Globaliser

The area where the Marriott is will actually be pretty buzzy late into the evenings, because the restaurants and bars both in the building next door on West India Quay and in Crossrail Place (where the Elizabeth Line station is) are all busy places. Because of the Elizabeth Line, this Marriott is now arguably better connected for Ronnie Scott's and Pizza Express Dean Street than many central London hotels in traditional tourist areas.

We do now have electric lighting over here! 😀 The most magical (if tiring) experience at the Globe is when they do a mid-June show starting at 11.59 pm, especially when it's A Midsummer Night's Dream (as it was this season). Most of the performance takes place under the night sky, but by the time it finishes dawn has broken and you can walk home in the light. I can vouch for the fact that there's no difficulty in seeing what's happening on stage.

You don't need to spend long reading either this board or the Cruise Air board to see that one pre-cruise night is typical, and that those who are disembarking are typically keen to get out of Europe and back to North America as fast as possible on the same day. As for the difference between turnaround days and port call days, remember that the number one reason given is pollution, and the docked ship will generate the same amount of pollution regardless of whether it's a turnaround day.

It can happen, although perhaps more likely as a consequence of IRROPS. That can also wreck the plans of those who have booked a connecting itinerary and who intend to travel the whole booked journey, but who - perfectly legitimately - have also organised to do things at the connecting point.

This can sometimes work even with checked baggage, but you have to really know the details of the fare rules and of the airline's policies and practices.

But this was only the third of the three reasons given, "in addition" to the first two. So it is clear that the decision was not simply based on reducing numbers. Pollution was first, followed by the inhibition of a second IJ bridge. The D66 statement was headed "Gemeenteraad: maak eind aan vervuilende cruise in Amsterdam" (machine translation: "City council: put an end to polluting cruise in Amsterdam"). The D66 party leader's quote in full was: "De vervuilende cruise past niet bij de duurzame ambities van onze stad. Ook het realiseren van een tweede brug over het IJ naar stadsdeel Noord, is niet mogelijk als de cruiseschepen blijven. Daarbij passen cruiseschepen in het stadshart niet in de opdracht van Amsterdam om het aantal toeristen te reduceren. Oftewel, Amsterdam vaart beter zonder de cruise." Machine translation: "The polluting cruise does not match the sustainable ambitions of our city. The realization of a second bridge over the IJ to the Noord district is also not possible if the cruise ships remain. In addition, cruise ships in the city center do not fit into Amsterdam's assignment to reduce the number of tourists. In other words, Amsterdam sails better without the cruise."

Even if the decision was simply based on the number of passengers (which the responsible articles make clear was not the case), it's not only a question of numbers: cruise ship passengers bring less net economic benefit to their ports of call than other kinds of tourists and visitors. So if you want to effect (say) a single-digit percentage point reduction in tourist numbers, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start by targeting the less profitable.

I remember an anecdote about another AA operation that targeted passengers who were doing this regularly. They'd be met at the door as they disembarked the first flight, and offered a choice: because they were clearly confused by DFW's layout as they consistently missed their onward connecting flights, they could be escorted to the gate for their onward flight to ensure that they found it OK; or they could be escorted to the AA ticketing desk where they could pay the proper fare for the travel that they were actually intending to take.

As gumshoe958 says, Blackfriars is closer to your hotel. It's also probably easier to drop you off at, especially on a Saturday; and it's also an easy station to navigate. Southbound trains go from platform 1. You're best off getting one of the fast trains (3 per hour); generally, these call only at London Bridge and East Croydon before Gatwick Airport. (The train describer boards and train announcements will tell you where the train will call at, so you can easily identify the fast trains.) If you get a slow train that stops at lots of other stations en route to Gatwick, it will be a significantly longer journey and the train would probably be overtaken by a later fast train. You could go to Victoria and get a Southern train. These generally call only at Clapham Junction and East Croydon en route to Gatwick, and their final destinations are typically Eastbourne, Littlehampton, Ore, Portsmouth Harbour or Southampton Central. It looks like there are about six of these trains an hour (so twice as frequent as at Blackfriars), but Victoria is a much bigger and more complex station, as well as being a bit further away from your hotel than Blackfriars. You can't get on a Gatwick Express by accident, as these go from a dedicated area (which enables the correct GX fare to be charged); there's only one GX every 30 minutes.

Air France is responsible for getting you to your destination as soon as possible if you misconnect. Are you arriving at CDG on AF357 at 1235, and continuing on AF1226 at 1525? If so, I really wouldn't stress about this. 2:50 is heaps of time (I think that the official Minimum Connection Time for your connection is 1:00), and almost every day there are two more CDG-VCE flights after 1525, let alone the ones early the next morning that should still comfortably get you to your cruise.

Having now had a moment to check this: Charing Cross station will be closed on Saturdays 12 August, 19 August and 26 August 2023.

Not particularly - my impression is that only the most disruptive strikes will stop all Gatwick trains from running. Today is a train strike day, but the limited service still includes plenty of trains from London Bridge (operated by Thameslink) and Victoria to Gatwick (operated by Southern). There will be at least two weeks' notice of any strike affecting your specific travel day; and even if there is a particularly disruptive strike, there will be alternative options.

If you're not planning to take the Gatwick Express, and you each have an Oyster card or a contactless bank (credit or debit) card, you can pay just by touching in at the London station and touching out at Gatwick, much like taking the Tube in London. I think that the Oyster/contactless fare if you do this should be £9.50 on a Saturday (you can check here on the Transport for London website). No need to buy in advance, which may be no cheaper in any event. You can also take the Gatwick Express using Oyster or contactless, but the fare is much higher. I think that you can save a little bit off that by buying a Gatwick Express ticket in advance via that company's website.

This is also a good idea, although the OP may want to check first whether there will be any Charing Cross to London Bridge trains on the Saturday that they're travelling (is the date 19 August 2023?). They should also be aware that at London Bridge, they will probably need to change platforms. It looks like they would arrive at platform 6 or 7, and they'd have to go downstairs (by lift or escalator) to the concourse and then go up to platform 4 for the onward train to Gatwick.

It depends on what you mean by "best". Some people think that a door-to-door car service is best. You'd get in at the hotel, and get out at the terminal at Gatwick. There are plenty of companies that will do that. Another alternative is to get a taxi from the hotel to either to London Victoria station or London Blackfriars station, and take the train. This is likely to be faster than doing the whole journey by road, which is a miserable experience at the best of times. It will also be cheaper, the exact extent depending on your choice of train operator, as they charge different fares.

Thinking laterally in these circumstances, why not take the train from Amsterdam to Bruges and stay overnight in Bruges?

There were some ideas posted by knowledgeable people in this thread, although you may want to check the age ranges for the suggestions made there:

I agree with the recommendation to stay in London overnight - but for the record, I seem to recall that the wine bar at the Radisson Blu at Stansted offers some high-flying entertainment.

I'm guessing, then, that you arrive at Southampton either on Thu 9 May or Mon 13 May, in which case an 1135 departure from Stansted is much too ambitious. Stansted is the furthest London airport from Southampton: it's 125 miles by road, and on a weekday morning travelling in the middle of the peak traffic, my guess is that it would take 3 to 3½ hours to get there, if there's nothing beyond the ordinary jams on the motorways. If you're keen to get home on the same day, then I'd recommend thinking about taking one of the three dozen daily non-stops from Heathrow to the two main NYC airports, instead of a connecting journey with zero backup on a low-fare airline that may or may not still be in business in 9 months time. After all, SWF is only about 75 miles by road from Newark airport.

There are a few bits of missing information here: Where does your cruise end? You say "London" - but cruise lines often lie about this: far more cruises use Dover, Harwich or (most often) Southampton. And this can make a real difference, as none of these places is anywhere near London. Which airport are you flying from? There are five London airports, spread across an area about 50 miles in diameter. Although London Heathrow and London Gatwick are the most likely options for you, travel to each of these airports is different from each of the ports that you might disembark at. Which is your "hometown airport"? If you need to fly to NYC, there are something like 25 non-stop flights a day from Heathrow to JFK and another 10 to Newark, so there would be no need to limit yourself to an 1135 flight. But if you're actually connecting to another airport, you may have more options connecting via somewhere else. On what day of the week does your cruise end? This is a critical bit of information for estimating how long it's likely to take you to get to your airport, and the level of risk involved.

This is the board that you want to look at: https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forum/148-british-isleswestern-europe. Questions about transportation/walking from Amsterdam's cruise terminal are asked most weeks.

Having just done a quick and dirty search for CLT-BCN on 3 June and VCE-CLT on 10 June (to get both dates in range), a one-way CLT-BCN can be had for about USD870 and the multi-city trip (both halves) for about USD1,650. But that one-way fare plus NCL's USD500 for VCE-CLT would work out at USD1,370 total. Are you seeing numbers like that? It doesn't seem "crazy expensive" to me.

Piet Heinkade 27 is the street address for Amsterdam's main cruise terminal. There's a vast amount of information here already about what you can do from there, and how you can do it.

I suspect that the amounts being discussed in this thread are highly unlikely to trigger AML interest. It's well within most ordinary people's lives to have an occasional need for a couple of hundred pounds of cash on hand, only to find that it wasn't spent after all.

If you have a UK bank account, it doesn't really even count as a problem. A few weeks ago, purely out of curiosity, I tried to pay some old notes in to my bank account using an ATM. I was expecting the machine to reject them, but to my surprise it didn't and the deposit completed straight away. It was easier and faster than queueing up at the counter.