Globaliser

I can see plenty of direct Amsterdam --> Paris trains on 17 June 2023, both on ns.nl and bahn.de.

For your specific requirements, you have no choice: it's the Hilton Garden Inn or nothing. Every other option - whether at the airport, near the airport, or in town - involves schlepping your luggage. And it's more difficult to schlep your luggage to some airport hotels than it is to schlep your luggage to some hotels in town.

For clarity, this protection is provided by specific UK legislation covering UK credit cards, for transactions between specific minimum and maximum values. Consumer protection in other countries may differ.

It depends on which cruise you're on. The Southampton cruise ship schedule will tell you which berth is planned for your sailing, and the port map will show you which terminal that corresponds to.

How do you come to that conclusion? There's about half a dozen direct fast trains every hour from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, and they get to Amsterdam faster than you can be driven there. There are good reasons why (as you yourself said) the train is the way to go.

It appears to be available for multiple nights if you book through third party sites, and Aerotel's own website says to contact them for stays that are longer than 24 hours. If you can't book the Aerotel, then it's Hobson's choice for your criteria: the HGI is the only other hotel in the CTA. Anything else will require a transfer. Even transferring from either T5 or T4 for an 0715-ish flight would incur a large proportion of the pain that you'd suffer from staying in central London. You'd have to allow 30-45 minutes for the transfer, and in the morning you wouldn't have to allow that much more to transfer from a central London hotel.

Are you flying from Toronto to Heathrow? If so, then I'm pretty sure that you arrive at T5. The flight from Heathrow to Oslo does depart from T3. What time is your flight from Heathrow to Oslo? Unless it's at silly o'clock in the morning, I think that your best option is actually a hotel in town. Transferring from Heathrow to central London and back again just to go sightseeing will drive you up the wall, and staying at the airport means that you'll risk depriving yourself of evening entertainment. If you do have a silly o'clock flight from Heathrow, then in addition to the HGI (which is really at T2) there is also the Aerotel at T3. Walking distances from both hotels to check-in is probably about the same (because of where the Aerotel is), but I think it should be an easier walk from the Aerotel. AFAIK, these are the only two hotels in the Central Terminal Area, where T3 is located.

Are you referring here to 26 July, after you get to Southampton at about 11 am? If so, then with a 5 pm sailing (Island Princess?) I think that visiting Winchester that day is too ambitious, and you can't easily catch up with the ship if it sails without you.

You will always have had ticket numbers. Without a ticket, you don't fly. The ticket is the document of value that shows that the travel has been paid for. It doesn't matter how confirmed your reservation is, or how accurately you have recorded your reservation/confirmation reference/number - if you don't have a ticket, you don't fly. Beyond that, there's nothing to add to what 6rugrats has said.

To be fair, it could (at least in theory) be done better than it is. A big problem with Heathrow is that (like many other global hubs) it's grown organically from an original layout dating from an era in which today's traffic levels would simply have been unimaginable. For example, it may originally have been sensible to put the Central Terminal Area where it was, but today it's a pretty mad concept that Heathrow is trying to manage as well as it can. If you could shut down Heathrow for a decade to rebuild it in a more rational way (see the very long-term plans that are in place), that would be wonderful - but of course, in real life that's completely impractical. Heathrow isn't unique in this respect. Imagine if JFK were a global hub! We've largely been saved from that chaos by the US' allergy to facilitating international-to-international connections. (Although, to be fair, if JFK had become a global hub then its layout would probably have evolved differently from how it actually has.)

However many airline miles/points you have, and however much the theoretical cost of an award ticket to Australia in first class, it's all useless if there's no availability for award tickets - which is a perennial problem for flights to Australia. You have to expect to fork out cold hard cash.

If it was for US immigration, that would be a fast clearance day! 🙂

But that's a different industry with different industry dynamics. What airlines have learnt is that providing good customer service can build up lots of goodwill and warm fuzzy feelings to passengers, who will then decide how to purchase their next flight by reliably selecting the cheapest option in the market. "I'm so loyal to Fly Me Airlines - they treat me so well - but I just couldn't pass up the Treat-Me-Like-Dirt Airlines fare that was $50 cheaper. I'll go back to Fly Me Airlines next time." Next time, of course, someone else may have a can't-miss fare that's $50 cheaper. There's no other way to explain the rampant success of airlines that do treat their passengers like dirt, and make no secret of it. In Europe, Ryanair is the shining example. In addition, no individual airline passenger is important to an airline, however loyal they think they are. Individuals are rarely worth more than several thousand dollars a year of revenue to an airline (and airlines' profit margin on that is notoriously tiny and volatile). If you control travel spend of several million dollars a year, the airline may push out the red carpet for you. Otherwise, forget about being rewarded for your "loyalty" - neither you nor your loyalty are important to the airline, even if it makes you feel good about yourself to say "I'll never fly XXX again".

The OP shouldn’t need a passport check either, you are only in transit in the UK. (It would have been different pre Brexit.) No, it was the same before Brexit: no need to clear immigration for a USA --> Heathrow --> Brussels connection. There will be a passport check on boarding, but that's an ID check for the airline to ensure that the passenger who's boarding has the same name as the boarding pass. Funnily enough, I've just posted this in another thread:

You need to keep your eyes open. The Flight Connections route is signed with purple signs, so if you look for those you will be in the correct stream. You also want to make sure that when the purple signs give you a choice of terminal, you're following the route for Flight Connections Terminal 5. (On the assumption that you are flying from Denver to LHR, you will both arrive at and depart from T5 - no terminal change involved.) Your inbound flight will very probably arrive at a satellite building. The Flight Connections route will take you to the main building, and into a big hall where immigration queues are to the left and connections are to the right. You're an international connection, so you will have your boarding pass checked, then go upstairs to clear security, and then you'll be in the main shopping area. Ironically, with 9 hours between flights you will actually have time to choose to clear immigration and do something other than hang around in the airport terminal (assuming no big delays to your inbound flight). You could either take a train or Tube in to central London - you'd have time for lunch somewhere or to visit one of the South Kensington museums, for example - or (as is sometimes suggested here) you could pop over to Windsor, which was handily built underneath the Heathrow flightpath.

And even if you're connecting to a UK flight, you should be able to use the immigration clearance point in the flight connections stream (as opposed to the normal immigration channel for those ending their journeys at Heathrow), which is usually rather less busy.

That's simply wrong. There are plenty of occasions when gate-checking decisions are made after the carry-on bags have made it on board, when it's discovered that there are more bags than will fit into the overhead bins, so some bags then have to be taken off again and checked into the hold. Sometimes, there's no space in the bins because smaller bags have taken up the space. So yes, if you always put your small bags into the bin, you could cause someone else's bag to have to be gate-checked. But hopefully, if the small bags are your only cabin bags, then you'll be on flights where there isn't that much pressure on space. I don't fly UA very much, but on the airline I fly most (BA), if the bins have got full then passengers with small bags will be made to put them under the seat in front of them to maximise the amount of bin space for other bags (because small bags are often a very inefficient use of that space). And you might want to remember that CCers like FlyerTalker are not simply posting arguments based on logic (silly or otherwise). It's from real-life experience. Those of us who fly a lot have seen (almost) everything.

They're not "switching" anything so far as the fare is concerned. You pay the premium economy fare from your origin to your destination. You're never paying a separate fare for the short-haul flight, so there's nothing to switch.

You will probably be paying a premium economy fare for all of the travel in each direction; the domestic connecting flights are usually not charged as a separate fare. So if the premium economy fare that you're buying is refundable, then it's refundable. In this situation, there is no question of you paying any sort of MCE fare, even though that's where you might be seated on the shorter flights. Trying a dummy booking on the AA website now, I see a notice at the top of the page with the firm fare quote (after you've selected seats) that says: << You have a mix of fares The rule of the most restrictive fare will apply. >> That seems to be clear enough? This only matters if your outbound travel and inbound travel are on fares with rules that are truly different from each other. Often there will technically be different fares in each direction because (for example) it's weekend travel in one direction but midweek travel in the other, but actually all the fare rules are identical. To check this, go to the bottom of that page and click the link for "Detailed fare rules". That should bring up a page that gives you the fare basis code for the fare in each direction, together with a selection of the most important fare rules for each of them. These include the "Penalties" section, which will tell you how refundable the fare is (or isn't). I don't know what AA means by "fully refundable" as opposed to "refundable", but my guess is that "fully refundable" gives you everything back if you cancel, but "refundable" means that there will be a cancellation fee and then you get the rest refunded. Of course, it's difficult to be sure about any of this unless we know exactly what you're looking at so we can see what rules are involved.

It doesn't. But the size of that space basically dictates the maximum measurements for the "personal item", so that it can fit in the space.

The plural of anecdote is not data. PHX is neither LOS nor MRU. And the NAP incident demonstrates that incidents could happen even to a local airline at PHX on a short-haul aircraft. Your proposition is that BA could find it more difficult to respond to a maintenance problem at PHX than a local airline would, because it's an airline based a long way away. The suggestion is that this is a potential reason for thinking that BA might be less dependable. That might be true if BA would have to ship in engineers and parts from London to fix the broken aircraft. But that's not how it would work. And that just looks at the aircraft side of the situation. For the OP's route, the commercial position is that BA is not a separate airline from AA. There is one joing business that one might call "AA-AY-BA-IB", so the OP would have the commercial protection of knowing that there are many other ways of getting to their destination - similar to the position if they were flying entirely within the network of another airline.

I think you're being unfair. NCL should have emailed the OP to tell him to read his emails.

Then you are not understanding the point. On your logic, BA's performance at PHX would have been abysmal when it was operating 747s there (many of them pretty old by then), because AA didn't operate 747s at PHX (or at all) and it would take a long time for BA to get trained personnel and parts over from London or wherever to fix problems. It didn't happen like that, because the industry doesn't work like that.

BA didn't do badly at PHX when it was flying 747s there. Somehow, someone managed to fix all the problems. How long is it since AA last operated a 747?

About which we shouldn't speculate without knowledge. Not least is the fact that one contract is the Joint Business Agreement between AA and BA (and others): the trans-Atlantic operation is basically a joint venture. Anyway, following the "only one flight is with the 777" logic would lead one to avoid flying BA to places where the native airlines don't operate these types at all. Yet I couldn't count the number of times that I've seen "SAA maintenance" hi-viz jackets visiting the flight decks of BA 747s and 380s at JNB, when they were types that SAA has either never operated, or not operated for very many years.