Globaliser

Because most of the flights leave North America in the early evening, before bedtime (if my body clock has adjusted to local time), and arrive first thing in the morning. It's hard to get to sleep when your body isn't ready for it, especially if the cabin is busy with a meal service. These flights are short, so by the time it is bedtime, there's perhaps only a couple of hours before the cabin crew are setting up for the second service. That's hardly enough time to get a nap, let alone any decent sleep. So I arrive in Europe having almost been up all night, but I then have to deal with a new day - and my body clock thinks it's about 3 am which is the lowest point of the circadian cycle so I feel like death warmed up. It's a bit better if I can pick a flight that leaves North America close to midnight, but there aren't many of them. Even then, getting any sort of real sleep involves being determined to avoid all of the onboard service - I might then manage about 5 or so hours between New York and London. Flying from London to Sydney, I will usually pick a flight that leaves later in the evening. If the first sector is something 12 or 13 hours long, that's enough time to get a decent sleep overnight when my body thinks it's night time. Then there's time for a further sleep on the second sector. It's no picnic, and I still have to deal with a bigger time difference between London and Sydney, but I don't feel nearly as bad as getting off in London after an eastbound trans-Atlantic.

Whether you fly east or west has little to do with the severity of the jet lag. That really depends on the length of the flight, the times of departure and arrival, the time difference between the origin and the destination, the comfort of your flight, and the amount of sleep you get on board. As CruiserBruce says, every individual's experience of jet lag will be different. The only things that can safely be said are that there will be jet lag (even if you think you can't feel it) and it will be whatever it will be. FWIW, the flights I hate most for jet lag are the short overnights from North America to London/Europe. I can deal more easily with the jet lag flying from London to Sydney or back.

No, that wasn't the problem. The OP inadvertently called a scammer, and inadvertently gave the scammer written permission to change the tickets and to take more money from their credit card. It's the written permission that the credit card company seems to be relying on in order to refuse to refund that money.

You'll definitely get more out of a day sightseeing in London than in Southampton (it'll be half a day plus an evening). There are no trains from Southampton to Heathrow, anyway, and even by road you would struggle to get there comfortably in time for a 9 am flight. Are you flying on Monday 28 August? If so, that's a public holiday in England, so traffic in cental London will be light at the time you need to go out to the airport. That's another reason for doing that transfer by road. Choice of hotel depends very much on budget. Don't forget that there's no such thing as a hotel close to the sights, because central London sights are spread over a fairly wide area so there will always be some that you will have to travel to. However, don't expect to do much more than view the surface; you won't even scratch it, and seeing all of London requires a stay lasting months.

Take the Jubilee Line from Waterloo to Baker Street, then a cross-platform change to the Bakerloo Line to Paddington. There is step-free access down to the Jubilee Line platform at Waterloo, and I think that there is now step-free access from the Bakerloo Line platform to the street at Paddington. If you have luggage, do not attempt to take the Bakerloo Line directly from Waterloo to Paddington, even though that is a direct journey. On a quick look, you'd have to change between platform islands if you do this. At Reading, I think that means taking a lift (elevator) up to the footbridge and then a lift down to the next platform. With cruise luggage, personally I think that simply going from Southampton directly to London Waterloo is better.

What time is your flight from Heathrow? And what plans do you have for your time in London? If for some reason you must stay at Paddington, then taxi --> train --> taxi can't be improved on. But it worries me that you're only staying "near" Paddington. If you will need transport from your hotel to Paddington just to get the train to Heathrow, I reckon you're likely to be better off staying in central London and then just getting a cab/car directly to Heathrow the next day. Or alternatively, if it fits in with your plans, pick a hotel in central London that's next to an Elizabeth Line station and take an Elizabeth Line train directly to Heathrow the next day.

I'd be pretty annoyed if I had to pay as much as £25 to get a black cab from St Pancras to the far (Waterloo) end of Westminster Bridge, especially during the day. And especially as there are many bus lanes that black cabs are allowed to use. I reckon that the slowest part of the journey is likely to be just getting out of the southern end of Midland Road at its junction with Euston Road.

There's still a chicken-and-egg situation here. How do you know which company is your train operator? The answer is to start at nationalrail.co.uk. Thinking off the top of my head, one possible workaround is to see whether any of the other train operating companies will allow you to create an account and buy a ticket. In most cases, the fare will be the same whichever train operating company you buy from - but it is worth checking this before you actually buy the ticket. You can find a list of train operating companies here on the nationalrail.co.uk website.

How do you expect a visitor to work out which Train Operating Company operates on the route they need, especially when every TOC will sell tickets for every other TOC's services? Even Londoners often need to do some research if they want to find out whether their South London service is operated by South Western, Southern or Southeastern. For everyone else: nationalrail.co.uk is a website that's jointly run by the TOCs (together with other parts of the railway system) - so it's official. It's unusual for a TOC's lowest fare not to be visible on nationalrail.co.uk, or to be available only on the TOC's own website. This is why nationalrail.co.uk is always the best first place to start researching, not least because it will then tell you which TOC is operating on the route that you're looking at. In any case, nationalrail.co.uk doesn't sell tickets, so when it sends you to the relevant TOC to buy tickets (as it's set up to do), you will then get a chance to see whether the TOC has any lower fares that it didn't display on nationalrail.co.uk. But if you're going to do this, make sure that you go to nationalrail.co.uk, not anywhere else.

No. These are fundamentally commuter trains, on which there are no reservations. If you have a ticket and you can physically get onto the train, you can travel on it. You may want to remember that Stonehenge is not in Salisbury - it's about 10 miles away.

We always did, even before Brexit.

Thank you for letting us know what happened. I'm sorry that it happened to you, but it's a salutary lesson for all of us.

I think Z class is used by QF for premium economy awards.

The AA website says that for 80,000 miles, you get a U class seat - which is the booking class for a standard business class award.

No, it's not small: it's a 72-seater aircraft.

I agree. IME, confirmed award tickets are booked into confirmed space. I've had experience of booking a partner award using AA miles when the initial booking has been on request, and AA has had to wait for the operating airline to confirm the space. But that was made clear in communications, and the ticket wasn't issued until the space was confirmed. It's also odd to have the operating airline demand an additional payment for the reservation and the ticket when the booking was made by and charged by the frequent flyer scheme. The only thing that I can think of that might be a plausible scenario that is QF wasn't charging for either the reservation or the ticket, but only for seat pre-allocation - which is something typically paid directly to the operating airline. I wonder if there's been some confusion here between a reservation and a ticket for the flight on the one hand, and a seat allocation on the other.

This is all very well in theory, but if only it was that straightforward. You try flying from London to Dublin as a British citizen. You still have to prove that you're a British citizen and entitled to the benefit of the CTA. That's all very well for those who happen to have a driving licence stating that they were born in the UK - Irish immigration will usually accept that. But if you weren't born in the UK, then the way of proving that you're entitled to the benefit of the passport-free travel area is ... to produce a British citizen passport.

It doesn't seem particularly odd if the cruise also goes to a foreign country (ie Ireland for those with UK nationality, or the UK for those with Irish nationality). If nothing else, it wouldn't surprise me if the ship must prove to the immigration authorities that those passengers who have declared themselves to be British or Irish have told the truth, and that it can really only do so by presenting those passengers' passports.

The intra-airport transfer should also be free if you touch in and touch out with an Oyster card or a contactless payment card/device. Personally, I would be a bit contrary with this and suggest taking the Tube (Underground) rather than the HEX or the Elizabeth Line. This is because the Tube station in the Central Terminal Area is closer to T2 than the HEX/Elizabeth Line station, so it's a shorter walk after you get off the train. (This is not a big deal - we're talking about saving three or four minutes of walking, which is only likely to be important unless you have a lot of luggage with you - in which case taking any sort of train for the transfer is probably not a good idea.) If you're arriving at T4, the Tube is also more frequent: 6 tph on the Tube as opposed to 4 tph for the Elizabeth Line (as there's no Heathrow Express at T4).

Even in the Savoy, you can sometimes feel like you've had to walk into an adjacent postcode just to navigate your way through the building. The Clermont Victoria probably also has added complications from its part in Victoria station's slightly mind-boggling history.

The Piccadilly Line is not much slower than the Elizabeth Line, which can also be very crowded at peak times (although they are much nicer trains). Any speed advantage of the Elizabeth Line can quickly be eaten up by the time it takes to change to a Tube line (compared to the cross-platform change at Barons Court) or to get a taxi (because the taxi queue at Paddington can be long). Whether the Elizabeth Line makes sense is very journey dependent. It's a bit like taking the National Express coach from Heathrow to Central London. Unless you're changing to another coach or you have some good reason to stay right next to Victoria Coach Station, it seldom makes sense.

From memory, I think that the HEX / EL platforms can only be "a much closer walk" than the Tube if you happen to arrive at T3. The Tube station is closer to T2. And there are plenty of Tube stations where it's easy to get a taxi. Again from memory, the taxi queue at Paddington can be a very long one (which is one of the reasons why it's been a very long time since I've done HEX + taxi). By the time you've waited in that queue for 15 minutes and then taken a taxi into central London, you might already have reached your destination by some other route.

There's an official taxi rank outside each terminal.

If going to Victoria (as the OP is), there's no point using the Elizabeth Line.

The OP is on a roll call for the 12 July 2023 Copenhagen --> Southampton sailing of Island Princess: https://boards.cruisecritic.com/profile/856697-snorkeler-gal/content/ That was the source of my guesses that the flying dates would be about 10 July 2023 for Chicago --> Copenhagen and about 26 July 2003 for London --> Chicago. I don't think that Chicago --> Copenhagen (or the reverse) can be done non-stop.