Cotswold Eagle

It's impossible to sensibly answer this question without knowing which hotel you are staying in!

This is the wrong way round - they are travel authorities for non-visa nationals. You can't have a "visa waiver" if you don't need a visa in the first place 🙂

Yes. Where outside the Schengen Zone you are travelling from is irrelevant - all non-visa nationals, which includes US nationals, will require an ETIAS from May 2023. It's Eurostar, not EuroTrain by the way 🙂

The UK is planning to introduce an Electronic Travel Authorisation over the next couple of years, as per the link I posted above.

There is little hard information about when the UK ETA will be introduced - the official line, as per the link below, is only that it will be fully operational by end 2024. I think I have read that initial trials next year will be for Gulf states. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationality-and-borders-bill-electronic-travel-authorisation-factsheet/nationality-and-borders-bill-electronic-travel-authorisation-factsheet

Yes, the off-peak contactless is set at half the off-peak return, so is a bargain in the unlikely event of only going one way (for example if going to stay in Windsor). To be clear for other readers this only applies to Great Western services on Windsor and Eton Central branch and does not include Oyster cards (there is a technical problem with extending the current Oyster system any further). It is most definitely NOT a more general extension of contactless across the network.

As mentioned up thread, they are exploiting American attitudes to tipping and, in my view, should be avoided!

As a general rule, expect to pay at (increasingly rare) standalone conveniences provided by the local council. Fee is often something like 20 p or 30 p. Those in visitor attractions, museums, galleries, large stores etc will be free, as will those in motorway service (rest) areas. Major railway stations now generally have free toilets too. Popping into a pub to use the loo without buying anything at the bar is frowned upon, but can be a last resort….

I hope you can see the tension inherent in your question 😂 I admire the spirit, but of course what you think of as “not real expensive” may not coincide with what hotels can sell on-airport rooms for at Heathrow…. For walking to T3 you have two options - the Hilton Garden Inn at T2 mentioned above (depending if the 10 minute walk from T2 to T3 counts as “really close”) or the Aerotel attached to T3 itself. That’s it, all other Heathrow area hotels will require transportation to T3. The Aerotel offers hourly booking, so make sure you enter the correct times when comparing prices. London Toolkit do a great job of describing the hotel situation at Heathrow: https://www.londontoolkit.com/travel/heathrow_hotels.htm

Regarding the question that relates to the title of the thread, be aware that some of the airside ATMs at Schipol are operated by the currency exchange company Travelex. However, unlike Heathrow, there appear still to be ones operated by large Netherlands banks too (certainly there used to be in the baggage hall, but I have not gone through AMS recently). That will occupy about 2 minutes of your very long layover! As regards your bonus question about your onward travel, have alternatives in mind, which in this case, as well as KLM’s direct flights, should include Lufthansa flights changing at Munich and, in extremis, flying to Munich and taken a train to Nuremberg.

I don’t really understand the relevance of the information about going to The Open. It’s hard to say if there will be any disruption to your journey from Dover without knowing the date.

Niche Rotherhithe knowledge, to be fair! The old dockers’ community of Downtown (which may have meant just ‘downriver from Rotherhithe village’) there got wiped out in the Blitz. Famous (in some circles) nightclub of the same name by the river in Odessa Street in the 70s/80s, then it got heavily squatted until the docklands development folk got their hands on the area.

I understand your wishes, but do keep in mind that London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to stay in. If you think you have found a real bargain, almost certainly you haven’t, and one of your criteria will have been badly compromised. Plenty of threads on here with recommendations that do fit your wish list, and if you see a decent rate at one of those, don’t hesitate, particularly if it’s one you can cancel.

Yes, it’s upstairs at that end of the station. There are lifts, which will be easiest with the luggage. Well signposted, including a floor trail, as with the tube lines at Paddington.

The added danger of people using this phrase is that there is in fact an area of London called Downtown - it’s in Rotherhithe (south east London), by the river. Definitely not where people probably mean and not a tourist area!

Oh, my. I assume you must mean Green Park, the route already posted by Globaliser. As a user of the bottom end of the Jubilee, ‘ never change at Green Park’ is a personal rule, but if you must, follow G’s first suggestion, the ‘Way Out’ route… Well, it’s a darn sight closer than LHR 🤣 My preferred route would actually be train to Paddington, then Bakerloo and Jubilee lines, using the easy level change at Baker Street. I accept the added expense to avoid the interminable Piccadilly leg to Heathrow (which I have done dozens of times), but I am in a minority on this board! Doesn’t matter to the OP, of course, given the rail strike.

As I understand it, a different operating licence is required for vehicles taking more than 9 passengers, so the services you are looking at probably offer cars or MPVs seating up to 9. You need to be looking for coach and minibus (what in the States would be called vans) operators. I don’t have any recommendations I can make, but they exist and hopefully our resident ex-professional drivers or others will be along shortly!

Yes, it does, so no chance for the OP to miss swiping in or out.

The real bottleneck recently has been ground handling, particularly delivery of baggage (but also getting aircraft onto stands) caused my significant staff shortages post-pandemic. BA has been badly affected at busy times. I've not been through LHR for a few weeks, but my impression is that is getting better for arriving flights. Hopefully some of our more frequent flyers will chip in. I think you can change National Express tickets to later services if delayed (only at the airport), but John B will hopefully be along to confirm that.

More context would be useful: - starting and finishing from where? - what is the 11 hour window? (6 am - 5pm is a different proposition to 9 am - 8 pm!) - what do you mean by “take in”? There are tons of things to see and do at the Castle, along the Royal Mile (which is what I presume you mean) and in St Andrews. Any ‘must do’ on your list? But for starters it takes just over an hour from Edinburgh to St Andrews by road - you’d probably need to write off at least 3 hours for driving (assuming you are returning to a starting point), so it’s feasible as long as you don’t want to actually want to do too much at either place!

You’re mixing apples and pears to make orange juice there, I’m afraid. The ONS survey is about the overall positivity rate, and is done to a robust statistical method. Daily case figures, as you rightly suggest, are significantly less useful than they were, but even back then their limitations were not generally well understood. PHE was replaced (in this context) by UKHSA late last year.

JB, is this a legacy copy ‘n’ paste from lockdown/quarantine days?

Just in case anyone thinks this says more about G than the UK payments landscape, I was in the same position until I bought some raffle tickets at the village May Fair yesterday!