Globaliser

Thank you for the kind words - but I'm posting again just to make sure there's no confusion. The only video that I could see concerned the 11-15 Zip Oyster photocard. That is not the same as the Young Visitor Discount, which is also for (and only for) this age group. Getting a photocard will probably not be practicable for you. To set the Young Visitor Discount, you need to get an ordinary Oyster. (A Visitor Oyster will also work, but I personally find it hard to see any real benefit in a Visitor Oyster, for any age.) Then find a member of staff at a Tube station, a London Overground* station, one of the listed Elizabeth Line stations, or a TfL Visitor Centre. Ask to have the Young Visitor Discount set on the Oyster. The child must be present. The staff member will then use one of the ticket machines to set the discount onto that Oyster. The process should take only 2-3 minutes. If you're here for 8 days, then this will definitely be worth doing. * NB The London Overground is a set of TfL lines. They are shown in hollow orange on Tube maps. The London Overground is different from National Rail, and National Rail stations will not be able to set the Young Visitor Discount.

This depends on your credit card company, not on TfL, which simply charges the sterling price. Typically, a credit card will charge a foreign exchange conversion fee in the order of 2.5% to 3.0%. But because this is a simple percentage, you end up paying the same whether you spend (say) $100 buying an Oyster or spend $25 on each of 4 days' travel. If your credit card company charges a per-transaction fee for foreign exchange transactions, then the calculation is different. A single $100 purchase will be only one transaction, but TfL will send a separate charge to your credit card for each day's travel, ie four transactions. It's not hard to get a credit card that doesn't charge forex fees, though, in which case it shouldn't matter which route you go down so far as fees are concerned. But if you buy an Oyster, you will now of course have to pay the non-refundable price of the card.

1. Yes, exactly right. 2. Correct. Every passenger who needs to pay must use a separate card (or device). If two people each use a separate card, it doesn't matter if the two cards are billed to the same account by the bank. It doesn't have to be a credit card. A debit card should also work, particularly if it's a Mastercard or Visa. Does the child have one of them? If not, then one option would be for an adult who has an extra card to let the child use it. If they don't already have one (which your post suggests), then they could get a supplementary card on their own card account issued in another adult's name. I expect that there's still time before July to get one issued, although this is probably not a use case that the credit card company would be happy about. But if you buy an Oyster, then the child can have the Young Visitor Discount set on it by Tube station staff. See here for further details. This basically gives the child a 50% discount, and if you do enough travel it could offset the cost of buying an Oyster. 3. Yes.

"Where you're from, does water really fall from the sky?"

Assuming a normal arrival and disembarkation time, on most days that would basically give you the luxury of lots of time to get to Heathrow by whichever of the options is most appealing to you.

There's usually a train every 30 minutes and it takes about an hour and a quarter. So basically, whenever you like during the morning or around lunchtime, so long as it departs after you get out of bed and arrives before check-in closes for your cruise.

Well, I believe that John Bull isn't one for big cities, anyway, so Brussels would get marked down for that reason. But he is right about the comparison in this case.

I have zero personal knowledge, but I did have a look at the best airliner seat maps currently on the web. The Copa page shows two variants of the 737 Max 9: Variant 1 Variant 2 Both variants are described as having Collins Aerospace Diamond seats that convert into 84-inch fully flat beds. It would be worth comparing these two variants to the seat maps for the actual flights under consideration to check whether one of these is actually the relevant configuration.

For anyone else who has an old Oyster and is wondering about this: Whether you can get your deposit back depends on when you "bought" your Oyster. If you got it when the deposit was refundable, in most cases the deposit should remain refundable indefinitely.

The second closure will be from 2100 on Friday 10 May to 0600 on Monday 13 May.

Very important: Virgin Atlantic's "Premium" is not business class. It's premium economy. Business class is branded "Upper Class" (which is an old joke dating right back to the founding of the airline). As a generalisation, price will tend to rise as you get closer to the date of departure. But you do not necessarily get the lowest price if you book as soon as booking opens. This is not a first come, first served industry; despite the generalisation, there are occasions when the best prices end up being those available just before departure. You can never tell (until the aircraft has departed).

Time to get serious, perhaps; but probably not yet time to get cheap fares, which often aren't available as soon as booking opens. However, "refundable business class" and "cheap" are mutually exclusive. If you were to add "non-stop" to that (you don't say whether or not you want this), then you may well be in the correct ballpark already with the fares that you've found. But you can probably cut this down quite a bit if you are prepared to connect somewhere. Maybe Singapore Airlines for less than $9,000 to Hong Kong?

You can also use the (plentiful) ticket machines on the concourse, which could save you some queueing time (depending on how busy the ticket office is). As you will have luggage with you, I'd recommend that one person's job should be to watch the luggage while the other/another person buys the tickets. If both/all people have their attention focused on the ticket machine, bad things can happen. This applies both in the ticket office and on the concourse, although the concourse is naturally higher risk.

Given those constraints and with so little time, personally I would do only one unmissable thing - probably either the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh Museum. At least you'd have time to see some of it properly, rather than half doing two or three things badly. But if my ship called at Rotterdam, personally I wouldn't be wasting time travelling to and from Amsterdam for the day. And even if I were to go to Amsterdam, I'd take the train there rather than a bus.

I don't know if they have a tap in entrance for payment, maybe someone who lives there can answer that question. In the London area, the gates both for the Underground and for National Rail all have a reader pad for Oyster and contactless, and also a slot into which you can insert a traditional credit card size paper ticket. (For these purposes, Underground also includes other TfL railways like London Overground and Elizabeth Line - although most of the DLR is gateless.) Gates for National Rail also have an additional optical reader that will scan 2D barcodes (eg QR codes) for those with other kinds of paper tickets on which there's a 2D barcode, or those who are using a mobile phone to display a 2D barcode. Some National Rail stations outside London also have gates, and these have both optical readers and slots for traditional paper tickets. As gumshoe958 has said, you can't pay for London to Southampton using Oyster or contactless even though in practice the gate would let you in if you touch in with an Oyster or contactless, and you would then be able to board the train. If you do this, you would be travelling without a valid ticket and there would be consequences (and IIRC there are gates at Southampton so that you wouldn't be able to get out of the station at Southampton without assistance, so you would be found out there even if not before). So you have to make sure you have a valid ticket before you go through the gate to board the train to Southampton. At Waterloo, if you exit from the Underground and then take a South Western Railway train, I think that (whatever route you take through the station) you will have to pass through a TfL gate to touch out of the Underground and then you will have to pass through a National Rail gate using your London-Southampton ticket before boarding the train to Southampton. So you can't really go wrong doing this: you just need to present the appropriate method of payment at each gate. However, the Underground and National Rail systems are not actually hermetically sealed from each other, and in some places it is possible (by design) to change between Underground and National Rail trains without having to pass through a ticket gate. But this doesn't apply at Waterloo - and even where it does apply, the system is intended to be intuitive to reflect the fares integration between TfL and National Rail for journeys within the TfL area. Things only go wrong if people forget how they're paying for more complex journeys, or in edge cases in which a TfL touch in or touch out is needed but there are no readers positioned on any reasonable route through the station - and bloggers usually point these out quickly enough that TfL then installs additional readers where necessary. Waterloo is in Zone 1. 'Nuff said! 😄