Globaliser

You don't get off the ship in Bruges. You probably get off the ship in Zeebrugge, which is about 9 or 10 miles away from Bruges.

Why would you be sure of this? If you check your bag twice, you double many of the chances of the bag going walkabout. Bags don't only go missing when they're being transferred from one flight to another.

Yes, I know about the sin bin. I actually used it for an AA-->AA once, but that was back in the mid-1990s. But MIA had another arrangement, where ITI bags would go through without having to be collected by the pax, even though the pax still had to clear immigration, customs and security. I remember this being in operation in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s. Has this been withdrawn?

Borough Market and the Shard are very close to each other - about 250 yards.

So what's happened to the arrangement at MIA, by which ITI transfer bags were automatically transferred to the next flight without the passenger having to collect them? The passenger still had to clear inbound immigration and customs and then be security-cleared, but they didn't have to wait for their bags. (For clarity, this was different from the sin-bin arrangement that you mentioned earlier, which was truly horrible.) IIRC, there may have been a complexity along the lines that AA-->AA ITI transfer bags didn't fall within this arrangement, but it's been a long time since I last arrived in MIA so I can't now remember.

A handful of notes about this: I'd recommend NOT taking the Bakerloo Line to Waterloo with luggage, because I think you can't exit step-free. Taking the Jubilee Line to Waterloo is better because of the step-free exit. The change from the Piccadilly Line to the Jubilee Line at Green Park is a bit inconvenient. An alternative is to change twice: from the Piccadilly Line to the District Line at Barons Court (an easy cross-platform change with minimal walking - about 10 feet), and then from the District Line to the Jubilee Line at Westminster. (In the morning peak or inclement weather, it may be better to change at Hammersmith rather than Barons Court, but the walk is about twice as long.) In addition, if the destination is either the Premier Inn London Waterloo (Westminster Bridge) or the Premier Inn London County Hall, it's actually not much further to walk from Westminster (and much more scenic), when compared to walking from the Jubilee Line exit at Waterloo (because that's on the opposite side of the station from the hotels). So you could do an easy change at Barons Court and then simply exit from the Tube at Westminster.

This is very funny. It may be true for Texas, but no weather forecast for the British Isles can necessarily be relied on to be "pretty accurate". If we happen to be having a spell of settled weather (whether good or bad), then a weather forecast may be reasonably good for three to four days ahead. If we're in an unsettled patch (like we are now), forecasts for more than about three or four hours in advance may be no better than sticking your finger in the air and guessing - and good forecasters will tell you this themselves. This is a consequence of the fact that we basically live in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The only thing that can be said with confidence is that we will be in for a spot of weather.

You should be able to take a lunchtime or early afternoon flight from Heathrow to Rome with little stress. If this is for 25 March 2024, then there's a BA at 1245 (arriving at 1620) that is well within the usual timeframe for post-cruise flights from Heathrow. If you're not comfortable with that, there's another one at 1420 (arriving at 1755). With those options, it would seem to be a waste of a day to hole up at an airport hotel.

No, this shouldn't happen - and it's not happened to me on the (mercifully few) occasions when I've had to accept the charge in the currency of my card. I have heard of it happening in rare circumstances. From memory, I think that one example was a merchant that offered to charge in € or £. But because of the merchant's location (or the location of their payment processor), the £ charge happened to be processed in GIP rather than GBP. The Gibraltar pound is pegged and freely convertible to the British pound at 1:1, but it is technically a different currency and is coded as such (ie as GIP rather than GBP). Some UK credit card companies therefore treated the charge as a foreign currency transaction, and charged the FX fee in addition to the GIP charge, even though the customer was expecting a GBP charge of the same amount with no FX fee. If that were to happen, the customer would be well advised to complain.

Indeed - the Shard is within easy walking distance of (for example) Borough Market, HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, the Monument, Shakespeare's Globe, and Tate Britain. Just a little further away, over the Millennium Bridge, is St Paul's Cathedral. Incidentally, your ship will be departing from Southampton. You'll get better search results if you use the correct name.

No. Whether the card is fee-free or fee-paying (assuming a typical FX rate), I'd take the charge in the merchant's currency. If I'm visiting the eurozone (as in this discussion) and the € / EUR is the merchant's currency, I'd take the € / EUR charge. But obviously, this works out even better if the card is FX fee-free.

This maximises the benefit of accepting the charge in the merchant's currency. But the FX rates usually imposed by the merchant if you choose to pay in your own currency mean that you will often pay more that way even if your credit card is one on which you pay a typical 2.5% - 3.0% FX fee. So I would take the charge in the merchant's currency even if I'm using a card on which I have to pay an FX fee.

Are those cruise ports? Yes. Tilbury is actually the main cruise terminal for London. The terminal there is formally called the London Cruise Terminal. Only a small number of relatively small ships actually come up the river into London proper. Dover has a very well-established and long-standing cruise terminal, and my impression is that Portsmouth has become busier in recent years, although usually only with smaller ships.

There's no way that you need to spend $1,200 for one night in London. And airport hotels aren't always much cheaper than hotels in central London, so the amount of money you're saving would be fairly limited. Also, from a jet lag / tiredness point of view, staying at the airport but travelling into central London to sightsee is choosing the worst of both worlds - not least because after you've exhausted yourselves from sightseeing, you still have to haul yourself all the way back to the airport and then from the airport to the hotel. John Bull's advice was spot-on: either go to central London, or else go straight to Southampton. If you can still change your plans, I would seriously advise doing so.

Yes, I think that that's exactly what I was pointing out.

But in general, a couple will probably lose more by doing this than they would gain by a small chance at the lucky dip for an empty middle seat.

On a quick look, it's even more out of date than SeatGuru. For British Airways, it still lists a 747 configuration that was retired 7 years ago (although both sites are guilty of listing aircraft that the airline no longer operates).

They can't go into baggage claim because that's a passenger-only area. It will be after you have collected your bags, cleared customs (just a walk-through unless you declare something or you are selected for a search), passed the arrivals shop, and then exited into the public area. I don't usually pay much attention to who's in that area, but that meeting area is the obvious place for the reps to be. There'll be a lot of people waiting in the area, so keep your eyes open for someone holding the appropriate sign.

If you're asking about whether the route from the gate to immigration is well signed, the answer is yes. Follow the yellow-and-black signs for "Arrivals". These will take you to immigration. Don't just "follow everyone". Not everyone will be going to immigration; many passengers will be making direct airside connections and will be following a "Flight Connections" route - those are signed in purple, to distinguish it from the arrivals stream.

For similar historical reasons, ss Rotterdam is a very special place to stay.

No, it doesn't have comments. But if you're thinking of the SeatGuru comments, they are pretty rubbish too because the vast majority are simple guesswork rather than the product of experience. aerolopa's seat maps are so good that you can often work out more for yourself from very accurate source information.

Was there a place to store luggage on the train? As long as you are not travelling at a peak time (and in the direction of the peak traffic), there is plenty of space on these trains to put your luggage. There isn't much dedicated luggage space, but that's no problem if the train isn't full because all you have to do is to put it in some space near you. Countless thousands of people do this every day. You just improvise.

Even Paris, where historically the natives were famously averse to speaking English, has had to change. Everyone in tourist-facing areas seems to speak at least passable English. This is actually very little to do with American or British visitors. Parisians could easily continue to cope with being unfriendly to us and making us stumble over what little school-era French we could muster. What has happened over the past couple of decades is the huge increase in visitors from other countries around the world, who really couldn't be expected to speak any French, but who have very often acquired a decent amount of what is now Planet Earth's lingua franca: English. That's why even the French now have to speak English to visitors. You just described his diet. There's plenty of all of that all over Europe, anyway. If you want weird food, try Glasgow. Anyone for deep-fried Mars bars?

No, don't go to SeatGuru. It's pretty rubbish. The best seat map website out there at present is aerolopa.com.

These days flights seem to be full so that strategy may backfire & you will have a stranger in between you then again you could have an empty seat If you're in a 3-seat row and someone is in the middle seat between you, you can offer them their choice of window or aisle seat. It's almost unheard of for that passenger to refuse to move from the middle seat and to insist on keeping you separated.