Hi,



I am going on RCCL's Med cruise on September 10th departing from Barcelona. After the cruise, we are planning to fly back to London where we will check into a hotel by Heathrow prior to our flight back to Toronto the next day. My dilemma is our flight from Barcelona to London.



According to RCCL's website, we are debarking on September 17 at 8:30AM. I was checking Easyjet's website for pricing and found that they had a flight from Barcelona to Gatwick at 10:40AM (gates closing at 10:10) for 35.49 EUR. The next flight is almost double in price and leaves at 14:30. There is a flight to Luton at 10:55AM and one to Stansted at 11:10AM. Am I being unrealistic for wanting to try to catch the 10:40AM flight?



Also, given that my flight back home is from Heathrow, I have been looking for a cheap flight from Barcelona to Heathrow. So far, I have not found any cheap flights and BA and Iberia offer ridiculous on-way prices. If I were to buy a return ticket, but not use the return portion, would I get in trouble?



Thanks. Any advice is welcomed.



G

My advice:

I assume your flight to Toronto leaves from Gatwick so any flight you take to an airport OTHER than Gatwick means extra time and money spent on getting to Gatwick.

RCCL probably has boilerplate language in their general information that you have either received or is available on their website that says something to the effect of "not recommending" booking departing (from Barcelona) flights before a certain hour (unless you are in their air-sea program and obviously you aren't).

What will happen on the day of arrival:

there WILL BE people on that cruise who will want to be the first off the boat because they booked earlier flights (after many cruises, believe me, this WILL occur).

You cannot depend on the first debarkation to take place at exactly 8:30.

If you really think you are going to save that much money by booking that early flight, then do so. But also tell Guest Services on the ship that you want to be in the FIRST group of passengers to debark.

Sorry..I apologize for not reading your original post more carefully re your departure from Heathrow vs. Gatwick.

Otherwise my advice still stands. Sometimes peace of mind and hassle-free travel costs a little more and only you can determine if the cost is worth it.

I have the outgoing portion of a return ticket a few times without problem. The only problem seems to arise if you've got a connecting flight to your return ticket. For example, I considered booking a Toronto-London, London-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-London, London-Toronto ticket, not using the AMS-London part (because we were actually flying Amsterdam-Barcelona-Marrakech-London on points). I was concerned that BA might cancel our London-Toronto ticket when we didn't show up for the Amsterdam-London flight. But if it's just a question of taking the outbound but not inbound flight (without that flight being sandwiched into other flights), you shouldn't have a problem.

Depending on how much time you have, you might also look into Ryanair's flight from Girona to London. Girona is about 90 minutes by bus or train from Barcelona and is a very attractive and interesting town. You could stop over for the night there, do a bit of sightseeing and fly out the next day.

Thank you everyone for your input.

My preference is of course to fly from Barcelona to Heathrow direct instead of through Gatwick as we will have to get ourselves from Gatwick to Heathrow, that is another 17GBP/person.

There are later flights from Barcelona to Gatwick/Luton/Stansted with EasyJet... However, the price almost doubles. And since we would like to enjoy a little bit of London before we come home, flying out of Barcelona at 10/11PM is really not ideal. That is why we were wondering if it would be reasonable to make it to the airport before 10AM.

It shouldn't take you too long to get to the airport from Barcelona. I made a 8:20 AM flight from Barcelona to Heathrow and made it ontime. I would take the 10:40 flight to Gatwick.