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Use the Elizabeth Line. There is step-free exit at Tottenham Court Road. Don't try using Covent Garden Tube with luggage, as you have to use stairs. For similar reasons, if you're going by Tube to Waterloo with luggage, it's not that easy to take the direct Northern Line route from Tottenham Court Road because exit at Waterloo is not step-free. With luggage, you may well be better off taking the Elizabeth Line one stop to Bond Street, and changing there for the Jubilee Line, from which there is step-free exit at Waterloo. (You can also go from Tottenham Court Road to Bond Street by Central Line - it's two stops - which has the advantage of shorter walks at both of those stations, but the disadvantage that there is a step up from platform to train.) To be honest, though, I'd be inclined to take a taxi from the hotel to Waterloo because it'll be the easiest way of doing that journey. You may have to walk up to High Holborn because part of Drury Lane has recently been reversed (between Parker Street and Great Queen Street) so you're less likely to find empty cabs just cruising past the hotel like they used to. But that walk is the first part of the way to Tottenham Court Road station anyway, so you can switch to plan B and just keep on going towards the Tube if you can't find a cab on High Holborn.

Correct - AA operates at T3. This is in the Central Terminal Area at Heathrow. I believe that there are now two hotels in the CTA: There's a Hilton Garden Inn next to T2, which is probably about a 10-minute walk with luggage to T3 check-in through underground walkways. There's also an Aerotel in T3 arrivals, but it may not be the sort of place you're thinking of staying in. There are a handful of hotels at T4. I think these are a Crowne Plaza, a Hilton, a Holiday Inn Express and a Premier Inn. They're 5 to 15 minutes' walk into T4 by elevated walkway, from which you can get a free transfer to the CTA by rail. And at T5, there's a Sofitel, which is about 5 minutes' walk into T5, and again you can get a free transfer to the CTA by rail. These intra-airport transfers are IMHO infinitely preferable to trying to get to/from the off-airport hotels by road. For completeness, there are a couple of hotels near Hatton Cross Tube. I think that one's the Atrium Hotel and the other is another Hilton Garden Inn. With a contactless bank card, the Tube journey from Hatton Cross Tube to Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3 Tube should also be free. But you would have a more difficult street-level walk to get from either hotel to Hatton Cross Tube.

Nothing. The IVL is basically part of the cost of getting an NZeTA. More information here: https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/preparing-a-visa-application/your-journey-to-new-zealand/before-you-travel-to-new-zealand/paying-ivl

Correct. Unless the hotel is within walking distance of the terminal, the options are basically as above: Hotel Hoppa, taxi, or "minicab".

Do you mean the "Leonardo Hotel London Heathrow Airport"? It's nowhere near T3. You'll need the (dreadful and dreadful value) Hotel Hoppa, or a taxi, or a private hire car/"minicab". Much as the hotel says, really, only in reverse.

Do you have a source for this? AFAIK, Minimum Connection Times are solely set by airlines. And it wasn't difficult to find a published MCT of 30 minutes. My first random try, in fact: Tweed New Haven (HVN).

Basically, there's no need. In London, there are a lot of people (like me) who simply don't routinely carry cash any more. I often go out taking nothing more than my primary credit card, put into my pocket on its own. For context, I think that in the UK I used cash on only one occasion in the whole of 2024. London restaurants will very often add a service charge to the bill. This is almost always discretionary, and if it is discretionary you have a legal right to ask for it to be reduced or removed. But I very rarely have any reason to, and just pay the total on a card. If there's no service charge, some people will tip but many people won't. There really are very few other situations in which a tip is expected. Even "black cab" (licensed taxi) drivers, who used to be pretty militant about their tips, don't really expect them any more (as they have basically been built in to the metered fare so that the total can be paid on a card), although their card machines will often offer the option.

At a guess, from Waterloo to your hotel would be about £20-£25 in a taxi.

Exactly what I quoted of your post: train to Waterloo, taxi to hotel. To be precise, I wouldn't Uber. But that's only because - as a matter of principle - if I had to choose between an Uber and walking, I'd walk.

That is how airline tickets typically record the passenger's names, if the passenger chooses to include their middle name(s). It's been like this for decades. The same applies to complex surnames/family names. So if Mr Juan Pablo Garcia Rodriguez puts all of his names onto the ticket, you would expect to see GARCIARODRIGUEZ/JUANPABLOMR on the ticket and in the reservation. It's not hard to see how a computer that's translating that back on some form of customer-facing interface would print the passenger's name as Juanpablomr Garciarodriguez.

I would do this. With luggage, don't even try any of those three Tube stations.

Which countries were these? And presumably, if the airlines you were travelling with had no middle name field, pretty much every passenger travelling on your flights were equally "sidelined" by immigration with you? After all, very many passengers have middle names, and very many passengers won't give middle names for tickets if they are not asked for them.

There is a very simple reason why so many airlines have no field for middle name(s) and neither want nor ask for them: your middle name(s) are not required on your ticket. Because of the limitation on data fields in tickets, inserting unnecessary middle names can sometimes cause necessary names (eg passport first name) to vanish or become corrupted. And that is something that could cause you a problem. So insisting on inserting middle names is not a risk-free exercise, even if you personally prefer to do it. Immigration officers rarely care about what names are on your ticket. What they are more likely to care about is the information transmitted as part of advance passenger information, which is usually asked for separately and has data fields that are structured to capture a great variety of naming practices. It is important to get that data correct.

Whoops, sorry, I didn't read that carefully enough. But exactly the same applies: there's more peak flow into town on Thursday mornings than Fridays, but it's equally immaterial for you as you're going the other way. Mind you, there aren't any substantial reasons to travel to Southampton a day early. In your shoes, I'd have an extra night in London and travel on Friday morning. There's very little risk involved in doing that.

Getting a discount set on an Oyster is a pretty swift operation (as you know) once you can find a member of staff who's free to help you. Getting away from a busy Tube station like Euston and doing it elsewhere would be one way of avoiding an over-long queue. It's possible that even walking over to Euston Square Tube would get you attention more quickly! I suspect, though, that Railcards (and their associated Oyster discounts) are unlikely to be of much use to most short-term visitors to London.

On a Friday morning, you'd be travelling from Waterloo to Southampton in the opposite direction to the peak flow, such as it is on Fridays these days.

Sorry, this is incorrect so far as international flights are concerned. I think that the current list of BA destinations that are or will be operated at Terminal 3 (not Terminal 5) is: Short-haul Billund Bucharest Budapest Cologne (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) Figari (Summer Seasonal) Gibraltar Gothenburg Grenoble (Winter Seasonal) Istanbul Sabina Gokcen (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) Krakow Ljubljana (Summer Seasonal) Luxembourg Lyon Marseille Olbia (Summer Seasonal) Oslo Perugia (Summer Seasonal) Prague Rimini (Summer Seasonal) Sofia Stuttgart Toulouse Valencia Vienna Zagreb Long haul Accra Atlanta Austin (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) Bahrain (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) Buenos Aires (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) Grand Cayman Nassau Phoenix Providenciales Rio de Janeiro (moves to T5 to on 30 March 2025) São Paulo (moves to T3 on 30 March 2025) Phoenix Vancouver (moves to T5 on 30 March 2025) The source for this says that this list was last updated on 26 January 2025.

I suspect it's a case of airline computers handling it as well as it could be handled in the 1960s - and still doing so today because a lot of the basic data architecture remains the same. Airlines will tell you that your ticket is a purely electronic document, although they can print you a receipt in various forms that shows you some of the data on the ticket. What they don't tell you is that what's actually recorded on the ticket is, from a functional point of view, recognisably the same as what was written on the red carbon tickets that some of us will remember but many of us are too young to have seen in the flesh.

If you are fit and able enough to wheel the luggage a couple of hundred yards (which is all the distance between Waterloo station and your hotel), the train is definitely better.

This will not be a problem, and just reflects the way that names have been stored since the beginning of computerised airline reservations. Ms Jane Smith's name will conventionally be entered in the reservation as SMITH/JANEMS. There isn't a separate field for the person's title. So what you see is almost certainly just the computer displaying that as JANEMS SMITH.

The point is that in all of these cases, this is because the port is in the same city as the airport.

Is he bringing the missus, or is it her turn to look after the kids? (For the avoidance of doubt, this is a joke.)

Domestic flights have no immigration on arrival, which saves the time needed for that. But for an international arrival, clearing Customs takes no time at all for almost everyone because it's a simple walk-through the green channel without stopping - so there is no time to be saved there if you are a domestic arrival. What takes time is baggage delivery, and I'm not sure that baggage delivery at Heathrow is reliably faster from domestic flights than from international flights. If travelling from Edinburgh to central London, the flying route of choice would surely be to London City? Baggage delivery at London City is usually fast, and travel to central London is usually significantly faster than from Heathrow. The train has many advantages, but it is possible to make flying on Edinburgh (or Glasgow) to London work better.

Typically, about 45-60 minutes. That includes clearing immigration, which isn't in your list of steps, but is required if you're not arriving on a domestic flight. However, if you can't use the eGates and you need to queue to see an immigration officer, that can add to the time it takes.

I've been with a competitor, although at a time when that was still run by its founder. I can't remember whether we actually saw any puffins specifically, but it looks like there are nesting puffins on Noss, and frankly it wouldn't matter given the richness of the other bird life that you would undoubtedly see. It looks like the competitor's boat (which I'm pretty sure is the same boat that I was on) is larger and more sheltered, if that makes a difference. See this post for more: Fortunately, it looks like the OP is going in mid-June 2025.