Stranded in Disneyland: What it was like to fly on Thomas Cook's final flight

There are worse places to be stranded, I suppose, than the "happiest place on Earth". Though that depends, of course, what your idea of happy is. At Disney's Grand Californian Hotel yesterday morning, I woke up to the news that my flight back to the UK no longer exists.

This didn't come as much of a surprise to me, nor, I imagine, any of the 150-odd Thomas Cook passengers I flew over here with from Manchester on Friday. We'd all seen the headlines, that the 178-year-old travel company was teetering on the brink of collapse – though you'd not have guessed it from observing the staff, bright and smiling in their blue and orange uniforms, legs paddling furiously beneath the surface.

It wasn't a good flight experience from the start. First, I couldn't check in online or reserve a seat – I was told over the phone, following a 24-minute wait on the helpline, that I'd been "randomly selected" for security reasons to be stripped of this privilege. The queue at the check-in counter was unusually long; a caterpillar of agitated humans and their suitcases, tended to by a pair of slightly flustered staff members with clipboards and a steady mantra of "business as usual".

The general mood, as we started boarding at the gate, however, was surprisingly upbeat. There will have been passengers, I'm sure, who were anxious as to the financial state of Thomas Cook, but most of us were just excited to be California-bound. I overheard one young man say to his friend: "I wouldn't mind being stranded out there actually – it would be like an enforced holiday from life." I have to say I concurred. Later, this optimism would come back to bite me, and my wallet.

I'm not sure how old the plane we then boarded was, but it was many years beyond its prime. The seats were narrow, thinly padded, fraying at the edges, and without a recline button. I am well aware that reclining one's seat is a divisive act, certainly on a short-haul flight, but to be strapped bolt upright for more than ten hours? Unreasonable.

The seat inadequacies didn't end there. At some point in this aircraft's life, entertainment screens had been bolted into the back of the flimsy seats. Which is not to say you could actually use them without, again, unreasonable levels of faffing: the hailing down of a long-suffering member of cabin crew and the sum of £6 for a code, printed on a ticket, which – my observations revealed – worked only some of the time, for some people.

Then the food. You have to pay extra for that too; a grim choice between grey, anaemic beef and rice, or grey, sinewy chicken and rice. I had requested a vegetarian meal in advance, but this was not to be. Let's not go into the price, nor the taste, of the Echo Falls wine on offer, which the in-flight magazine's expert Helen McGinn describes, somewhat desperately, as "guaranteed to put you in the holiday mood". If you drink a flagon of it, perhaps.

If I've thus far come across as a spoilt brat, it's definitely because I am. Spoilt, entirely, by a modern breed of low-cost airlines like Norwegian, which, for example, operates transatlantic flights on new planes, with decent films and meals at least a mark above prison food. I'm fine, too, with no-frills Ryanair. At least it doesn't pretend to be a brand that cares about your comfort when in reality both parties grudgingly concede this is relationship based entirely on rock-bottom fares.