Globaliser

My guess is that this is because the LGBTQIA+ Cruisers forum also has a sub-forum: LGBTQIA+ Roll Calls. In the main forum listing ( https://boards.cruisecritic.com ), the "LGBTQIA+ Cruisers" listing will remain bold until you have marked as read both the LGBTQIA+ Cruisers forum and the LGBTQIA+ Roll Calls sub-forum.

FWIW, ASLEF has now announced a strike for Friday 1 September, and an overtime ban on Saturday 2 September. The affected TOCs will publish details of their plans later; but at a guess this will mean that on Saturday 2 September there will be disruption in the morning due to trains being out of position (Friday 1 September may see very few if any trains operated by the affected TOCs), and a reduced service on mainline routes because of a combination of RMT's strike and ASLEF's overtime ban. So my guess remains that there's a good chance that you'll get from Southampton to Glasgow at some stage that day.

On the assumption that your onward flight is on AA, good. A quick look suggests that the published Minimum Connection Time for this is 85 minutes. If you have "about" 120 minutes, and you have GE, you have a decent margin over the MCT - although it depends on what you mean by "about".

One of the issues is that it is probably too early to be planning the fine detail of this, because (I suspect) plans for engineering work that weekend have not yet been confirmed. For example, if SWR is selling Advance tickets to Southampton Central on Saturday but not Sunday, it's possible that SWR has not yet confirmed the timetable for Sunday. (Notably, the Advance tickets are only available on every other train on Saturday, so there appears to be some uncertainty about that day in any event.) Also, if there are Advance tickets from London Waterloo to Eastleigh, but not to Southampton Central, then it's possible that SWR may yet do something on the line between Eastleigh and Southampton Central. One indication is the specific warnings on the National Rail website that John Bull has also given an example of: the currently-published timetable is not the final timetable for that weekend. Whatever you can buy on Trainline, you can usually buy directly from the train operating company, but without Trainline's booking fee. This means that you can already replicate what Trainline seems to have sold to your fellow cruisers - an Advance ticket from Waterloo to Eastleigh (£8.70), plus a walk-up fare from Eastleigh to Southampton Central (£3.90) - by simply buying these tickets from SWR. However, split ticketing comes with disadvantages. If all you ever do is look at the total cost, you can miss the hidden pitfalls. If you want to try to save money in this way, you really ought to do it with your eyes wide open and with a full understanding of the rules and their implications. The potential disadvantages, given the (probably) unconfirmed state of the timetable for that day, include: The Advance ticket can only be used on the specific train that has been booked. If you want to take a direct train from Waterloo to Southampton using a pair of tickets like this, then you must choose a train that calls at Eastleigh (even though you don't have to get off and get on again there). There are fewer trains from Waterloo to Eastleigh than there are trains from Waterloo to Southampton, so you have less choice of train times. The Advance ticket is not valid on a direct train from Waterloo to Southampton if the train does not call at Eastleigh - you could well be made to pay a penalty fare for Waterloo to Southampton onboard the train, but you probably couldn't get a refund for the Advance ticket because these are non-refundable. If the timetable is amended so that there are no trains between Eastleigh and Southampton, then you will have to get off at Eastleigh and change, probably to a rail replacement bus service. If the timetable is amended so that there are no direct trains between Waterloo and Southampton that call at Eastleigh (which is the normal situation on a weekday), then you will also have to take a train to Eastleigh and change trains there; or alternatively junk the tickets you have already bought and buy a replacement Waterloo-Southampton ticket. So don't be blinded by the siren lure of saving money. If I were in your shoes, I would stick to what I've already said above: do nothing for the moment and see how things settle down. Your worst-case train fare scenario is that you have to pay £41 for a walk-up fare, just like you would pay now if you were to buy a ticket for 22 October. The difference between that and the best-case split ticketing scenario is less than thirty quid. Historically, whenever I cruised from Southampton I'd always just paid the walk-up fare for the train because the travel flexibility on the day of departure was worth paying the extra money for, although I haven't done one of these for a long time now. Finally, BTW, the place really is spelt "Southampton". It's dead easy if you simply take a taxi - on a Sunday morning, I reckon that this should be something like £20.

It's much too early to know whether there will be any industrial action that day. There is, however, some planned engineering work affecting that route. You can see the details on this page on SWR's website, but on a quick look, it appears that trains will run from London Waterloo to Southampton Central on 22 October. Advance tickets may go on sale later, or they may not. But there would seem to be little reason for you to do anything about tickets at this point in time.

Have a look at this thread:

Thanks for that - I will have to make a note in my diary about those announcement dates. Coincidentally, a Chris Botti CD turned up in the post today, which reminded me of last week's email that said that there were fewer remaining cabins for Botti at Sea 2024 than for TJC 2024. If Botti turns out to be a winning formula that eliminates the perennial struggle about what began as the CJC, so much the better.

It may be worth mentioning, then, that IIRC (assuming that you will tender to Greenwich Pier) the closest that a car can normally get is here, which is a couple of hundred yards from where you would actually step off the tender. Also, at low tide there can be a reasonably steep slope to walk up from the floating part of the pier to the bank - see this image and this image for an illustration. If these might pose a problem, it could be worth asking your cruise line about any special arrangements.

That may well be true, although it will be for each passenger to decide for themselves. However, that's a different issue from whether duty-free liquids bought in the US will be confiscated at the connection point in Europe. Basically: if it's in a compliant STEB, it won't be.

No, this is not correct: Pre-pandemic, if your over-size duty-free liquids were sealed in a compliant STEB, they were good for any security screening at any connecting point that accepted the STEB. (Compliance requirements included a visible receipt showing the date and time of purchase, and the STEB would be valid for 24 hours from that time.) This applied to purchases in the US by passengers connecting through (and being security-screened) at Heathrow, as well as to connections made at other European airports that required security screening of connecting passengers. On my regular routes, the only exception was flights inbound to Australia, which did not recognise STEBs and required the application of the 100ml rule at the last boarding point before arrival in Australia, save for purchases made at that point and delivered by the shop directly to the aircraft door. In any case, there are many European airports that will now accept US security screening, so that further security screening is not required if you connect at one of these airports. If no security screening is required at the connecting point, then obviously you can continue to carry whatever liquids you already have on you. I'm not aware of any of these basic rules having changed since the pandemic, hence my question as to whether you think that they have. So the OP may well be perfectly safe to buy duty-free in the US without any risk of it being confiscated in Paris before boarding their flight to Barcelona. This has nothing to do with the newer scanners, although their introduction will be very welcome to us all. They've already made a difference to the experience at my local airport.

It depends on how you would want get from the dock to the airport. By public transport, an obvious route to Heathrow would be a short walk to Cutty Sark DLR, then the DLR to West India Quay, then a short walk to Canary Wharf Elizabeth Line for a direct train to Heathrow Central (because IIRC Icelandair is at Terminal 2). That would probably be easier than any public transport route from the dock to Gatwick, plus IIRC Icelandair uses the North Terminal there which involves one more step (using the inter-terminal transit to transfer from the railway station at the South Terminal). By car, the journey time to either airport is probably about the same, although to Gatwick that partly depends on whether your driver is prepared to do a lot of fast miles out on the the A2 to the M25 and then round to the M23, or whether he's going to insist taking on the shortest route through suburban purgatory. Other than the journey to the airport, I can't think of any particular reason to favour one airport over the other, given that it would be the same airline at each.

Have EU airports stopped recognising US STEBs? I thought that if you buy duty-free alcohol (or other liquids) in the US and it's sealed into a compliant STEB, then it will be accepted through security screening in EU airports.

You've mentioned this one before:

There should be more specific advice by the day of travel. What I recall on the strike day on which I travelled was basically along the lines of: If your booked train operates, you can/should take it. If your booked train doesn't operate, you can take any other train. Also, if you miss your onward booked train because of strike disruption on an earlier part of the journey, you can use your existing ticket to take any other train (and this is a standard provision anyway for a missed connection on a through ticket that's not your fault). The train operating company that I was on also allowed you to make a standalone seat reservation on another train if you wished to have a reserved seat and you couldn't travel on your original train. But there were actually plenty of free seats anyway. My vague impression was that on a strike day, anything goes so far as using tickets on other trains was concerned. But it's safer to know exactly what your TOC actually advises.

That option on SeatGuru was never reliable (= worse than useless, because it was often misleading), so it's probably better that it isn't there on aerolopa. You should be able to see the configuration for your flight (or your possible flights, if you're trying to choose between them) by trying to pre-allocate a seat on your airline's website. Alternatively, you can use ExpertFlyer to find the exact seat map for your flight (or possible flights) - I think that this can be done with a free subscription if seat maps are the only thing that you require. ExpertFlyer uses real-time information drawn from airline reservations systems, so it is pretty much as accurate as any source can be. SeatGuru's attempts to retrieve the seat map on the basis of your flight number never seemed to draw on accurate real-time information - basically, it often seemed to be guessing. When you get the configuration from one of these sources, aerolopa will then give you an accurate seat map. My own experience is that it can be more accurate than airline websites' own seat maps. As for SeatGuru's "reviews", they were as often as not just wild guesswork. With the accurate maps that aerolopa gives you, you can actually work out a lot of this for yourself, and probably more accurately than SeatGuru's guesses. Unfortunately, aerolopa's seat maps don't have everything - one of the things that I think it's missing is the exact locations of underseat IFE boxes.

aerolopa.com

I don't think that any of the trains operated between London and Southampton have any dedicated storage space for luggage. They're fundamentally commuter trains - and so if you have luggage you're always going to have to improvise about where the luggage goes. One type of space is the area between rows of seats where they're installed back-to-back, leaving an A-shaped gap. Otherwise, it's just a case of anywhere you can find a space. The eight-seat first-class compartment made me dig into the detail of the rolling stock that SWR uses. On a quick look, it seems that the most common type between London and Southampton is the Class 444 (see more detail here), but sometimes a Class 450 train may be used (see more detail here). It's the Class 450s that have the small first-class compartment. I don't think there's any easy way for an outsider to know in advance what's planned for the future, but a poke around the last few days suggests that Class 450s tend to appear only on slower trains, and are often coupled with a Class 444 anyway. Are you travelling on your own? If you are, and you have three pieces of luggage, I'd question whether you might be better off using a car service anyway. It's not easy to manage three pieces of luggage on your own, bearing in mind that you'll have to lift, carry and stow them by yourself without assistance.

One other thing that should be both an alert and some comfort: There could also be disruption between Southampton and London. I presume that you're planning to use South Western Railway for this, and its website also has a warning: "It is likely that we will operate a significantly reduced service on a limited number of lines, with trains only running between the hours of 0700 and 1900." So it isn't only the London to Glasgow part of your journey that could be affected. However, the wording of that statement underlines how it is likely that you will be able to travel, just not necessarily as currently booked. It seems that Avanti West Coast is being more cautious about avoiding overcrowding on trains on which some passengers will be making very long journeys, hence taking all trains off sale until the strike timetable has been finalised. SWR doesn't have quite the same constraints, and many passengers would do no more than grumble a bit (at the unions, probably) if they have to stand for (say) the 1¼ hours between Southampton and London, which is probably the worst-case scenario for that bit of the journey.

I wouldn't put any money on the strike not going ahead. But that's not the full story. The announced strike is by a union called the RMT. Recently, strikes by this union have seldom been enough to bring trains to a complete halt on important main lines like London <-> Glasgow and London <-> Edinburgh. I have an experience similar to fruitmachine's when I've been travelling London <--> Newcastle: the trains that ran were pleasantly quiet, even though I had to adjust my journey times to get onto a train that did run. If a union called ASLEF strikes, then trains operated by the relevant companies do tend to come to a complete halt. Further strikes for 2 September could be announced any time up to 2 weeks before that date. So it's not yet possible to be fully confident about this - but if there is no ASLEF strike on 2 September, then I would personally be reasonably comfortable that I would be able to get to Glasgow at some time on that day.

I doubt that the OP will see such signs at Heathrow. There will be yellow signs saying "Arrivals" and "Baggage Reclaim"; there will also be purple signs for "Flight Connections", but the colour makes it clear that these are not relevant to the OP. At baggage claim itself, the only relevant signs may be the yellow ones saying "Exit", and then the red and green portals for the two Customs channels. As far as I can tell, this is a Heathrow policy: reduce the number of different words to the minimum to avoid confusion. After all, for a very large proportion of Heathrow passengers, English is a foreign language, so the fewer words that the passenger needs to translate as they move through the airport, the faster they will understand where they need to go. Only after exiting from Customs will there be more specific signs. For the OP, I think that the relevant signs will be yellow ones saying "Buses".

The OP's first question was definitely about whether a credit card (as opposed to a debit card) would be accepted. There was then ("also") a second question about whether you get a physical card: The idea that debit cards would be accepted but not credit cards isn't outlandish. In the UK, AIUI a merchant taking a debit card is charged a flat fee for the transaction but a percentage fee for a credit card transaction. So there are some places here that take debit cards but not credit cards, and the same may apply in the Netherlands too. But my impression is that credit card acceptance has become more widespread because of the stringent cap that has (in effect) been imposed on the percentage fee that can be charged to a merchant when accepting a credit card transaction, so that taking a credit card has become cheaper than it used to be.

But I see 40 minutes? Omitting suppressed MCTs: Minimum Connect Times: Connecting at ORD Incoming airline UA Outgoing airline UA Flight type Domestic to International STANDARD.D/D...D/I...I/D...I/I. ONLINE .50 1.15 1.30 1.30 OFFLINE .50 1.15 1.30 1.30 ** OR * ARE ALL ... UA-UA DI .45 AUA - ALL 13FEB14 - INF UA-UA DI .45 DUB - ALL UA-UA DI .45 NAS - ALL 13FEB14 - INF UA-UA DI .45 SNN - ALL 13FEB14 - INF ... UA-UA DI .40 13FEB14 - INF UA-** DI 1.30 TRM 5 - ** COUNTRY CA - ALL ...

However, there's no absolute guarantee. Occasionally (but very rarely), engineering work can overrun. But even if it does, they do their best to clear it as quickly as they can, so any further disruption is usually confined to the earlier half of the morning. Beyond that, you're probably about as likely to have serious disruption on the railway as you are to have serious disruption on the roads if you choose to do that instead; we've all had the experience of being trapped on a motorway for prolonged periods of time because (for example) it's been closed ahead due to an accident. Incidentally, now that I've been looking at the timetable detail, you may want to note that the direct train from Bath to Southampton is actually operated by Great Western Railway (not South Western). You may find GWR a bit more friendly towards US addresses.

I always think that a discussion like this was probably where the idea for that game came from. It is the kind of thing that Londoners are wrestling with all the time.

But don't forget to keep watching for this one as well. 31 October 2023 is at the beginning of the next international scheduling season (northern winter 2023/24), and we will soon be in the period when airlines make final decisions about (and final adjustments to) international schedules for that season.