Globaliser

A critical question is what day of the week this will be. To say that "the port is a fair way from the airport" is a bit of an understatement. It's in a different city altogether, about 100 km away (although I suppose that in WA that's about the distance to the next suburb 🙂). Are you trying to make the non-stop from Heathrow to Perth? IIRC, that's actually scheduled for a few minutes before midday.

For clarity (again): There are two trains per hour from Waterloo to Weymouth. These depart at 05 and 35 minutes past the hour (during the regular daytime pattern). The xx05 train takes ~3 hours to reach Weymouth. It does not call at Woking. The xx35 train takes ~2¾ hours to reach Weymouth. It does call at Woking. There is therefore only one train per hour from Woking to Weymouth. This departs Woking on the hour (xx00), and takes ~2¼ hours to reach Weymouth. All of these trains call at Southampton Central. If the OP needs to do this, it will be because they don't reach Heathrow until the afternoon of 5 September (24 hours after their scheduled arrival time or more) or 6 September. If they don't reach Heathrow until 6 September, then time will be pretty tight. Hence it's probably important that they know what the frequencies are from each of Waterloo and Woking, given that it will take time to transfer to either of them (probably best by taxi to Waterloo despite the expense; or Railair coach to Woking, which has its own timetable, linked to above). I thought that by this stage (more than 12 hours after the originally-booked National Express coach) the National Express tickets would no longer be valid as it's outside the Change and Go window? If that's right, then although National Express coach to Southampton (1¾ to 2 hours) --> transfer to Southampton Central station --> train to Weymouth (~1½ hours) is theoretically possible, it would involve buying a new coach ticket as well as a train ticket, and possibly a longer overall journey time. The coach frequency between Heathrow and Southampton Central is also less good than the train frequency between Waterloo and Weymouth.

If the same thing were to happen to you on 3 September, you might be able to get on the 2359 to Chicago and connect to the day flight, which would get you to LHR in the late evening of 4 September. With a little more leeway, you might be able to get the 2155 to New York JFK and connect to either of the day flights from there, which would get you to LHR in the evening of 4 September. That would be plenty of margin. But even if that's not possible, there are dozens of combinations of one-stop flights that would get you on to a conventional overnight flight on 4 September that arrives at LHR in the morning of 5 September, which would leave you time to get to Southampton for the ship. Things would have to go very badly wrong for you to be unable to find one of these combinations that works. And even if you were simply to go on the same AA flight 24 hours later, you still might make it to the ship on time. Given what sleepingcat said, I've just checked the frequency again. As I said before, there is a Waterloo to Weymouth train every 30 minutes (not hourly).

However, if the OP were to be so late that they miss the ship, that would mean that they've been delayed by more than 24 hours. (Even if they're only 24 hours late, they might still be able to get a coach to Southampton in time to board the ship.) AIUI, Change and Go is only valid for 12 hours after the booked service, so the National Express ticket would be toast anyway. I do think that a 1345 coach after a 1210 arrival is a bit optimistic, but that's the sort of thing that Change and Go is designed to cater for.

By public transport, I think you'd be best to take a train from London Waterloo to Weymouth. You'd need to head from Heathrow in to town if you are going to start at Waterloo, but Waterloo to Weymouth is one of South Western Railway's main routes. There's a train every half an hour during the day on weekdays, and they take 2¾ to 3 hours. If you're at Heathrow, there is the option of taking the Railair coach from Heathrow to Woking and catching a train there. However, only one train every hour routes through Woking, and it's then 2¼ hours to Weymouth. Either way, you'd then have to get from Weymouth to Portland, but AIUI that's just a few miles in a cab.

You're really needing these boards: Italy Ports Other Mediterranean Ports

If you follow those links, which I included for the sake of detail that's as accurate as currently possible, the plan for 2 September (subject to National Rail confirmation) is that Avanti will not run to Glasgow, but LNER will run to Edinburgh. That seemed to me to be important to the OP, who does still have a decent chance of getting to Glasgow by train that day, although unfortunately not on their booked route.

Surely that will only work at a US airport? The last time I checked, YVR wasn't one.

You've probably seen that timetables for 2 September will be published tomorrow (25 August) by both SWR and Avanti. Unfortunately, it looks like Avanti has decided to run services only as far north as Preston (and occasionally Carlisle) and won't serve Glasgow that day. However, it looks like LNER will run to Edinburgh Waverley, from which you should be able to reach Glasgow Queen Street easily because those services are operated by ScotRail, which is not affected by the strike. Maybe it should be helovestrainsbutnotsomuchtraindrivers?

I was intrigued enough to click through from an equivalent to that first "$286" fare. It's the same combination of airlines on a different date (9 January 2024): it's Vueling from London Gatwick to Barcelona, and then Iberia/LEVEL from Barcelona to Boston. The website that the screenshot came from (Travelocity) quoted $304 on the corresponding page. After clicking through, I couldn't find any reliable indication of checked baggage fees before having to pay for the flights. However, a different website (Skyscanner) offered various purchase options for the same physical flights. One was to buy directly from the LEVEL website, which for Barcelona to Boston offered a Vueling code on the Iberia/LEVEL flight. This showed a lowest fare of $299.64, but there would have been baggage fees of $129.44 for one 23 kg checked bag; also, meals were not included, and would have been $35.00 per person extra. But if you go up to the next fare level, this added $84.00 to the fare, for a total of $383.64. This fare included one checked bag at 23 kg, and also meals. As the OP herself said about domestic fares and whether they included a checked bag: That's all she would have to do for these trans-Atlantic flights too. Like many others, I'm really not sure what the problem is, other than (as you say) unrealistic expectations of how much it should cost to fly trans-Atlantic one-way.

Yes, many of them do. You just have to reserve from the next category of tickets. For example, on Jet Blue its terms like Blue Basic, Blue Extra, etc. That's just like internatonal flights, then. So what exactly is the problem about fares for international flights?

In relation to this part of the trip, the train is indeed a good idea. But if you ultimately do decide to fly then don't forget that there are flights from London City Airport to Amsterdam. If you're already in central London, this could make much more sense than schlepping out to Heathrow for the short flight over to Amsterdam.

If someone sees a fare that's about as cheap as you can possibly buy a ticket for on that route, but thinks it's expensive, then a perspective adjustment would seem to be needed. As has been said by quite a few people now, if you don't want to pay a separate baggage fee, then simply pay an inclusive fare.

If you have a through ticket, you will be able to use the airside flight connections route that means that you will only have to clear security again. You will not have to clear either immigration or customs, and you will not exit into public areas. Three hours is plenty of time; something would have to go pretty drastically wrong for you to miss your onward flight.

If you book two separate tickets, as you are describing, British Airways policy is to not through-check your luggage to the Virgin Atlantic flight. You will have to clear immigration at Heathrow, collect your luggage, clear customs, maybe transfer between terminals (at the moment, BA's Oslo flights are at T3, the same terminal as Virgin, but this could change), and then check-in with Virgin. For what it's worth, the same BA policy applies even if you were to take a BA flight from Heathrow to Las Vegas, if the two BA flights are on separate tickets. However, BA will through-check if you have a through ticket covering Oslo-Heathrow-Las Vegas (regardless of whether the Heathrow-Las Vegas flight is operated by BA or Virgin). But on a through ticket, you can't mix a cash fare on Oslo-Heathrow with an award redemption Heathrow-Las Vegas on either airline. I don't know what SAS's policy is on this, but it will be a matter of policy; on two separate tickets, you would have no contractual right to have the bags through-checked. In addition, even if your luggage is through-checked and even if you never exit into public areas, you would still have to clear security at Heathrow between flights.

My impression is that there are too many people working on this problem in different places, with no coordination between them and no hand knowing what any other hand is doing, so that everything that anyone does is causing more confusion and sowing more potential disruption. I would have lots of questions, including: Who is "they" who have sent you a copy of the 220- ticket number? When was this sent to you? Is this ticket still valid, or has it now been cancelled? Which flights were written on this ticket? (For the reasons above, this is a different question from which flights are in any of the reservation records.) Is the Lufthansa record that "seems to be linked to today's new duplicate booking" the same record as you have already mentioned (***ED9), or a different record? Which flights are reserved in each Lufthansa record? Which flights are reserved in "the other UAL [record], which I understand to be in good order (booked/ticketed/etc)"? How do you know that that record has been ticketed? Do you have a ticket number? Does that ticket number begin 016- or 220-? Which flights are written on that ticket? (For the reasons above, it seems unlikely that you simultaneously have two valid tickets, because tickets are valuable documents and nobody will be keen for you to be holding two tickets having only paid for one. FBC certainly won't be keen to have issued a second ticket without the first being cancelled, as it would mean that it has to pay the airlines twice - possibly once to each of two different airlines.) I'm using "ticket" in the singular for clarity, although obviously each of the two of you needs to have your own ticket (with a unique number) in order to fly.

Assuming that by now, you just need practical suggestions, here are a few thoughts. First, whatever it was that triggered Lufthansa's reaccommodation module to offer you any replacement flights at all, the offer of business class seats would have had nothing to do with how full the flights were in economy, let alone where the unallocated seats were physically located. It just doesn't work like that. Whether or not there are unallocated seats in economy tells you very little about whether the reservations system will take more reservations in economy. And if the reservations system has no more space for taking reservations in economy, the flight simply won't be offered to you at all. You wouldn't be offered vastly more valuable business class seats just because the only unallocated physical seats are in a particularly undesirable location. So despite your frustration at apparently being offered a great option and then having that taken away from you, any practical approach to the current problem has to be on the basis that the business class seats were only ever a glitch, and you may never have been allowed to fly in business class even if nothing else had gone wrong. Don't get hung up about this. You need to solve your practical problems, not try to restore something that you were probably only ever offered because of a glitch. You haven't really "lost" business class seats. Second, it's worth remembering the difference between: A reservation. A ticket. A seat allocation. These are all different things, and although you need all three of them to actually fly, none of them is a necessary consequence of having either of the others. A PNR is a reservation record, and is identified by a reference or "locator" - for major airlines, usually six alphanumeric characters. But if you have a complex booking, there will a number of PNRs because each travel agent and airline involved will have its own record, and each record will have a unique locator. If a travel agent makes a booking, it will have its own record, and each airline with which the booking is made will have its own record. If the airline with which the booking is made is different from the operating airline, the booking airline will have a record and the operating airline will have at least one separate record and sometimes more than one. From what you describe, it looks like the original airline with which the booking was made was Lufthansa, but it then booked you on flights operated by United. You know that United now has at least two records, but it's not clear whether Lufthansa now has a second record linked to United's second record. It's certainly not clear whether the flights that United has just moved from one record to the other have ever been known to Lufthansa (and therefore whether Lufthansa has any record of them), let alone which Lufthansa record they're in and whether they have moved between records to match the move that United has made. However, if United has basically cancelled all the Lufthansa flights, so that the only active record contains only United flights, then Lufthansa may have no need to know any of this and no need to have any active record - but that's not clear. You can probably see why some airlines will not touch a booking that's been made by a travel agent, and will refer all changes and queries back to the travel agent, until a very late stage before the flight. With the situation you describe with your booking, a cynic might say that it's almost guaranteed that something is going to go very wrong. Third, you say you have a ticket number. These are 16 digits long (digits only). My guess is that your ticket number will either start 016- (for a United-issued ticket) or 220- (for a Lufthansa-issued ticket). More important is the question of what flights were written on the ticket. That's not clear, although my guess is that it's more likely to be for the itinerary departing at 6.15 am via Munich, in which case it's may also be more likely that it's a 220- ticket. Now that United has moved the flights for the itinerary departing at 11.45 am via Washington into (what may be) the only active United record, an open question is whether anyone's going to reissue the ticket to reflect the new flights, and if so, who is going to do that. The answer to that may be that only FBC can reissue the ticket, because it's an FBC booking, you've paid FBC, and it's FBC that owes the relevant airline the fare represented by the ticket. The issue of the ticket is the point at which the travel agent accounts to the airline for the fare, and the ticket is the valuable document that proves to the airline that the fare has been paid, without which the airline usually won't carry you. But if the ticket isn't reissued, there's a question about whether United would accept the original 6.15 am ticket as payment for the 11.45 am flights without the ticket having to be reissued - in which case, there may be no need to reissue the ticket. Fourth, FBC's willingness to reissue the ticket (if that's needed and that's all that's needed to straighten things out) may depend on what FBC can see in its record, and what ticket FBC currently thinks has been issued. But none of that's clear, other than that at one recent point in time FBC thought that things were fine. So you may now have a better idea about the types of information you need to get a picture of where you are. The bottom line is that you need to know what flights you have reservations for, what kind of ticket you have, and whether the operating airline will accept the ticket for your reserved flights or whether the ticket needs to be reissued, and if so, by whom. Fifth and finally, seat allocations are frankly irrelevant to these issues - don't confuse them. If you get access to the operating airline's system and you can get seats pre-allocated, so much the better. But don't muddy the waters with them when you're dealing with reservations and tickets. Seat allocations are something different and much less important.

Affordability is subjective, yes. Whether a particular fare is "cheap these days" is not. You can compare that to general trends and patterns in current market prices.

What's the problem with a $500 one-way fare for trans-Atlantic travel? That's pretty cheap these days. (See "affordability" above.)

I suspect that the OP may be interested in Monday 30 October 2023. It's also probably relevant to know which terminal at Heathrow.

I'm sure that we all like getting more for less money. But if your complaint is that you're now having to pay for something you never used to have to pay for, it's just not true. What's changed is basically that you can now see it, whereas you couldn't before. It seems illogical to react to this by not flying internationally and restricting yourself to US-based cruises. That doesn't exempt you from baggage fees; in fact, you may be more likely to have to pay baggage fees than if you were flying internationally. The only logical reason I can immediately think of for imposing such a restriction on yourself is if cruises that involve international travel have become unaffordable for you because of the higher total cost of travel. But then international travel - indeed, all travel - has become more expensive, particularly in the last 3½ years. Affordability (or unaffordability) isn't really to do with the practice of unbundling fares.

It sounds like you're getting a bit hung up on maybe having to pay baggage fees. Don't. What's happened is this: It used to be that you might pay (say) $500 for a long-haul ticket, which would include a checked bag. Airlines that used to price on this basis now often offer "unbundled" fares that mean that you pay (say) $450 for the ticket, plus (say) a $50 fee if you choose to check a bag. This has been done to keep the headline fare lower, largely as a competitive response to new low-fare airlines that have always priced everything on an unbundled basis. So it's a conceptual misunderstanding to think that a baggage fee is something that you now have to pay in addition to the fare, and that you never had to pay before. It's basically been broken out of the old pricing system, so that (for example) you can now choose to not pay for a checked bag if you're not taking one. There are sometimes ways to get an airline to waive a baggage fee, but it would be ridiculous to cite the existence of baggage fees as a reason not to fly at all. If you really object to paying a separate fee, you can always choose to fly with an airline that offers inclusive tickets priced on the traditional basis, which means that you don't have to think about any baggage fees for the included bag(s). If your confusion arises because it's not clear whether cruise line-booked air fares are inclusive or unbundled, then the solution is easy: book your own air fare so that you have control over it. Cruise line-booked air travel is notorious for taking away all your control, all your choice and all your options.

My guess is that this is because the LGBTQIA+ Cruisers forum also has a sub-forum: LGBTQIA+ Roll Calls. In the main forum listing ( https://boards.cruisecritic.com ), the "LGBTQIA+ Cruisers" listing will remain bold until you have marked as read both the LGBTQIA+ Cruisers forum and the LGBTQIA+ Roll Calls sub-forum.

FWIW, ASLEF has now announced a strike for Friday 1 September, and an overtime ban on Saturday 2 September. The affected TOCs will publish details of their plans later; but at a guess this will mean that on Saturday 2 September there will be disruption in the morning due to trains being out of position (Friday 1 September may see very few if any trains operated by the affected TOCs), and a reduced service on mainline routes because of a combination of RMT's strike and ASLEF's overtime ban. So my guess remains that there's a good chance that you'll get from Southampton to Glasgow at some stage that day.

On the assumption that your onward flight is on AA, good. A quick look suggests that the published Minimum Connection Time for this is 85 minutes. If you have "about" 120 minutes, and you have GE, you have a decent margin over the MCT - although it depends on what you mean by "about".