Globaliser

"Not adding value to the process" wasn't the complaint you made earlier. The fact that you've only seen this sort of thing in the US may just be a consequence of you not having flown to enough other countries around the world. But so far as "adding value to the process" is concerned, keeping non-passenger members of the public out of the terminal building altogether certainly adds value in many situations.

Thanks - that's a bit that I couldn't find. It's been too long since I last had visitors of that age. In this case, the best way to do this with contactless is to use the wide gate that should be available at every gateline: the adult touches in with the contactless card and then walks through with the child(ren) they're travelling with.

IANAE, but I think that the 10 yo would need a 5-10 Zip Oyster photocard to travel for free, and the 13 yo would need an 11-15 Zip Oyster photocard for the fares specific to their age. If that's too much hassle (and there are a lot of steps involved for just a few days' discounted travel), then one alternative is the relatively poorly publicised Young Visitor Discount, which is added to an Oyster card when the child is in London and takes very little time for a TfL staff member to set, but wouldn't save you as much money. You'd need to do the maths to work out whether it's worth your while getting Zip cards. In part, it'll depend on how long you're spending in London, and when you're coming. There'll be a limit to how much money you save each day because of the daily caps, so that will limit how much time it's worth your while spending on the project. On Heathrow Express, if you pay by contactless you pay the full walk-up fare (£25.00 one-way). Are you really sure you'd want to do that even if the children can go for free? As you know your arrival date, wouldn't you be better off buying an advance purchase ticket? I think that these can be had for as little as £5.50. This seems to be one route on which paying by contactless does not make sense if you can do it a different and cheaper way.

It's these two lines, isn't it? You go up to "the next cabin of service". Discount Premium Economy with published fares booked in P Full-Fare Premium Economy with published fares booked in W

It looks like the non-stop IAH-SYD flight operates during northern winter 2023/24 but not during northern summer 2024 - so the last departure from IAH is Friday 29 March 2024. Now for an entertaining question: What's happening to that aircraft? (Or perhaps that should be: When will UA's schedulers wake up to this glitch?)

If you fly from Copenhagen to another EU country that's within the Schengen travel area, and then connect on to Chicago, you will clear Schengen exit immigration at the connection point, but you may be able to avoid clearing security a second time at the connection point. If you fly from Copenhagen via London to Chicago, you will clear Schengen exit immigration at Copenhagen before the first flight and there will be no immigration control at London, but you will have to clear security a second time there. As gumshoe958 says, this depends on Copenhagen to Chicago being on one through ticket.

I have little doubt that in the UK, a credit card company would have quickly refunded the OP. But I suspect that the problem here is that the scammers did what the OP gave them written permission to do, and paid them to do: to change the booking that the OP already had. So in a sense, the scammers did deliver what they had promised. Given that the scammers had the OP's written permission, it is not hard to see why a credit card company might not be quite so ready to refund immediately. The scam seems to have been that the scammers pretended that they were the airlines concerned, when they were not, rather than them taking money but not delivering.

Windsor is almost right next to Heathrow; they even built the castle underneath the flight path. So it doesn't make any sense to go from Heathrow to Southampton, and then to make a day trip from Southampton to Windsor. In any case, if "a day early" means that you're only going to spend one night in Southampton before the cruise, you haven't got time to do a day trip to Windsor. Even with an early morning arrival at Heathrow, you wouldn't be in your Southampton hotel before about midday, which leaves you with too little time to visit Windsor that day; and on the day of the cruise departure you will at best only have the morning before you have to check in, so you have too little time that day. If you specifically want to visit Windsor before the cruise, either stay there or at Heathrow when you arrive, and then transfer to Southampton the next morning in time to check in for the cruise.

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.