did the Easyjet passengers we mixed with at Nice airport. Of course, we did the trip in considerable style, but nothing like the luxury you get on the top deck of an Emirates A380.

These are unfair comparisons, and not entirely relevant for Vistajet’s target market of multi-millionaires who fall just shy of the wealth required to own a plane outright (a target market described by Mr Flohr as individuals with net worth of around $100-200 million).

And it was these customers that I had in mind when the private jet concept fell into place right at the end of our round trip.

The flight back to Farnborough was lifted by some amiable banter with my new found media friends and a few bottles of excellent Chablis. But I was still silently dreading what I expected to be a two hour journey from south-west of London, to my home north of London round the dreaded M25.

However, on landing at Farnborough, I discovered that the overnight stopover for the plane would be at London Luton Airport, a mere half an hour from my front door.

“Can I catch a lift?” I asked with my cheekiest winning smile. “Of course,” replied the pilot. I just need to make a phone call to clear it.

So, having dropped off my new chums at the airport nearest to their homes and offices, I was left alone on the 25 minute flight to the runway a stone’s throw from my house.

This, I discovered at last, is the reason for private aviation. It is not the leather seats, the private terminals, the chauffer driven transfers or even the bragging rights. It is the difference between catching a bus and calling for a taxi. You can drop your mates off at their place before carrying on to yours at any time of the day you choose.

The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) of Dubai must be delighted. According to a poll on its own web site, 61 percent of commuters will use the Metro to get to work once it is launched.

A mere 21 percent of the population will not use it to get to work, and 16 percent are undecided.

This is not a small poll where only RTA employees cast their votes. The web site counter says that 18,901 people have voted.

On the same web site a few months ago, an almost identical poll asked whether people will use the new public buses in Dubai. 59 percent said they will.

The results of these surveys are not necessarily contradictory. After all, it is possible for six out of every ten people to commute to work on the Metro, and to use new public buses. Indeed, this is exactly what the RTA would like: catch a bus from home to the Metro stations, and continue your journey to work on the train.

So it seems that what the RTA wants, it gets, even when it comes to results of spot polls on its web site.

At what point do you earn the right to link yourself with a particular profession or job title? I have been considering this quandary because, as you may have noticed, I have been doing a bit of writing of late, but not once, when someone has asked what I do, have I told them that I am a writer.

Perhaps it’s a time thing, and I just haven’t been doing it for long enough. But then I have been driving a car for 15 years and cooking for even longer than that and yet I don’t think of myself as ‘a driver’, and, as scores of people will testify, I’m certainly no chef.

Maybe you have to be seen to be good at what you do before you are honoured with a title. No, estate agents the world over disprove that theory.

Being paid for what you do is, no doubt, a key element to how people perceive themselves but that is not a hard and fast rule either. Take philosophers for example, they don’t necessarily get paid. They just sit there, thinking. But how much thinking do you have to do before you can legitimately call yourself a bona fide philosopher I wonder?

When I was a little boy I wanted to grow up to become either a tycoon or an explorer, but it seems that they are tough worlds to crack. I still don’t know what being a tycoon really entails, apart from being rich, tanned and being able to wear floppy linen shirts. ‘Explorer’ is even more vague – just go and get lost, seems to be the remit.

As with writing I figured that the best way to become an explorer was just to have a go one day. So, to test my trainee exploring skills I decided to start small and local – with a visit to the monorail on The Palm Jumeirah. What do you mean that’s not proper exploring – have you been on it? No. Exactly.

The Palm, for the uninitiated, is a man-made, palm-shaped island, the self-proclaimed eighth wonder of the world, and is both absolutely amazing and yet completely bonkers at the same time. A few weeks ago a monorail service opened up which takes paying guests the length of The Palm but which few people have yet tried out. I think I know why.

And it’s not the price. At AED 25 it is expensive but not prohibitively so, at least for a one off exploratory trip. It’s finding the damn thing that’s the problem. I knew that the main monorail station was housed inside a huge great car park. I could see it, but boy was it tricky to get to. There were no signposts. I now know how Edmund Hilary must have felt as he traipsed up that hill.

I read a report stating that 600 people a day are using the monorail. I doubt that – it’s harder to find than the Holy Grail which means that you need the tenacity of Indiana Jones to stand any chance at all.

But find it I did. And it was well worth it but not because it was an efficient mode of transport that took me from A to B. I had struggled to find A and I didn’t want to get to B. But that’s not the point. I wanted to have an opinion so that when people speak to me about the monorail I can speak from experience. And now I can, and, for what it’s worth, this is my opinion:

We can grumble – as we will – about the signage, the price, the unopened stations and the need to connect to a wider Metro network in order to become a useful daily transport link for residents. So it is not perfect, but we need to have a little faith that these issues will be addressed over time.

It’s still early days but it is clearly a modern and slick form of public transport that provides unique overhead views of The Palm Jumeirah and, best of all, it makes you feel like Neil Armstrong, stepping foot where no man has been before.

It’s new territory. Go. Explore.

GCC nationals and expatriates become acutely aware of international roaming charges at this time of year as most companies reject enormous expense claims that include holiday phone calls.

This makes it all the more important to do some research into roaming charges, and to ensure that you connect to the best priced networks in the countries you are visiting.

For example, did you know that Etisalat customers with a contract will pay roughly twice as much for making a phone call in the UK if they connect to O2, Orange or Vodafone networks rather than T-Mobile?

Etisalat’s web site lists the cost of making a call back to the UAE as:

O2: AED8.04 per minute
Orange: AED9.49 per minute
T-Mobile: AED4.43 per minute
Vodafone: AED8.08 per minute

Irritatingly, while T-Mobile is cheapest for making calls back to the UAE, Orange is far cheaper when making calls to other UK numbers.

The price of receiving a call (AED3.09 per minute) is exactly the same across all UK networks.

Count yourself lucky if you are not a Batelco customer. Batelco has entirely different roaming charges, and the cheapest options are different for peak-time and off-peak calls. Looking again at roaming in the UK, Vodafone offers the cheapest off-peak price for calls to UK numbers of BD0.082 per minute, compared to BD0.284 per minute on Orange for peak and off-peak calls - more than treble the price!

Peak price tariffs are different. Connect to the O2 network and you will pay BD0.355 per minute, 40 percent more than the tariff of BD0.204 with Vodafone.

And if you are calling Bahrain, it is different again. This time T-Mobile is comfortably cheapest with an all-day rate of BD0.39 per minute, compared to Orange’s eye-watering peak time rate of BD1.17 per minute.

UK coverage for all major mobile networks is in the high 90 percent range, so in most parts of the country you are well advised to manually select a network rather than allow your phone to automatically find one.

The examples here give only a narrow window into the complexities of international roaming, but I urge you to do your own research before travelling this summer. Five minutes of web research could save you colossal sums on your phone bills come September.

Let me know if you have any other tips for saving money on mobile roaming.

The idea of a single GCC visa is one that will be welcomed by everybody that has sat for hours in a Saudi Arabian embassy waiting for a visa, then spent several more hours at the airport in Jeddah or Riyadh, standing in line behind what always appears to be a jumbo jet-full of people that can’t read, let alone fill in immigration forms correctly.

I estimate that I have lost around 16 days of my life in this purgatory, and I’m never getting those days back.

Unfortunately, despite Kuwait’s director general for immigration saying that an agreement will be reached today (Monday) by all GCC officials for a GCC visa, I do not see it happening any time soon.

Kuwait has form when it comes to this type of initiative. I recall a proposal in the late 1990s when it was proposed that Kuwait Airways and Emirates Airline share a web site so that people could book tickets for either carrier more easily.

The idea has merit (as Expedia.com, Lastminute.com and other have demonstrated), but it was clear from the outset that it would not fly. While the benefits to Kuwait Airways of selling tickets on the massively successful emirates.com web site were obvious, it was a great deal less clear what Emirates had to gain.

The GCC visa initiative has some of the same problems, and I fully expect tribalism to scupper the idea when it is discussed by a meeting of immigration chiefs in Abu Dhabi today.

My first question is, why is Kuwait proposing this hugely complicated initiative right now? Aside from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait is the toughest country to visit for an expatriate living in the GCC. Why not simply relax its own immigration rules so that they fall in line with Qatar, Oman, UAE and Bahrain - all of which allow Western expats to turn up and buy a visa at the airport?

Could it be that Kuwait is trying to force Saudi Arabia’s hand, and extract concessions that would make it easier to enter the Kingdom? If so, there is little chance of success. Saudi Arabia is open to change, but at a pace of its own choosing, not to a timetable suggested by Kuwait.

This immigration conference has all the hallmarks of a meeting where a good idea will be kicked into the long grass. Expect a communiqué to emerge that is long on intentions, and short on detail, with a further meeting scheduled some time next year to take the idea forward.

We’ve seen it all before with customs union, single currencies and regional railway lines. You could put officials from six GCC countries into a room and ask them to emerge with a consensus on the colour of the sky and they would take five years to conclude that it depends on your point of view.