Globaliser

Thank you - that is indeed very kind of you.

There, I think, is a good part of your answer.

As another alternative, other London airports are available (as they say). But almost anything would beat having to waste the best part of a day sitting on National Express coaches on an indirect and time-consuming routing.

Those airlines/flights use the same terminals at Heathrow. So I don't know what these locals were on about. The issue has been addressed over the summer. The airport imposed capacity caps and required airlines to reduce the number of passengers they were carrying. Some airlines had to stop taking bookings.

To be frank, I would change my arrival day instead so that I could take the train.

Yes. After you have cleared immigration and customs and exited to the public area, you take the inter-terminal shuttle train from the North Terminal to the South Terminal, to which the railway station is attached.

I don't know where you're currently booked to stay, but there's not so much to do around Kings Cross as to make it worth deliberately staying there. If you're currently booked to stay somewhere interesting in the middle of town, you're likely to be better off there. If you're currently booked near Euston, it's only a 10-minute walk from Euston to Kings Cross, so unless you have lots of luggage, there may be little point in changing hotels just to be in the Kings Cross area. Perhaps the main exception to this is if you are going to stay in St Pancras station itself, which is a more special experience.

When is this for? Avanti are having some well-publicised timetable issues at present: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62771922 But this may not be relevant to you if your travel is a long way off (in which case, my advice would be to do no further planning until this journey is about three months away).

The Scandinavian countries are all directly covered by 261/2004. At present, the UK's divergence from 261/2004 is, I think, limited to specifying the compensation in GBP rather than EUR.

You'll be fine if the liquids are in an appropriate security bag by the shop at your European airport of origin. Off the top of my head, I think that the requirements are that the liquids are sealed into an approved STEB (security tamper-evident bag), the bag has not been opened or tampered with, the receipt for the goods is visible and legible inside the bag (some bags have a special pocket to ensure this), the receipt matches the goods, and the receipt shows that the goods were bought no more than 24 hours previously. Otherwise, you'll either have to comply with the 100 ml baggie rules, or dispose of the liquids (eg drink all the drinking water) before security at LHR (an obviously empty bottle is fine), or dispose of the bottle entirely before security.

You don't have to do that. You can follow the purple Flight Connections signs and use the airside transfer bus to get from T3 to T5 (assuming your onward BA flight is from T5 and not T3). If you still need an onward boarding pass for the flight from T5, the transfer desk would be your first stop. Even if you already have both boarding passes, you would still have to clear security when you get to T5, but because you are not going landside, you would avoid having to clear immigration. Obviously, if you want non-airport dining you will have to clear to landside. But I think there aren't many establishments in the Heathrow/Hounslow area that would be worth the effort, let alone truly count as fine dining.

I agree. It just seemed like a possible explanation for being told that there's a terminal change, like ITA (for example) says.

Is MAD-PHL operated from T4S, perhaps?

You should have boarding passes for both flights before you board the first flight. When you get to Heathrow, you'll need to clear security and then go to the gate for your onward flight. There will be a passport check at the gate before boarding the second flight but this is to check your identity against the boarding pass name, rather than for immigration clearance. The best route through the terminal will depend a lot on where your first flight arrives. You're likely (but far from guaranteed) to arrive at the main building. If you do, that's where you'll clear security before going to the gate, which is likely (but far from guaranteed) to be at the Terminal 5B satellite, to which you'll need to take the transit (basically a shuttle train). However, if you arrive at one of the satellites, keep your wits about you and read the flight connections information, because you may be allowed to save time by clearing security at the satellite. The signs should tell you whether or not you can. If you can't, you have to take the transit to the main building, clear security there, and then take the transit back to the relevant satellite.

Would these be on the same booking? If so, then the connection is legal, and most people doing such a connection will make it to the next flight. But because 60 minutes is exactly on the Minimum Connection Time, there's a significant misconnection risk even in normal times. So it is possible. But that's not the same as whether it's advisable, or whether you'd be happy to run the risk (which depends on your own circumstances).

In general: a direct train from Gatwick Airport to Southampton Central, operated by Southern Railway, once an hour during the day, takes just under two hours, does not run on Sundays.

You're not missing much! This week, for example, I have seen this gem.

Viator seems to be on a massive market-grabbing drive at the moment. I've never seen its name so often in London. Clearly, it thinks that there are enough unsophisticated / gullible / lazy tourists who are willing to pay a mark-up over the price that they could get the same thing for elsewhere.

I suspect that the moral of the story is more that Viator is not cheap.

That's really odd. I've never even thought about seat reservations on a train to Southampton (although I haven't done it since South Western took over). So I've had a look. https://www.southwesternrailway.com/contact-and-help/faqs has this: Q. Can I reserve a seat on South Western Railway trains? A. No. If you buy an Advance ticket, you must travel on the train you’ve booked but you are free to choose any seat – this must be in Standard Class if you have a Standard Class ticket. Also, https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/tocs_maps/tocs/SW.aspx has this (in the "Ticketing & Fares" panel): Seat reservations: Not available

More details about the current arrangements via Woking at: https://www.southwesternrailway.com/travelling-with-us/at-the-station/airport-links https://www.firstbus.co.uk/railair/timetable https://www.firstbus.co.uk/uploads/node_images/RA2 from January 2021_0.pdf

It's like Forrest's box of chocolates. In May 2007, I sailed south from Southampton to northern Spain on Sea Princess (1998, 77,000 GT). When we woke up on the first morning at sea, it was blowing a Force 10. Worse, a lone long-distance yachtsman was in distress, and we were one of a number of vessels dispatched to assist. Of course, this meant that we couldn't steer a course to minimise the ship's movement, so it was an exciting ride. I sat in the very front of the ship on the highest enclosed deck (the seating area for the buffet, IIRC), which had large windows through which I could watch the SAR aircraft circling over the yacht's location and a number of ships converging on that point. It was a memorable day. Five days later, on the northbound crossing, it was like a millpond. AIUI, there are good scientific reasons why the Bay of Biscay deserves its reputation - something to do with common weather patterns, the shape of the surrounding shorelines and the shape of the bottom. But none of that can tell you in advance what it'll be like on any particular day.

Correct: you send them to a good local wine supermarket, ie Majestic.

Majestic is good for what it is, otherwise it wouldn't have become what it is today - and it is one of the wine shops that I use. It may well be the best wine supermarket in Southampton. But let's not suggest that the company is anything that it is not (and that it would not itself claim to be). Today, the "true connoisseur" has access to plenty of online retailers that do much better than Majestic in that niche (including, in one particular specialist area, what is in effect a subsidiary of Majestic). Those retailers don't have to be located in Southampton in order to serve customers in Southampton. As for London, you're beginning to sound like you have a sizeable chip on one shoulder. Please don't believe everything you see in the movies. You might want to come and visit some time to see what it's really like.

I agree that Frankfurt itself is a bit of dump, but one advantage is that it's really easy to get out to surrounding places that are really worth visiting, like Wiesbaden and Heidelberg, or the cathedral cities of Worms and Speyer. There are some famous Chagall windows in a church in Mainz. There are also many attractive places down the Rhine between Mainz and Koblenz, and up the Nahe from Bingen - even though this may duplicate some of the river cruise's itinerary (depending on where it's going), you can't see or visit everything/everywhere from a cruise. Hamburg is a very prosperous city with some interesting history, and much of it looks like it used to - but a very large part of it is post-WW2 reconstruction. I would suggest avoiding Munich during Oktoberfest (although it sounds like this won't be a problem) unless Oktoberfest is actually the reason for going. Otherwise, though, given the OP's list of interests my top pick from the list would also be Munich.