You are in a queue. Your call is important to us. No, honest it is. Well, okay, it’s not. In fact, we couldn’t give a monkey’s. If you want to buy something from us, do it online like everyone else, you loser.”

The internet is a marvellous thing. Marvellous for the travel industry, that is, because it means they can get rid of whole high-street offices staffed with actual people who actually know stuff about travel, and replace them with a big computer server called Hal or Norad or R2D2 that doesn’t know anything. It is not always so marvellous for anyone who prefers to speak to humans.

Every week, we hear from readers who’ve lost the will to live while in a phone queue. So we spent the world’s most tedious afternoon finding the worst offenders.

Top of the list was EasyJet. It charges 65p per minute if you’re enough of a Luddite to want to book one of its flights by phone. Fair enough: it makes no bones about keeping its costs down by being primarily web-based. We waited just over a minute to get through. But if you’re only half-Luddite, in that you fancy yourself as an online booker but run into trouble halfway through, EasyJet has a web support number. This you pay a terrifying £1 a minute for.

I called it. The computer voice explained in quite a lot of detail, considering I could have had live phone sex for the same price, that I was through to the web support line, that it could help with web support only, that there was a chance the call was being recorded and, just in case I didn’t know, that this was costing me £1 a minute. Then it said there was a queue of “more than 15 seconds”, which, considering I was already 35 seconds in, didn’t seem that bad, so I held. And held. The longer the call got, the more there was at stake. Ten minutes flew by and I started sweating. Fifteen minutes and I’m thinking my wife might have to settle for a smaller bunch of flowers on her birthday. Twenty minutes — or £20 — later, I hung up.

EasyJet says it can’t understand why that happened: it updated its system on April 3 to stop this sort of thing happening, and I should have been cut off if the queue was too long. That did happen when I tried again, so maybe my £20worth of sex-free phoning was just an anomaly.

Ryanair was just engaged all afternoon. Annoying, but less so financially than EasyJet.

What about British Airways? Once upon a time, you could phone up, chat with an amiable fellow, then pay an awful lot of money for a flight. Now, BA’s going low-cost as well, and it’s doing it partly by driving us all online. If you want to book by phone, there’s a £15 charge. But how long do they keep you on hold? An acceptable 1 minute 20 seconds on an 0870 number to get through to sales, but 6 minutes 53 seconds of the Lakme Flower Duet (Spanish guitar variation - aaaaarrrghh) to speak to customer services.

And when I tried to call to track a lost bag (like thousands have had to in the past year), I had to wait 15 minutes on the 0870 line, during which time I was, among many other things, encouraged to contribute to BA’s award-winning Unicef fundraiser. Shouldn’t BA donate the cut they take from using that 0870 number to Unicef? Aaaarrrghh, again.

The French Tourist Office kept us waiting just 7 seconds, but has the Gallic gall to charge 60p a minute if you’re impertinent enough to want to go to France on holiday. The German Tourist Board took a reasonable 48 seconds to answer, and it doesn’t have a premium line. Hoorah. The Canadians do, which is outrageous. Canada isn’t that good. I expect and demand a live person to tempt me to the Belgium of the Americas, not a 65p-a-minute brochure line.

Then there are the operators. Who is going to book a whole holiday online without at least having one live conversation on the phone to check the beach they like the look of isn’t next to a sewage pipe/building site/bird-flu test lab? Well, First Choice, apart from charging £10 if you don’t do things online, kept us waiting a top-blowing 8 minutes 28 seconds for the privilege of booking one of its holidays.

“Why not book online? Why not book online?” said the computer. No, if you can’t be bothered to answer, I’ll just book with Kuoni (straight through to a live person with a real brain) or Abercrombie & Kent (seven seconds of panpipes and in).

By the end of the day, right ear red, neck cricked, phone bill maxed out, I felt like I needed a holiday. Maybe that was their strategy all along.

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