Ski Trip Begins in Chaos

The 2009 Varsity Trip began with cock-ups and confusion this weekend.

The travel agency organising the trip's accommodation left almost 200 people without rooms.

And the coaches coming from London arrived at the wrong town after the driver mis-typed into his sat-nav.

The trip's organisers were left scrambling to find rooms for 180 students after the travel agency let them down by telling them at the last minute that the rooms were unavailable due to refurbishment.

One student told The Tab "it's a shambles. We have been waiting 4 hours for the key to our room, others have had their rooms changed without notice and some have not even got rooms from the looks of it".

The changes meant that students were put up in new rooms, often seperated from the friends they had arranged to stay with and in some cases spread out across town.

Students on the ski and snowboard trip, which is organised annually for those at Oxford and Cambridge, pay upwards of £329 for the 7 day package.

Laura Abrams, from the Varsity Trip committee, said that the issues had been resolved: "Everyone on the committee worked very hard to sort the problem out".

'Sat-nav cock-up'

But for some skiers the problems were not confined to a shortage of rooms, as another mess-up outside the committee's control hindered participants.

The 3 coaches from London Victoria managed to miss their ferry, leaving the students on-board to wait around at dover in the early hours.

Following a rocky channel crossing, the biggest cock-up was soon to come.

The ascent to the ski resort at Tignes was supposed to be via the town of Bourg-Saint-Maurice.

Catastrophically however, the lead-driver failed to realise that 'Bourg' is a common pre-fix in French town names and managed to type the wrong name into his sat-nav, heading his fleet of coaches for Bourg-en-Bresse – a full 276km from the intended stop-off and a 5 hour drive to the destination at Tignes.

A student on one of the coaches said it was farcical: "They led us on a 24 hour wild goose chase. The mood on-board was nothing short of riotous!"

Jesus fresher Annie Gilchrist agreed: "I'd rather curl up and die in a snow drift than get the coach home".