I'm absolutely with Leia on all her reactions
A couple of further observations:
a. It's ages since I took the train to London, but for Gloucester/Cheltenham some are through trains to or from Paddington, while for some there is a branch line to/from Swindon where one must change to/from the main line. Those Swindon trains are mostly from/to Bristol, but some also or instead go/went from/to Newport and Cardiff. I don't know if they still do. Anyway, I can recall some loudspeaker announcements both at Paddington (in the era before there were only announcement boards) and on the train itself in both languages, presumably when there was serendipitously a bilingual employee; I don't suppose the bilingualism was ever a job requirement, although perhaps on the Cardiff trains and at the stations in Wales it should be achievable with recordings for routine announcements
.. anyway, I liked hearing them, but ISTR being on a train where a fellow-passenger volubly did not
I pointedly asked another passenger, whom I had seen wincing, in Welsh if she was going on to Cardiff
It is one thing not to need that extra bit of service, but quite another to be resentful if it is proactively offered to others.
b. We often visit family in Sydney (NSW not NS!). Usually we have been with airlines which stop in the Gulf (Etihad, Emirates or Qantas before they changed to stops in Singapore). We were once on BA (stops in Singapore) both ways, only because it was a codeshare with Qantas. It was noticeable that Etihad and Emirates cabin crew made cabin announcements in Arabic and English always, that at the beginning of every flight announced (in Arabic and English) which other languages were available among the cabin crew, and that cabin crew wore national flag pins indicating their language competencies. Qantas made similar announcements (English only), and had similar pins (rather fewer on most crew, as far as I could see). BA IIRC made no such announcements and had no equivalent pins; but they made recorded announcements prior to landing in Singapore in Mandarin Chinese (while Cantonese is the Singapore language!). Anyway, the BA approach was not only disappointing to me as a language nerd, but struck me as poor customer service; unfortunately, it may be typical of companies which while having an international footprint are based in a monolingual anglophone culture.
[I've looked at the Times article. The core facts may be correct (I don't know) but the headline and tone seem arrogant. The article is under the weekly spoof by Hugo Rifkind which imagines the diary entries for the week of a politician or other public figure who has been in the news, which made me wonder whether the core story is itself a spoof. I suppose it might have been left over from 1 April, and put to various people (a 'travel writer' talking about an 'unwelcome extra burden on pilots', and Yes Cymru and Plaid Cymru spokesfolk saying 'why not ?') to get a rise out of them. The reporter's byline is Kaya Burgess of The Times, who has been their Religious Affairs correspondent, and has also written for The Guardian
From The Times website (my bold):
"news reporter and religious affairs correspondent. @kayaburgess. Kaya Burgess covers breaking news and religion stories. He has also
written the paper's satirical TMS column, runs the award-winning Cities Fit for Cycling campaign, and worked on the Time to Mind child mental health campaign. He joined The Times in 2008."
and blog:
https://kayaburgessblog.wordpress.com/ ]