Globaliser

Maybe. Which airline(s)? Which cabin(s)? Checked bags? On a through ticket, or two separate tickets?

The ss Rotterdam: https://ssrotterdam.com/sleep/

And how are you planning to get from Heathrow to Victoria? If your scheduled arrival (not landing) time is 7.00 am, your flight is on time, you have a US (or other eGate-compatible) passport for clearing immigration, and you're planning to get a car/minicab transfer, I reckon that ballpark figures are 60 minutes to get out of customs (which is after you collect your bags), 30 minutes to find the driver, get to the car and get moving, and 60-90 minutes to get to Victoria - so perhaps 9.30 am to 10.00 am. It's difficult to be any more precise than this. You could cut a little time off this if you go by Tube, given that the Clermont is where you're staying.

Well, you can tick this one off the list, then. If you travel enough, it will happen to you - whatever "it" may happen to be. If you leave aside cost, then whichever way you happen to have booked this itinerary, you will have to put up with Level and with all the disadvantages associated with it if you want to keep those advantages.

I'll happily be corrected if I'm wrong about this, but I think that Level-liveried aircraft are operated on Iberia's Air Operator Certificate. That would mean that it's some standalone second-rate operation, if that's what you're concerned about. If you have a look on Level's website, you will see that almost all of its own fares include food and drink. And the worst that can happen is that you'll have to pay (and then complain to Celebrity Air afterwards). I think that you mean "cheapest", not "best". You're discovering some of the downsides associated with "cheapest", and with not having control over what you're getting.

There are noise restrictions all the time - for example, the oldest noisiest aircraft are basically not allowed to operate at Heathrow at all - but for most practical purposes the main restrictions start in the late evening and continue until 6.00 am. As you would expect, the most stringent restrictions are those that apply in the middle of the night, but they are slightly eased for landings from 4.30 am. And the rules do have provisions to allow for exceptional circumstances (for example, to try to clear backlogs after major disruption) and emergencies (if you have to make an emergency landing, Heathrow will always be open for you).

Staffing will be planned around what's needed for schedules. But actual flying time can be very different from what the schedule implies. Looking at my own non-stop flights, I see the following spreads: Bangkok to Heathrow between 10:53 and 13:33; Hong Kong to Heathrow between 12:25 and 14:43 (plus one outlier of 16:04 - a very unusual flight); JFK to Heathrow between 5:38 and 7:24 (excluding Concorde). So if on any particular day departing on schedule means that you can't land at Heathrow, or you'll get there before the staff do, there's just no point departing on schedule. These are noise-related restrictions at Heathrow. Although it's a little bit more complicated than this, the basic effect of the night flight regime is that flights can't land before 0602, except for a handful of flights that may land from 0432. These times are for actual landing times, not scheduled arrival times. I've never manage to get an authoritative answer for the "2". But I suspect that this is because the lower that an approaching aircraft is, the more noise is experienced underneath it. They are particularly noisy in the last part of the approach because when flaps, slats and landing gear are extended, these produce a lot of additional aerodynamic noise, which on modern aircraft can be rather louder than engine noise. So the first landing may be at 0432 so that the noisiest part of the flight doesn't begin until about 0430 (and similarly for 0600, when the regular one-a-minute landing pattern begins).

Historically, I think this was 12 hours, but may recently have been extended to 16½ hours. See: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/american-airlines-aadvantage/2063901-newbie-lounge-2022-ask-aa-newbie-questions-here-flame-free-thread.html#post35053277

Interestingly, all of these are examples of the importance of on time arrival.

This is also feasible by train. There are direct trains between Brighton and Hastings (about 1¼ or 1½ hours), and then there are direct trains between Hastings and Rye (20 mins). Additional itineraries are also available that involve a change, which could get you to your destination faster than waiting for the next direct train.

This is very common, but it's also to do with making sure that there is sufficient operational capacity at the arrival airport to deal with the flight. There's no point having flights depart "on time" only to have them arrive (for example) an hour before the baggage handlers have arrived at work. Airlines have quite a lot of leeway about actual arrival times for the purposes of working out whether they've properly operated the slot. But operational constraints don't give you that much leeway: if your baggage handlers are rostered to start work at 7 am, they're unlikely to be keen to turn up early at short notice. At Heathrow, I think that the strictest rules about slots concern night flights. There's a very limited number of flights that are permitted to land between 0432 and 0602, and airlines usually allocate these to specific flights. If your flight is not a quota flight, the airline's default position is that it simply can't land before 0602. So there's no point in it departing "on time" only to burn tons of fuel circling around London waiting for the magic hour when it's allowed to land. The same applies even if your flight is a quota flight but you would get to London before 0432. If such a situation develops during the course of the flight, the aircraft is often slowed significantly so as to delay its arrival. The general public often treats "on time" departure as some sort of hallowed principle. But the only metric that really matters is whether arrival is on time.

It's not that obvious - it could just as easily be Brussels, Rotterdam or Amsterdam. But Paris (like Amsterdam) gives you the option of flying, and you could be in Paris before your Eurostar had even set off from St Pancras. If you really want to transfer to London to get a Eurostar, then the most practical route is train to Waterloo then taxi to St Pancras. You can get from Waterloo to St Pancras by Tube if you take the Jubilee Line to Green Park and then the Victoria Line to Kings Cross St Pancras. Train to Victoria then Tube (Victoria Line direct) to Kings Cross St Pancras is an alternative, but that train is about an hour longer than the train to Waterloo. All of these Tube routes should be step-free throughout.

I don't know why you're picking on AF or CDG as a result of one incident. This sort of thing happens at every airline and every airport.

I don't think anyone is saying that it's unbelievably complicated to tap an Oyster that you already have, compared to tapping a credit card. The unnecessary complication comes from insisting on buying an Oyster, and (in addition) to do so using cash, when the passenger does not already have an Oyster but could use a credit card that they already have. A fear of losing a credit card because of using it to pay for public transport is verging on the irrational. (So too is an insistence on refusing to use the contactless payment facility.) In today's largely cashless UK, on an ordinary day I may use my credit card a dozen times or more between leaving home in the morning and getting back in the evening. It really is no big deal - but some of the reasons suggested here for treating one's credit card like the Crown Jewels suggest that some people think otherwise. There are some valid reasons for using an Oyster as opposed to a credit card, but these will mostly apply to Londoners. There are some people who don't hold and can't get either credit or debit cards (so Oyster will probably always be with us in some form). And then there are those of us who prize Oyster for their speed at the readers - but you really have to be a Londoner to have perfected the skills needed to make the most of that speed.

There's no difference in risk to you between using a PIN compared to simply tapping where contactless is available. And you're doing a British Isles cruise, not going to some dangerous foreign location. You know the saying about "when in Rome, do as the Romans do"? Here, that means using contactless for everything. It's safer than cash.

FWIW, the port's website - https://portsmouth-port.co.uk/at-the-port/find-us/ - suggests using Portsmouth and Southsea "which has a taxi rank right outside". Looking at Google Maps, it looks like it may be a shorter walk from the platforms to the taxi rank than at Portsmouth Harbour.

In all seriousness, if he is aged 11-15 then if you get an Oyster you can ask station staff to set the Young Visitor Discount on it, which basically gives him 50% off for 14 days. See here for more details: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-travel/11-15-zip-oyster-photocard?intcmp=55575#on-this-page-5 and https://tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/visiting-london/getting-around-london/best-ways-for-visitors-to-pay#on-this-page-3

If you have a teen who doesn't have their own NFC-enabled device, then I take my hat off to you as a parent.

Each person needs to use a separate device or payment card. Always remember to touch out using the same device/card that you used to touch in for that journey. Always use the same device/card during any single day to get the maximum benefit from fare capping. If you must use a battery-powered device, rather than a physical card, remember to make sure its battery has enough charge. And at Tube station gates, always remember to touch on the reader to the right of the gate. The green arrow on the display will show you which gate is opened by its reader. (It's very funny when someone who wears their "smart" watch on their left wrist touches it on the reader to their left.)

Do you mean to/from the terminals? You just walk through the underground walkway tunnels. Follow the signs.

There must be some people in TfL who are praying that traffic levels don't recover to pre-pandemic levels because the gate lines at busy stations wouldn't cope with high numbers of phone payments at peak hours. It's simultaneously entertaining and infuriating to watch people try to get through gates using their phones to pay. The gate occupancy time per passenger - often 5, 10 or even 15 seconds per person - is huge compared to Oyster users. Oyster may be "old tech", but it is still the fastest way to get through the gate.

You've been given good advice already about why you don't need an Oyster, but in case you decide to buy one anyway, you will be able to do so at the Tube station serving Terminals 2 and 3, which is a short walk from each of those terminals. You don't need to go to Terminal 4 to buy one. And although you can pay cash to load the Oyster, it's faster to do so using a credit or debit card.

Then you will find your horizons becoming progressively more limited as cash is accepted in fewer and fewer places. If your "bad luck" experiences really involved times when you travelled with travellers cheques, then it's been a long time. The world has moved on since then - travellers cheques are almost unusable now - and those experiences may bear little relevance to what anyone should do now. You are so much more at risk from carrying large amounts of cash than from using credit cards - not least because cash is usually uninsurable, but many credit card companies will basically protect you from any loss through credit card fraud.

DL8692 = AF1233 DL8514 = AF322 Both of these are Air France flights, not Delta flights, even though Delta sells them under its flight number. Delta's rules for what you can take or use on board are likely to be irrelevant.

FWIW, I see that today's ECP email contains the following. So perhaps not a resurrection of Blue Note at Sea, but a different direction altogether - and a focus on vocalists would certainly interest me. STEPPING OUT WITH A NEW CRUISE PROGRAM Jazz Cruises will soon be announcing another cruise program for ’24. One of our passions has always been iconic vocalists. Watching great entertainers perform hit after hit after hit is a great format for entertainment on a cruise. Over the years, Jazz Cruises, through its various programs, has presented Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, George Benson, The Beach Boys, Kenny Loggins, Huey Lewis, Dianne Reeves and many other vocalists whose name defines a music genre and whose music is on the tip of your tongue and in your heart. It is in that tradition that our newest program has been crafted. Stay tuned for more.