If you’re planning a holiday in France any time soon, you’ll be reassured to hear that getting there has never been easier. There are superb air, ferry and rail links from the UK, so much so that you’ll be spoilt for choice. To take just one example of the numerous ferry connections, Brittany Ferries recently launched the luxuriously splendid ‘Amorique’, specifically for use between Plymouth and Breton. You’ll be aboard a €120 million of state-of-the art cruise ship whilst traversing the Channel on this floating palace – it not only has room for 1,500 passengers and 470 cars, it offers the most sumptuous comfort and the kind of spaciousness you’d never get on a flight.

But flights are certainly worth considering. The airline industry may be going through a particularly turbulent time right now, with many smaller airlines falling by the wayside, but the bigger names like Easyjet, Ryanair and Flybe are slugging it out with one another very competitively to attract travellers flying to France – and they haven’t done a bad job. The bargains currently available on flights to France have simply never been better as a result.

For those who enjoy the prospect of driving through France to their holiday destination, of course, the ferry or Eurotunnel links are probably the way to go. Eurotunnel may not be an especially pleasurable trip, but the big advantage is that it’ll only take 35 minutes. If you plan to hire a car when you’re on the other side of the Channel, Eurostar is also worth considering –since its moves from Waterloo to St Pancras, its sojourns to Paris take less time and they’re less expensive, too.

How will the announcement by budget airline Ryanair affect you forthcoming winter skiing holiday? If you had planned to fly with them, then of course you will be affected, but there are plenty of alternatives. They have planned to  cut its UK winter capacity by 16% from November, has blamed Air Passenger Duty (APD) for a move which will see it carry over two million fewer passengers this winter compared to the same period last year. Mainly these cuts will concentrate on London Stansted, where the airline will base 22 aircraft instead of 24. This will mean a flight volume decrease of 17% at the airport and a loss of up to 1.5 million passengers between November and March 2011. The cuts will affect some other UK bases but if you are planning to fly from Leeds or from Edinburgh you will still get to Munich or Treviso.

Ryanair pulling out of the winter flight schedule so popular with skiers could leave a hole but we would imagine that there will be other airlines that can fill the gap. Jet2 and EasyJet are examples who fly to French ski resorts and the popular destination of Geneva could become ever more popular this coming winter as we plan our next skiing holiday.