Globaliser

There's no way you're getting from Paddington station to the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge in 15 minutes, even at 3.00 am!

Except for international arrivals at most airports around the world, and domestic arrivals at many non-US airports! Fortunately, this won't adversely affect the OP - although I too can't understand the logic behind their plan.

For Torbay, the towns of Dartmouth, Kingswear and Totnes, which can even be done together via triangular trips sold by the Dartmouth Steam Railway. Also, you're close enough to get up onto Dartmoor; if you do, one of the quirkiest places to call at must be a Californian bakery (the Beachwood Bakery) in Chagford, which was listed by the Financial Times as one of "The 50 greatest food stores in the world". But there's plenty of countryside to see up there.

The 8-digit number is almost certainly nothing to do with any airline. If you can't get NCL to give you your Sabre locator, then with your name, flight details and 13-digit ticket number, AA should be able to pull up your reservation anyway.

Of the ports you list, I think that the only one that really requires getting away from the port town is Le Verdon, but you'd want to have a good think about what you want to do and see. It's most obviously a good starting point for seeing the wineries of the Medoc, but not everyone will want to do that. The city of Bordeaux is reachable, but a long way away. From memory, Le Verdon is also one of the harder ports from which to DIY, so you may be more likely to be constrained to take a ship's tour, with all its disadvantages. I think that I eventually gave up trying to work something out, and made it my day to stay on the ship. Similarly, although A Coruna has a bit more to offer, it's a good place from which to get to Santiago de Compostela, which is probably rather more interesting. This is pretty easy to DIY. For the others, as ISLABONITA says, everything depends on what you're interested in doing and seeing.

That's not actually quite right. A possible alternative explanation is that the airline has made confirmed reservations for the flights, but hasn't yet given the OP the reservation code/number/locator that would be recognised by AA. A confirmed reservation is confirmed, and the airline is holding space on that flight for the passenger (subject to all the usual caveats about what "holding space" means in a modern dynamic (over)booking environment), even if no ticket has yet been issued. Issuing a ticket is conceptually a different step from making a reservation, but the difference is often lost on people who have never used red carbon tickets and don't work in the industry. NCL is likely to be making the booking in whatever booking system/GDS that it uses, which will generate a locator for itself. But if that's not booked directly into AA's system, so that the prime record is hosted by AA, then AA may only have its own copy of the booking record with AA's own locator, and it's possible that NCL has simply not provided that to the OP. A passenger is of course in a better position once a ticket has been issued, because there is then a contract of carriage between the passenger and the airline for specific flights. Perhaps more importantly, it also means that the airline has been paid by the agent (NCL). But it looks like the OP's cruise isn't until January, so as we all think, there's a good chance that this step has not yet happened. in theory, the OP could call AA and ask the agent to try to find the booking using name, date and flight number(s). The agent may or may not be able to do so, and may or may not be prepared to give the OP the AA locator, and may or may not be prepared to do any of the other customer service things that passengers often want, eg pre-allocating seats. Given that NCL could yet change the flights before ticketing (judging by what other CCers sometimes report), this could be more effort than it's worth.

That's a pretty slim chance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southampton_Airport#Airlines_and_destinations

Which port are you calling at? If you're going to be at one of the Edinburgh locations, there should be no difficulty in getting to and from central Edinburgh on your own, especially as you'd have heaps of time to get back to the ship after the early show. If you're trying to do this from Glasgow, it should still be possible but would require planning in finer detail.

Your original post made it sound like you were going to do three days in London, and then go to Berlin before flying home. If you only have three days in total, then my advice would be either to do London, or to skip London and go straight to Berlin for your three days. Even if you fly, the end-to-end journey from London to Berlin will soak up a good part of one of those three days. If you try to see both cities, you'll end up seeing neither. Three days in Berlin would give you a reasonable taster of the city, which is why I would personally be relaxed about skipping London in this situation. You really need three months to see London properly.

Yes: I once did a Caribbean cruise, and then flew to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Thailand on the way back to London.

One obvious option for this now is Jubilee Line to Bond Street, Elizabeth Line to Heathrow. All should be step-free.

You can sometimes get lucky like that. Assuming that it didn't lock you in to undesirable fare conditions, and that it wasn't actually better value to go down to economy on that sector, then $200 pp extra to go from premium economy to business was a good price, even if it was only one-way.

Two ideas that immediately come to mind: You could leave your bag at Waterloo while you explore central London on your own: https://www.excess-baggage.com/rail-station-stores.php. When you're ready to go out to Heathrow, just collect your bag and head out there. Pay a company like Airportr to take your bag off you and check it in for you with your airline, so you don't have to see it again until after your flight.

If the quote above about "airlines couldn't care less" is the original comment" you're referring to, then I completely disagree with that. Airlines care a great deal about whether you make your connection. What they don't care about is your feelings.

Yes, airlines care. But they don't pretend that they can operate at 100% capacity, and they never have. Neither do they pretend that they will offer a perfect service. They play a numbers game that is far beyond the ability of any customer to comprehend. And that means that there will always be some people who will misconnect. The airline cares because if the number of misconnects is too big, it costs the airline extra money. But if it eliminates all misconnections, that also costs the airline extra money. The airline is always looking for the numerical sweet spot of exactly the right number of misconnections to minimise those additional costs. How the misconnecting passengers "feel" about it is of almost no concern to the airline. It's just an emotion that has no relevance at all to the huge numbers game that they are taking part in. The emotion contains no useful information whatsoever. What every passenger really needs to understand is that individually each of them is a near-inconsequential piece of self-loading cargo that is handled as part of that game. The airline cares about the misconnection, but not about the passenger's feelings.

Just for fun, the very first search I've just done on the BA board of FlyerTalk returned these: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive-club/448021-window-blind-etiquette-practice.html (thread started 29 June 2005) https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/british-airways-executive-club/1429708-closing-window-blinds-daytime-flights.html (thread started 20 January 2013)

It depends on who the regulator is, and who the airline is - see the discussion above. The same also applies to enforcement. And no, it's not a new thing. There have been complaints for years - probably decades - about dark cabins during daylight flights.

Actually, the better advice is that you should not be looking at Seatguru at all. Ever. Ever. Ever. For an Air France B777, this is the page that you want, on what (IMHO) is by far the best seating layout site currently available on the Internet: https://www.aerolopa.com/af-boeing-777-gallery

I think it'll be worth planning on the assumption that many/most will be closed during the day. I have already seen one email this week specifically mentioning the cancellation of a matinee performance on 6 May because of the coronation (but not the evening performance). I imagine that the biggest driver behind the decision will be whether staff want to watch; if many do (as I expect), then it just won't be viable for places to open. I doubt that the Bank Holiday on 8 May will be a major problem in your plans. You'll have to plan around whatever changes there are, but they should be relatively minor. There are already Bank Holidays on 1 May and 29 May, and this one will be additional.

Honestly? What airline is this? What? Have you never experienced this? And there we were, thinking that you were a seasoned traveller and all.

ISTR that these tags are typically used at stations where check-in is quite manual, and the check-in agents know when they're closing the flight and not accepting any more passengers. The last bag to go down then has this tag put on it, so the baggage handlers know that they can close the last can (if that's what they're using) and take the bags out to the aircraft, and that they don't have to wait for any more bags to come down from check-in. I don't know why one bag (ie yours) and that handler were waiting by the aircraft side, but one guess is that it was a bit like an aircraft-side marker to similar effect, just in case anything else did turn up before they closed the hold door.

Yes. If there is an emergency, those inside also need to be able to see out to assess where there may be danger. A good illustration of this is the shades at the doors on some aircraft types. These are fitted upside-down (compared to the usual), so that to close them you need to slide them up from below. This means that if there is a hard touchdown in an emergency situation, the forces acting on the shade will tend to open them rather than close them. At the doors, this is more critical than in passenger rows. Some regulators are more strict than others about requiring and enforcing procedures to have the shades open for take-off and landing. Passenger comfort considerations like keeping the aircraft cooler are secondary, but having the shades down while the aircraft is parked does help with this.

This does depend on who the regulator is, and also on any airline-specific policies.

One thing that I think can't be relied on any more is the assumption that a flight that is advertised and on sale is a flight that the airline actually intends to operate and for which the airline actually wants to take bookings. That used to be a reasonable assumption, but at present I think that both of these things can be very doubtful unless the flight is in the near future. One phenomenon that I have seen quite a lot is a flight that is on sale but only in the most expensive booking class in each cabin, which is typically only bookable using a fully-flexible fare. That's sometimes an indicator that the airline is very iffy about whether the flight will operate, and it wants to discourage people from booking it unless they too are very iffy about whether they will take the flight. Things that we used to be able to infer from availability and fares simply can't be taken for granted any more. One clear absurdity, though, was really the existence of $200 round-trip fares for journeys like DTW-FLL. On any view, that was irrationally cheap as a fare level that you could rely on (ie at any time other than in crazy sales etc). I've said this before - but today, that might not even pay for the fuel needed to transport you that distance.

In that area, I've experienced rough seas. In that area, I've experienced calm seas. What relevance or help is it to know what others have experienced in the past? It doesn't tell you anything about whether you will have rough or calm seas if you do the cruise next year. As a wise man once said, predictions are very difficult - particularly about the future. If this is a serious concern for your husband, then maybe a cruise is not actually a good idea? You can get rough seas anywhere.