Not just me who's had a bad experience with "Excel" then?
We booked tickets with Excel early this year for Tenerife only to find it was an Air Atlanta 747. Outbound from MAN the flight was 5 hours delayed because of a technical fault with the original 742 so we had to transfer to an AA 743, the flight crew then told us they'd have to swap around because they'd run out of flying hours...how lovely.
The service was horrendous, truly horrendous. They didn't have any vegetarians meals that we had ordered and the meal itself was pretty awful for the 10 POUNDS we had paid for them, next time it's going to be a packed sandwich and a flask.
Inbound was ok, only a few minutes late, again on an Air Atlanta 747 (the original -200 that we were meant to be on first time round). Meal had something to be desired but the new leather-esque seats and seat back tv's were a nice change.