Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - England trip including Gatwick overnight

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England trip including Gatwick overnight

I "arrived" at this website 3 or so months ago to help plan our first trip to Venice. My husband is English, I'm American & we live in the US. We decided to go to England for Christmas to visit my husband's family & then meet American friends in Venice for New Years. I am posting a report on things that happened on the English part of the trip (Venice will follow separately) that may be helpful to others. I hope you won't find it dull as no sightseeing is involved. I also don't cover London because unfortunately,we never got there. I will mention that there is a new Alan Ayckbourn (sp?) trilogy of plays on in London that got great reviews. Each play has the same cast & set but three different stories. They can be seen all together on a Saturday or separately at other times. I was hoping to go but...stuff happens. Forgive me if some of my experiences are not new news. Airfare & getting the best price. The decision to add Venice to this trip was clinched when I discovered how cheap fares from London to Venice were. The trick was getting the best fare to London & then coordinating connecting flights on the return-Venice-London-NY. I haunted all the discount websites as well as the airlines' own (Virgin, BA, American etc.) One thing I discovered was on BA's site, if your dates & times are somewhat flexible, you can find the best price fairly easily. When you plug in dates, you can add + or - 7 days (or 3 days etc.). Airfares can change dramatically in a day, particularly around holidays. Once you've picked the date, you're then offered different flight times & there were price differences on the same day. While $30 or $40 doesn't seem like much, if it's per ticket, one way, it adds up. Having found the best days & times on the BA site, I then checked those flights on the discount sites to see if I could do better. In the end, the best fare & flights I found was on the BA site. I did have a heart-stopping few days when the fares suddenly went up (while I was waiting to see if they'd go down). I thought I'd missed my window of opportunity but they did come down again & when they did, I grabbed the tickets. Two roundtrip NY/London/Venice tickets cost under $1,000. We might have done slightly better if we'd been willing to stay overnight in London on the return, but that would have eaten up the savings. We did have to transfer from Gatwick to Heathrow at our own expense (GBP 28 for 2) on the return.

Christmas in the Cotswolds My stepdaughter lives in the picturesque village of Great Tew where we were to spend Christmas. Since it's a small village with nothing but a pub and a post office with a convenience store attached, I was a bit stunned, whilst doing a search on this message board, to find that many Fodorites have discovered this little piece of heaven. Last time I looked, there were 55 strings mentioning Great Tew! Driving to Great Tew from Surrey, we stopped in Woodstock (home of Blenheim Palace) for a late lunch. It was 3:30pm & we discovered most restaurants were closed for lunch & not serving. We were lucky enough to come upon The Woodstock Arms (also sign-posted the Greene King, I think) where we were met with a cheery welcome and a huge roaring fire. I wanted something light. On their specials board was Cauliflower & Stilton soup. I'm not fond of either but decided to try it. I also saw what I thought was risotto on the board. It turned out the risotto was actually an accompaniment to another bigger dish. I asked if I could just have the risotto & they happily complied, saying I was the second person that day to ask for it. The soup was creamy & "out of this world" served in a footed crock with wonderful crusty bread & fresh butter (cholesterol heaven). This would have been plenty but I still had my risotto coming which was also delicious. I could barely eat half. My husband had steak & ale pie & was a very happy camper. On Christmas Eve my husband & I went to midnight mass at St. John's church (Great Tew) built in the 12th century. The walkway to enter the church takes you through a graveyard that's so old, many of the stones are tilting so precariously you want to rush past for fear they will topple over on you. The church was lit in only candle light. When the Vicar began speaking I was a bit stunned to hear what sounded like an American accent. It turns out he is Canadian & recently posted there as the old Vicar has retired. Late Christmas morning we decided to talk a walk through the village to walk off breakfast in preparation for Christmas lunch. I expected the village to be very quiet but the pub (The Falkland Arms) was quite busy & was even serving food. No-we did NOT partake. Everything in the countryside in England is quite muddy now because they've had so much rain. If you're going, take boots!

Staying overnight at Gatwick We spent all our time in England staying with family but decided, while already in England, that we should stay at a Gatwick hotel the night before departing for Venice since it was an early morning flight. I was lucky to have computer access so I came to the Fodor's website & did a quick search for hotel booking websites (what an amazing source of info this site is!). My sister-in-law had told me Le Meridien is actually attached to the North terminal at Gatwick so you can walk there rather than waiting for a courtesy bus. One site I tried (I think it was ABC) which is supposedly used by travel agents guaranteed the lowest prices. They quoted GBP 79 for a double. I then found that Lastminute.com had a rate of GBP 70 so I took that. (so much for guarantees) I was luckily able to print out the confirmation because when we arrived at Le Meridien, they first couldn't find the reservation & then claimed I had booked a "day rate" i.e. in in the morning-out before evening. This was clearly not the case since the confirmation showed our checking in on one date & checking out the next. They further pointed out my confirmation was from Lastminute.com, not from Le Meridien. I overheard they were trying to pull the same thing with another couple who were checking in at the same time. I don't know whether the other couple had used Lastminute or some other booking service. I said in a loud voice to my husband "this is a scam". Another check-in agent then came to tell me angrily that travel agents were posting the wrong rates. I told her that was HER problem not ours. She disagreed. I persevered & we got the 70 pound rate which included all taxes. (I checked on Lastminte.com yesterday & they're now showing a 60 pound rate!) This aggravation aside, Le Meridien was a great choice. The room was lovely and clean, the bed comfortable, the bathroom terrific and, despite the fact that our room was closest to the elevator, it was very quiet. The wake up call came on time. My only minor complaint was the heat in the room was a bit too much & the windows can't be opened. This is apparently the most expensive hotel at Gatwick (you can get a room at the Ibis for about 39 pounds not to mention lots of B&Bs for even less than that), but being able to walk to the terminal eliminated the worry of courtesy buses that may only run every hour-or worse-some buses don't start running until 6:30 or 7 which would have been too late for us. Eating near Gatwick We were meeting some family who live near Gatwick for dinner. We went to an Indian restaurant in Crawley called Raj Tandoori. The food was excellent and it was only about a 7 minute cab ride to the hotel (8 pounds). A nice alternative to hotel dining although the restaurants at Le Meridien looked fine. Checking in at Gatwick When we arrived at the terminal, I was horrified to find that all BA passengers check in at the same line. 6:30 am and the place was chaos. Our flight was at 7:40. When it's starts to get close to your departure time, there is an agent who comes around asking for passengers on particular flights so you get walked to the head of the line, but we still had to go through security after being checked in. I made the cardinal mistake of putting my cuticle clippers in my cosmetic bag which was in our carryon case. It was picked up by the x-ray machine & they emptied EVERYTHING out of that bag. I was given the choice of checking the entire bag or having the cuticle nippers confiscated. I am now minus a Hoffritz cuticle nipper. Once arriving at the gate, you must take a bus to the plane.

Miscellaneous observations -Text messaging on cell phones (mobiles) has arrived big time in England. -There is a chain of restaurants called Ask (mentioned by others on this site) that has good, reasonably priced Italian food including individual, thin crust pizza. The one we went to also had a daily 6.95 GBP luncheon buffet that included both hot & cold items-very acceptable alternative to pub food. -The ethnic food in England,- Chinese, Thai, Indian is still great! -For those needing to park at Gatwick long-term, I noticed that many of the Gatwick hotels have very reasonable parking rates if you book a room, even for one night. I'm told it may even be worth booking a room you don't use to get these parking rates. Finally, the last misadventure we had on this part of our trip involved our Nissan hatchback rental car. After 10 days of no trouble, we arrived at Le Meridien to discover the boot (trunk) of the car refused to open. Our luggage was being held hostage! We had not had this problem before. In the end, we were lucky it was a hatchback. I read the owners manual, discovered we could put down the back seats & gain access to the boot. It then took some intense "jiggling" to slide the tightly packed suitcases through the opening & out the back seat.