Globaliser

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".

One of the issues is that it is probably too early to be planning the fine detail of this, because (I suspect) plans for engineering work that weekend have not yet been confirmed. For example, if SWR is selling Advance tickets to Southampton Central on Saturday but not Sunday, it's possible that SWR has not yet confirmed the timetable for Sunday. (Notably, the Advance tickets are only available on every other train on Saturday, so there appears to be some uncertainty about that day in any event.) Also, if there are Advance tickets from London Waterloo to Eastleigh, but not to Southampton Central, then it's possible that SWR may yet do something on the line between Eastleigh and Southampton Central. One indication is the specific warnings on the National Rail website that John Bull has also given an example of: the currently-published timetable is not the final timetable for that weekend. Whatever you can buy on Trainline, you can usually buy directly from the train operating company, but without Trainline's booking fee. This means that you can already replicate what Trainline seems to have sold to your fellow cruisers - an Advance ticket from Waterloo to Eastleigh (£8.70), plus a walk-up fare from Eastleigh to Southampton Central (£3.90) - by simply buying these tickets from SWR. However, split ticketing comes with disadvantages. If all you ever do is look at the total cost, you can miss the hidden pitfalls. If you want to try to save money in this way, you really ought to do it with your eyes wide open and with a full understanding of the rules and their implications. The potential disadvantages, given the (probably) unconfirmed state of the timetable for that day, include: The Advance ticket can only be used on the specific train that has been booked. If you want to take a direct train from Waterloo to Southampton using a pair of tickets like this, then you must choose a train that calls at Eastleigh (even though you don't have to get off and get on again there). There are fewer trains from Waterloo to Eastleigh than there are trains from Waterloo to Southampton, so you have less choice of train times. The Advance ticket is not valid on a direct train from Waterloo to Southampton if the train does not call at Eastleigh - you could well be made to pay a penalty fare for Waterloo to Southampton onboard the train, but you probably couldn't get a refund for the Advance ticket because these are non-refundable. If the timetable is amended so that there are no trains between Eastleigh and Southampton, then you will have to get off at Eastleigh and change, probably to a rail replacement bus service. If the timetable is amended so that there are no direct trains between Waterloo and Southampton that call at Eastleigh (which is the normal situation on a weekday), then you will also have to take a train to Eastleigh and change trains there; or alternatively junk the tickets you have already bought and buy a replacement Waterloo-Southampton ticket. So don't be blinded by the siren lure of saving money. If I were in your shoes, I would stick to what I've already said above: do nothing for the moment and see how things settle down. Your worst-case train fare scenario is that you have to pay £41 for a walk-up fare, just like you would pay now if you were to buy a ticket for 22 October. The difference between that and the best-case split ticketing scenario is less than thirty quid. Historically, whenever I cruised from Southampton I'd always just paid the walk-up fare for the train because the travel flexibility on the day of departure was worth paying the extra money for, although I haven't done one of these for a long time now. Finally, BTW, the place really is spelt "Southampton". It's dead easy if you simply take a taxi - on a Sunday morning, I reckon that this should be something like £20.

It's much too early to know whether there will be any industrial action that day. There is, however, some planned engineering work affecting that route. You can see the details on this page on SWR's website, but on a quick look, it appears that trains will run from London Waterloo to Southampton Central on 22 October. Advance tickets may go on sale later, or they may not. But there would seem to be little reason for you to do anything about tickets at this point in time.

Have a look at this thread:

Thanks for that - I will have to make a note in my diary about those announcement dates. Coincidentally, a Chris Botti CD turned up in the post today, which reminded me of last week's email that said that there were fewer remaining cabins for Botti at Sea 2024 than for TJC 2024. If Botti turns out to be a winning formula that eliminates the perennial struggle about what began as the CJC, so much the better.

It may be worth mentioning, then, that IIRC (assuming that you will tender to Greenwich Pier) the closest that a car can normally get is here, which is a couple of hundred yards from where you would actually step off the tender. Also, at low tide there can be a reasonably steep slope to walk up from the floating part of the pier to the bank - see this image and this image for an illustration. If these might pose a problem, it could be worth asking your cruise line about any special arrangements.

That may well be true, although it will be for each passenger to decide for themselves. However, that's a different issue from whether duty-free liquids bought in the US will be confiscated at the connection point in Europe. Basically: if it's in a compliant STEB, it won't be.

No, this is not correct: Pre-pandemic, if your over-size duty-free liquids were sealed in a compliant STEB, they were good for any security screening at any connecting point that accepted the STEB. (Compliance requirements included a visible receipt showing the date and time of purchase, and the STEB would be valid for 24 hours from that time.) This applied to purchases in the US by passengers connecting through (and being security-screened) at Heathrow, as well as to connections made at other European airports that required security screening of connecting passengers. On my regular routes, the only exception was flights inbound to Australia, which did not recognise STEBs and required the application of the 100ml rule at the last boarding point before arrival in Australia, save for purchases made at that point and delivered by the shop directly to the aircraft door. In any case, there are many European airports that will now accept US security screening, so that further security screening is not required if you connect at one of these airports. If no security screening is required at the connecting point, then obviously you can continue to carry whatever liquids you already have on you. I'm not aware of any of these basic rules having changed since the pandemic, hence my question as to whether you think that they have. So the OP may well be perfectly safe to buy duty-free in the US without any risk of it being confiscated in Paris before boarding their flight to Barcelona. This has nothing to do with the newer scanners, although their introduction will be very welcome to us all. They've already made a difference to the experience at my local airport.

It depends on how you would want get from the dock to the airport. By public transport, an obvious route to Heathrow would be a short walk to Cutty Sark DLR, then the DLR to West India Quay, then a short walk to Canary Wharf Elizabeth Line for a direct train to Heathrow Central (because IIRC Icelandair is at Terminal 2). That would probably be easier than any public transport route from the dock to Gatwick, plus IIRC Icelandair uses the North Terminal there which involves one more step (using the inter-terminal transit to transfer from the railway station at the South Terminal). By car, the journey time to either airport is probably about the same, although to Gatwick that partly depends on whether your driver is prepared to do a lot of fast miles out on the the A2 to the M25 and then round to the M23, or whether he's going to insist taking on the shortest route through suburban purgatory. Other than the journey to the airport, I can't think of any particular reason to favour one airport over the other, given that it would be the same airline at each.

Have EU airports stopped recognising US STEBs? I thought that if you buy duty-free alcohol (or other liquids) in the US and it's sealed into a compliant STEB, then it will be accepted through security screening in EU airports.

You've mentioned this one before: