Globaliser

This sounded unusual for Heathrow so I had a look at the Aer Lingus website. It looks like this is just EI's marketing term for self-service bag drop, so my guess is that earliest bag drop would be no different from using a conventional check-in desk. AIUI, Heathrow sometimes imposes a 3-hour limit at busy times, so as not to overwhelm the early bag store with bags for flights departing a long time ahead, but I think that would be your worst-case scenario. If EI won't take your bag earlier, then you can pop it into the left luggage facility: https://www.left-baggage.co.uk/en/locations/left-luggage-heathrow-t2 (I think T2 is the terminal where EI operates?) and then just retrieve it before you drop it off with EI when you get back to the airport.

Greece ports Italy ports

The whole list of 2026 cruises sent today has "[Christian] McBride's World at Sea" slotted in between TJC and SJC in January in the Caribbean. Botti is in September, immediately following the new third SJC sailing (both on the West Coast).

Then that's within scope for 261/2004, and it's now become quite hard for an airline to avoid paying as the exceptions have become progressively narrowed.

I can't see how you'd really be worse off if you follow the instructions on the GWR website about how to do it. The hoops you have to jump through in this situation are part of the quid pro quo for getting cheaper Advance fares. Which airline is operating the flight that's been cancelled, and on which route was that? You may qualify for cash compensation under the UK version of Regulation 261/2004, which could take some of the sting out of this hiccup.

I'd take this one. The 0135 departure from YYZ gives you a better chance of some decent sleep on board the first flight (although I would ignore the first meal service to do this). A 2:35 connection time would be fine in itself, but it obviously gives you less margin for delays on your first flight. Um, Hong Kong is one of the foremost international airline hubs in the whole world. Why wouldn't there be signs in English? You will only have to clear security. If your first flight is on time, you'd have enough time to take a shower in the lounge (Cathay Pacific has a selection of good lounges in Hong Kong) so that you're feeling fresher and more relaxed for the second flight.

From non-expert observation, if someone does this and knows how to use their phone, then I think it's actually faster than using a contactless bank card, and is about as fast as a pay-as-you-go Oyster. But it's a big "if". The problems come from (a) the people who don't, and who then occupy a gate for 5, 10, 20 or more seconds franctically swiping their phone screen trying to get the correct card up and active before they then reorientate their phone to try to get the reader to read it; and (b) the people who don't know where on the phone the NFC chip is so they are twisting and turning their phones to try to get the reader to read it.

No, for a more basic reason than fare capping. It is basically impossible to charge properly for any journey unless a card that is logged as having entered "in" to the system is logged "out" before it is logged "in" again. If two people travel at the same time using a single card, that simply can't happen. And impossible situations arise if the two people travel on different journeys, which is a possible outcome unless and until both people have touched "out". If TfL was really interested in speeding up entry, it would ban phone payments.

Bournemouth to Southampton is about a 30-mile 1-hour journey, isn't it? Even given how cruise passengers can tend to be risk-averse, that's pretty extreme!

There should be direct services. There certainly are on a random day next week. But it looks like there are only a few each day (I counted only a dozen). If there are no direct services, then it would make absolutely no sense to take a train to the airport and then take a coach; it would be mad not to just take the train from central London to central Southampton instead. More generally, there really aren't many good reasons to take the coach from central London to central Southampton anyway. On any route with a decent rail service, rail beats road for pretty much everyone - which is one of the reasons why there are so many more trains than coaches (40 on the same random day).

The OP wasn't likely to be at risk of this anyway. If they did have to wait until Princess issued the tickets and that happened a month out (which would be typical), there would almost certainly still be plenty of seats that they could pay Qantas for.

London Underground is now good at helping people with visual impairments if they're travelling on their own: station staff will escort them through the stations. If it was actual children who were at risk of getting left behind, there's a decent chance that someone would have done something more anyway, whether that was the train operator or other passengers. But nobody's going to pay any attention if it's early teens who might be on their own (except maybe to try hard not to laugh at the wailing).

This is one of the things that online check-in is good for, if you don't already have a pre-allocated seat. Do you know all of this, or is it more of your speculation? Some of us have spent decades living all these permutations. For example, the point that you had to read up online about consolidators and ticket issue is something I know because I have deliberately used the system to my personal advantage on many occasions.

Of the three you list, this would be the easiest for public transport. It's about 5 minutes walk to Earls Court Tube, where there is step-free access down to the District Line. I would then change at Westminster (step-free) to the Jubilee Line to go one stop to Waterloo, where there is step-free exit and step-free access up to the mainline concourse for the onward train to Southampton. Don't try Gloucester Road Tube with luggage.

Take the train. And yes, there is plenty of space of luggage. Every day, thousands of people get off a flight and get on the train with their luggage. Occasionally, the train may not be the answer for some people, but it really is the answer for the vast majority.

On airlines like Qantas that charge for seat pre-allocation, there are usually plenty of seats still available a month or so before departure, which is when cruise lines typically issue the ticket (and pay the airline). That is actually one of the reasons why they charge: to try to dissuade early bookers from hogging all the best seats, when the airline's most profitable customers are typically the ones who book really late (three weeks or less before departure). But this is confusing two steps in the process. Even if you don't have pre-allocated seats, online check-in is usually available, typically long before you set off for the airport, and during that process you should be able to get a seat allocation. And even if you can't at that stage, you're very unlikely to be able to go to the gate without a boarding pass, and you're very unlikely to have one of those without also having checked in and having a seat allocation. If a flight is oversold (ie more passengers check in than the number of physical seats on board the aircraft), having a seat pre-allocation doesn't provide that much protection against being bumped. If that's the situation, it doesn't take a huge amount of button-pressing to make space for someone who's checking in at the airport by cancelling the seat pre-allocation of another passenger who hasn't yet checked in. After all, the second passenger hasn't bought a ticket for that particular seat, but has only made a request for it.

This also applies to groups of adults. It doesn't really matter what the plan is, so long as you make a plan and everyone knows what it is. Personally, I prefer a uniform plan of meeting up again on the platform at the next station, whoever has been left behind. The cause is preventable, anyway. Every time I see this happen (which is a lot), it's because someone's tried to rush onto a train at the last moment, just before it's going to close its doors and depart. Why the lemming-like compulsion to travel on the train that's already on the platform? Let it go. The next train usually won't be more than 2 or 3 minutes behind. Anyway, it was hardly a "disaster". Early teens are not children any more. And there are plenty of children who are younger than that travelling unaccompanied on the Tube all the time.

No, that's not the way it works. When you buy a ticket to travel on an airline like Qantas, you do not have a ticket for a specific seat; it's not like buying a theatre ticket. That's the same whether you buy directly from Qantas or through an agent like Princess. If Qantas pre-allocates you a seat, that's basically a request (although if you have paid Qantas for that, there will be terms about whether/when/how you may get your money back if the request is not honoured). If you book through an agent like Princess and you can only request a seat on Qantas by paying for it, that would be an additional payment by you to Qantas. I don't think that Princess can save itself any money by not paying for a seat request for you. The OP is describing something which (IME) seems typical of cruise lines. It may well be that Princess has reserved space on the Qantas flight for the OP (which means space for some seat, but not any particular seat, on the flight), but hasn't yet bought the ticket from Qantas, and Qantas won't accept a seat request until Princess actually buys the ticket (and Qantas has been paid for the ticket). Princess does have a financial reason for not actually buying the ticket until quite close to departure: it's taken the OP's money but hasn't yet had to pay it to Qantas, because it doesn't need to until it actually buys the ticket.

If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't bother. There is no need for the airline reservation or ticket to show your middle name(s). If they have passport first name and passport family name, that will be fine. However, if the airline asks you to input your details for advance passenger information purposes before travel, that is a process which requires accuracy. But it's a different set of data from what the reservation or ticket have.

Because in London, all of the things that I have mentioned (and more) mean that it makes no sense for hotels to organise the kind of shuttles you mention. Just as hotels don't organise tours to Bath, Watford or Windsor.

If you're staying in a Miami area hotel, it's a few miles to the port. If you're staying in a London hotel, going to the port in Southampton involves travelling to a different city altogether, covering a distance of a similar order to travelling from New York City to Philadelphia. For that reason alone, it's hardly surprising that London hotels don't offer shuttles to the port. In addition, a negligible proportion of self-booked guests at any London hotel will be going on a cruise from Southampton, which is another difference from Miami.

I would still urge people not to fret or panic about this. It really should be no big deal, particularly if you know that you are an absolutely bog-standard tourist (eg US citizen with no criminal or other adverse history), of which the UK welcomes and wishes to continue welcoming millions every year. If you know or think that you will need one, it's one of those bits of pre-departure admin in the weeks before you leave, like checking that your credit cards aren't all going to expire while you're away. As a corollary, I would expect to do my US ESTA / Australian eVisitor / New Zealand eTA about a week or two before travel, if I don't already have a valid one.

That's not correct. There are some nationalities that require a visa to travel to the UK even if all that they do is to do an international-to-international transit without crossing the immigration border or entering the UK. I've generally been ignoring these ETIAS amd ETA threads because there really is absolutely no point fretting about something that's still many months away. All that's currently needed is an awareness that by the date of travel, there may (or may not) be a requirement to get one.

What do you need it for? A quick Google threw up a number of hits about distilled water and CPAP machines in the UK, for example - and why distilled water is (apparently) actually unnecessary and therefore not widely available here.

Just pick any hotel you like in the city centre close to the main railway station, because it's 10 minutes by train to the airport. You'll probably be best off south of the station (ie between the station and the lake), but either side of the river would work. A family member has stayed at the St Gotthard several times, and that would tick all those boxes.