Globaliser

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! 😄

The bags could also just sit in the floor in front of a seat even though that also takes the seat out of use for a passenger. Or one could sit on the floor and the other could sit on the seat, so that the pair only takes up one extra seat. But this is all part of improvising. These are commuter trains with no seat reservations, so it's not like you're prohibited from using any seats other than the ones you're sitting in. (Even on long-distance trains where there are seat reservations, unreserved seats are often used for luggage.) Only if the train is really, really busy might there be any chance of you having to stand. Also, if you are near two rows of seats that are arranged back to back, there's usually an A-shaped hole between the rows and you may be able to fit the bag(s) in there.

Not really. Contactless is probably now the best solution for most adult visitors who will only be in London for a short while. But some visitors with children, for example, may find benefits that are only available with Oysters. The daily cap applies to contactless as well as Oyster. For completeness, the weekly cap (Monday to Sunday) also now applies equally to both Oysters and contactless.

A slightly out-of-centre locations. Bermondsey Street is just round the corner. Lots of restaurants there. Very true, but perhaps slightly underselling this aspect of the area! It's a bit of a foodie hub now. I think that there are now two Michelin-starred restaurants in the area, one with two stars, although both are just off Bermondsey Street. Jose Pizarro has two venues, and the Garrison is a long-standing gastropub that's highly regarded. And there are other options right down to chain pizza (Franco Manca), if you must. If you're heading up towards (or beyond) Tower Bridge, there are a few bus routes that run along Tower Bridge Road if you don't feel like walking. I think that Borough Tube may be slightly closer than London Bridge Tube if you don't specifically need the latter and you're heading further afield. Don't forget that Bank/Monument is in reality one single station, including a fairly easy interchange between the Northern Line and the District/Circle Lines (and it's now much easier to do all interchanges there, because the Bank station upgrade has basically been completed).

I think it's the entire concept of reading any reviews about SWR that seems slightly bizarre. Railways are simply the principal form of transport for this kind of journey. You would no more read reviews of SWR to decide whether to take it than you would read a review of the New York subway to decide whether to take that to go downtown as opposed to taking a bus. It's not like you're choosing between two different cruise lines. And I'd be much more nervous about something going wrong with a car.

Here's a page showing that specific day's planned timetable, using information coming directly from the rail network (the signalling system's plan, I believe): https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/detailed/gb-nr:VIC/to/gb-nr:GTW/2024-05-18/0000-2359?stp=WVS&show=all&order=wtt. You can see that the first Southern train that morning will be at 0430, and the first Gatwick Express will be at 0529. (The list does include slow trains that stop everywhere in between London Victoria and Gatwick Airport, and are probably worth ignoring.) One big thing is that if you're going to Gatwick, road travel is dreadful but rail travel is bliss.

If that's where you set the bar for refusing to travel again with an airline, you're going to run out of airlines pretty quickly!

In general, all that a Bank Holiday means is that public transport will run on a special Bank Holiday timetable (but all that usually entails is that it's likely to be more like a Saturday or Sunday service than a Monday service). Whether there will be any specific disruption that day (for example, engineering work closing the line) probably won't be known until a couple of months beforehand. Engineering work does tend to take place at weekends and on Bank Holidays, but whether any specific line has any engineering work on any specific day, and what that means for the level of service that day, can't be predicted this far in advance. You won't have the same problem in London as you did in the Lake District about getting bookings over a Bank Holiday weekend. Many places in London (particularly restaurants) will be quieter over that Bank Holiday weekend than they will be two weeks later.

This makes no sense, either. If you had actually booked with Southwest, you wouldn't have had this problem. It was the way that NCL made the booking that seems to have caused it. Refusing to book with WN in the future, just because NCL messed you around this time, is a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face.