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HS wrote:

Pretty sure Dishoom had stopped accepting Amex, has definitely been the case in December in London. 100% sure it wasn’t something else?

Agreed, I went to the one in Birmingham in December and I’m almost certain they didn’t take Amex. Would be great if that’s changed.

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yonasl wrote:

You can use all OW lounges but some may be full and prioritise their own clients (I don´t know who Finnaair´s has a deal with when that happens).

I took what sounds like the same Finnair flight last month and my boarding pass told me to go to the Qantas lounge, so I assume you are supposed to be able to get in there if others are busy. Qantas wasn’t busy at all when I got there around half 8; they didn’t have a flight leaving until later in the morning so the downstairs dining bit wasn’t open but the upstairs was fine.

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Doesn’t help this time but I recommend travelling with a doorstop. Had two very drunk men walk into my Travelodge room in the middle of the night once; there had been an issue with the corporate credit card, which meant my room was showing as vacant/unpaid on the system. They were just as startled by the situation as I was tbf but I found it quite unsettling and struggled to sleep in hotels for a while afterwards. Eventually my OH bought me a cheap doorstop and it makes me feel better that at least I’ll get some warning if someone is trying to get in!

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Thank you, @Travel Strong – relieved if it’s planned maintenance and not Amex cancelling me.

I’d also feel a bit nervous about having Russian visa in my passport atm. I got given the third degree at passport control in Helsinki back in 2023, by an officer who decided he needed to call his boss over when he saw I had a Russian visa. All kinds of questions about why I’d been there etc, whether I planned to go again etc. Then made me show all kinds of documentation about my plans in Finland too. I was just unlucky – OH also had a visa and got through with no problem – but I genuinely thought they wasn’t going to let me into the country for a few minutes so was quite glad when my passport got close to expiry and I could justify a new one!

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Anyone else having issues with the Amex app today? Mine tells me my total balance is n/a and I have no recent transactions, which definitely isn’t the case.

Ethics aside, my main concern about going to Russia atm would be whether any UK credit cards still work there? I really want to go to Belarus but procrastinating it for that reason; I don’t like the idea of carrying large amounts of cash just in case.

I went to St Petersburg in 2019 and stayed in the Hotel Russ, which I would not recommend. Rooms were fine but the food in the hotel restaurant was terrible; excessive use of dill, even by Russian standards.

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dreamflyer1 wrote:

Lastly does anyone have experience with the hotel that is attached to the airport. Any feedback? All I am after is a bed to have a rest while I get ready for the next flight

I stayed a night in the airport hotel a couple of years ago and it was fine; room reminded me a bit of a Premier Inn. The only thing I remember being a bit of a pain was that I had to queue at the transfer desk for quite a long time to present a stopover voucher before I was able to go to the hotel. But that was on a free stopover on a cash flight.

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Rui N. wrote:

Fascinated by the Lapland suggestion, only had heard of it for Christmas stuff (but “cold” vacations were never really my thing) – and only knew about Rovaniemi, not Ivalo/Saariselka. What makes the latter better?

Not necessarily better. Rovaniemi is a decent-sized town, so it has more amenities, and it’s the official home of Santa Claus, so you can visit Santa there even in the middle of summer if you want to. Saariselka is a small village on the edge of a national park, so it’s more picturesque and easier to get away from street lights etc when you’re trying to spot the northern lights at night. Saariselka is also significantly further north so often has better snow conditions (though there should be snow everywhere in Feb; it’s more of a consideration for people planning trips in late Nov/early Dec).

How do you guys go about booking such a trip? Package holidays or just find the flights+hotels separately? Any suggestions on how to do it, agencies, etc. appreciated. What scale of costs are we talking about here?

I always do DIY flights and hotels (though I don’t have kids – packages are probably a more attractive idea if you do, but I think TUI etc mainly run them pre-Christmas for the Santa stuff). I normally pay about £400 for economy flights on Finnair or £800 for business. I booked an apartment via booking.com for about £130/night. If you start booking activities then the costs do add up (prob about €200 for an adult+child to do a 5km husky sledding trip, for example), but there’s tonnes of snow to play in and plenty of little slopes to go sledging on, so you don’t really need a tonne of expensive organised stuff.

There was a Lapland thread earlier this year in the destination section which has more info: https://hfp2026mar.kinsta.cloud/forums/topic/lapland-december-have-we-left-it-too-late/

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+1 for Saariselka. I’m there at the moment and can confirm there is tonnes of snow. The limiting factor for activities is normally daylight, of which there isn’t much so far north in December/January, but by February the days will be noticeably longer. You can fly on Finnair with a change in Helsinki very easily and there’s a bus to Saariselka that meets all Finnair fligths into Ivalo.

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I have a flight with Qatar from Gatwick booked later this year and asked on chat about the lounge, as was a bit confused. I was told that because I was on an Avios ticket, they couldn’t say whether I would have lounge access at Gatwick or not (but that I would definitely have lounge access in Doha). So I ended the interaction more confused than I started!

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I haven’t flown with them yet so can’t comment, but I have the same Urgench-Baku-Gatwick flights booked for October. Just wanted to say – be super-careful when booking on their website; I managed to screw it up and ended up paying twice! I was trying to pay on my BAPP and the payment appeared to fail so I figured maybe they didn’t take Amex and paid on a different card instead (which went through and I received a ticket). Then a few days later I realised the initial attempt had actually been charged to my BAPP (although I hadn’t received a second ticket). Luckily, their customer service was better than I expected and they refunded me when I got in touch, but I got the impression that problems with their website are fairly common; they didn’t seem particularly surprised that I’d managed to pay for the same flight twice.

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Love reading other people’s plans.

Jan – week in Saariselkä (northern Lapland), flying Finnair business class. Technically not a holiday as I’m working remotely all week, just doing slightly funny hours. There’s only 4 hours of anything approaching daylight so far north in Jan, so plan is to be outside in the snow for those hours and work when it’s dark.

Feb – got some cheap CE flights to Malaga so having a long weekend in Spain. Decided to stay in Algeciras and take a ferry trip across to Ceuta (one of those weird bits of Spain that’s in Africa).

Mar – more cheap CE flights, this time for a long weekend in Toulouse. OH used to live there so mainly catching up with friends.

May/June – long weekend in Kosovo for the first bank hol. Very unglamorous – flying Wizzair and staying in an Airbnb that’s costing £30/night! Then in late May/early June, going on a 10-day trip to Georgia with my parents; it’s somewhere they’ve always wanted to go, but were nervous to try on their own. They were not impressed by the timing of the BA flight to Tbilisi, so instead we’re flying out via Amsterdam with Georgian Airways. Then coming back from Batumi with Turkish.

Oct – like @Saltrams I am off to Uzbekistan, but I’m taking a different route as used some Avios to book Qatar business class from LGW to TAS via DOH. Then coming back I paid cash for UGC-GYD, GYD-LGW on Azerbaijan Airlines, with a three-night stop in Baku in between. Contemplating a day-trip into Tajikistan as part of the Uzbekistan trip, but getting a visa for Tajikistan doesn’t seem 100% straightforward so not sure yet whether that will happen.

Haven’t decided what I’m doing over the summer yet. OH is spending the first week of Aug at a conference in Graz and is keen for me to come with him, but a week in Graz doesn’t really appeal. Thinking of doing a solo hiking trip somewhere instead but not sure where yet; it’s an awkward week because so many places are too hot/busy/expensive.

I work for a company with an unlimited holiday policy, so try to make the most of it. (I’m sure there is an invisible limit somewhere, but so far I haven’t managed to cross it!)

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This is a fun idea for a thread 🙂

My highlights were:

1. Best northern lights I’ve ever seen in northern Finland. Actually looked like they do in the photos, rather than just a grey blur like I’ve seen previously.
2. Free upgrade from PE to CW on a LHR-JFK flight.
3. Incredible tulips in Istanbul parks in April and hardly anyone else there to see them. 10/10 would recommend.
4. Ticking Albania off my list of unvisited European countries, leaving me with just Kosovo and Belarus to complete.
5. Finally getting to visit Yellowstone NP in September (and seeing a grizzly bear!). This was my second attempt, the first being in July 2022 when I’d booked accommodation in Gardiner, at the northern park entrance. A few weeks before that trip there was a once-in-a-century flooding event that swept away the road from Gardiner into the park. I ended up having to reorganise my itinerary and spent four days in Idaho instead. Idaho was fine – there is genuinely more to see there than I expected – but it can’t compete with Yellowstone and I was so happy to finally see it.

One minor lowlight:

Six-hour Easyjet flights to/from Cape Verde. I couldn’t complain too much because my OH booked the trip as his treat but OMG, six hours on Easyjet is a loooong time and reminded me why I’m normally the one in charge of booking travel.

One major lowlight:

Spending two hours on a flight from Ivalo to Helsinki thinking I’d lost my passport.

I’d been on a hiking trip and my hand baggage was a rucksack that was within the size limits (just!) but nevertheless too big to fit in the overhead of what was quite a small plane. When I boarded I was told to put it under the seat in front of me instead, but I had a window seat and the shape of the plane meant it wouldn’t fit under the seat there either. I eventually switched to the aisle seat and managed to stuff it under the seat in front of that. Phew.

There was a bit of commotion when the rightful occupant of the aisle seat showed up. He didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak Finnish. Eventually, he seemed to understand why I was in his seat and agreed to take mine. The plane began taking off and it quickly became clear that the poor guy must have a serious phobia of flying. He was shaking, he was breathing into the sick bag, at one point he started sobbing. I tried to ask if he was okay (I mean, clearly he wasn’t, but I didn’t know what to do!) but he didn’t understand what I was saying. After ten minutes or so, once the worst of take-off was over, he thankfully calmed down. And then I realised I didn’t have my passport.

I last remembered having it at the gate. I hadn’t had it in my hand for boarding originally because it was a domestic flight and I could see that the (mainly Finnish) passengers in front of me weren’t being asked to show ID. It turned out I did need to show it, perhaps because I was flying on to LHR, so I was slightly flustered getting it out of my bag. I could perhaps have dropped it walking across the runway afterwards, as I paused to take a photo of the plane (it was a cute little one with propellors). Or I could have dropped it somewhere in the vicinity of the seat while I was struggling with my bag. I couldn’t see it anywhere though and, between the language barrier and the fact that he seemed on the verge of a breakdown, I felt like I couldn’t ask the guy next to me to move so I could search around his seat too.

It’s only a two-hour flight from Ivalo to Helsinki but it felt like the longest two hours of my life. I realised I had absolutely no idea what to do if I lost my passport while overseas. It was a Sunday, I was supposed to be at work the next day, I’d gone away without my work phone and I realised that I didn’t even have my boss’s number in my personal phone to let him know if I was going to be stranded in Finland. I always find Finnish passport control a bit intimidating post-Brexit anyway and by the end of the flight I was on the verge of hyperventilating into a paper bag myself as I contemplated how much trouble I might now be in.

Finally, we landed in Helsinki. I stood up to let the guy next to me leave… and realised he’d spent the entire flight sitting on my passport! Not sure I’ve ever been so relieved in my life. It wasn’t 11am yet but I went straight to the Finnair lounge and poured myself a large glass of medicinal Chardonnay.

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brian wrote:

It’s now over a year since I got VIP status via this route and according to the app I’ve yet to drop back down to Premium which I get from my Platinum. It’s still showing the 12/99 tier update date which I believe is the same for many others.

Mine is the same and it’s starting to annoy me a bit; I wish it was clear in my account when VIP was going to come to an end. My status should have dropped down to Platinum by now but hasn’t yet, and I haven’t managed to rack up enough stays to legitimately requalify as VIP. I’m in the middle of booking accommodation for next year and would definitely book a few more Radissons if I was still entitled to the free breakfast, but without that benefit I’m more inclined to stay elsewhere. I don’t want to connect support and ask when I’m going down though in case that reminds them that they should already have downgraded me 😀

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I’ve won nothing all month… then span it today directly after making a booking and immediately won 5,000.

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Thank you @davefl, that’s super useful as I’m actually in the middle of planning a separate trip to Georgia with family for late May as well. Will have to save Armenia for another year/passport, I think.

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Saltrams wrote:

@pebbles Are you going / in / back from Uzbekistan yet? Would really appreciate an update, or even better a trip report 😄

I was planning for autumn 2026, so only just making bookings now. I’m going to do the Tashkent-Samarkand-Bukhara-Khiva route and have just booked award seats out to Tashkent with Qatar. I’m flying out from LGW because I’m planning to add Azerbaijan onto the end of my trip. Azerbaijan Airlines operate flights from Urgench to Baku (and also fly Baku-Gatwick) so seems like too good an opportunity to miss. (Now I need to search for trip reports from Azerbaijan!)

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JDB wrote:

@Mark-B-London all sounds very familiar, although my wife’s experience (and that of female friends) is that she is generally invisible to BA long haul cabin crew, male or female. It comes as a bit of a shock as they seem systematically rude towards women but also as in her professional life, when she speaks, everyone pays attention!

I agree with this re sometimes feeling invisible as a female. I’ve started booking myself a seat behind my husband (rather than next to each other in the middle), precisely because I feel like I have more chance of getting served for an extra drink etc if we have the same flight attendant and he orders for both of us. I would actually rather sit together in the middle and be able to chat, but I’ve got frustrated after too many instances of him getting fab service on his aisle and me being ignored on mine.

I flew Finnair business class on my own for the first time this summer and the service was impeccable, so it really does feel like a BA problem.

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Really enjoyed reading your trip report, warrior01. I did a similar trip in 2023, but took the Sarfaq Ittuk in the opposite direction from Nuuk to Ilulissat. Such an experience! I loved the chaos every time it pulled into a town; tonnes of the locals seemed to have been on a shopping trip to Nuuk and they’d getting off carrying flat-screen TVs, duvets, the kitchen sink…!

Agree that it is not a great culinary experience, but I would actually do it again. I was originally planning to do the whole route from south to north, starting in Qaqortoq, so was booked on an Icelandair flight to Narsarsuaq. When my Narsarsuaq flight was cancelled by bad weather two days in a row, I managed to convince Icelandair to put me on a flight to Nuuk instead and intercepted the ferry there. Will never forget the Nuuk flight; it was me, my partner and approx. 10 rather drunk Greenlandic men. The flight attendants gave up on seat reservations and allocated me and my partner different exit rows to ourselves (as the only passengers who spoke enough English to understand the emergency instructions – and also possibly the only people sober enough to operate the doors!).

Not sure whether smithjn’s question is a genuine one, but I had two days in Nuuk while I waited for the ferry and that was definitely enough. One day is plenty to see the town; literally enough time to walk around it multiple times. On my other day I did a boat trip in Nuuk fjord which I would really recommend, but only if you haven’t already been to Ilulissat. Once you get further down the fjord away from Nuuk there are icebergs and it is really beautiful, but they are tiny compared to what you see in Ilulissat, so it’s really only going to be an exciting trip if you haven’t been there first.

Just as a warning to anyone else planning a trip to Greenland: I had so many problems with my credit card being blocked. I was using my Halifax Clarity and for some reason they seemed to think Greenland was a high fraud risk. It started when I was planning the trip and trying to use the card to book Air Greenland flights home, then it just got worse when I was over there. I spent a lot of time on the phone/chat convincing them I was actually in Greenland!

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Name: Radisson Red Madrid
Upgraded? Yes, I paid for the cheapest standard room and got upgraded to a premium room which is really nice and even has a slight view of Madrid.
Breakfast: Yes, informed at check in that it was free.
Welcome gift: Free bottle of water in the room. Also got a voucher for 30% off in the restaurant but haven’t tried that yet.
Stay duration: 3 nights

Seems like a really nice hotel and it’s in a convenient location, just a short walk from the train station. At check-in, the receptionist greeted my husband as a VIP member, then realised it was actually me who was the VIP and apologised profusely. I was pretty impressed that he acknowledged the mistake as I’ve had a surprising number of hotel stays recently where, despite the booking being in my name and paid on my card, the entire check-in proceedings have been directed at my husband as if I’ve somehow had the misfortune to turn invisible.

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Flew to Madrid this morning and didn’t really understand what was going on. We were directed to what seemed to be the EES kiosks and scanned our passports. The machine then informed us that an officer was considering our details and flashed up a message telling us to proceed to the desk. It didn’t ask us for fingerprints, which was what I thought was going to happen. After that we had to join a very chaotic queue for e-gates. The e-gates seemed to be malfunctioning and were taking several minutes to let each person through. After that we proceeded to a human and got stamped as normal; the only bit of the process which was efficient. In total it took about 50 minutes from getting off the plane to reaching baggage reclaim, although it wasn’t actually a huge queue.

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I’m also starting to plan an Uzbekistan trip for next autumn, so really enjoyed reading this 🙂 Hadn’t appreciated that hotels got booked up so quickly! I am hoping to go in October, assuming I’m correct in thinking that the weather is still okay until the end of that month.

Interested if anyone has any insight into how widely Russian is understood. Spent six years learning and had just got to a pretty decent level by the start of 2022, after which my grand plans for travelling around Russia felt like less of a good idea! Thinking I might find the motivation to keep it up if I plan more trips to ex-Soviet countries and find it’s still useful as a lingua franca.

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A few more thoughts on Saariselkä…

The other company I’ve used there is Lapponia Tours (https://saariselka.com/en/). I’ve only ever used them for equipment rental but they do activities as well. I’ve always found the staff to be super helpful and knowledgeable about the area; they’ve given me recommendations for trails I didn’t know about etc in the past.

The other company I remember has a presence on the main road is Husky & Co (https://www.huskyco.fi/). Never used them but they look serious about huskies! I think I have seen them doing snowmobile tours as well. Remember that if you want to go on a snowmobile, you need to bring your driving licence.

The area is so beautiful that you don’t necessarily need expensive activities every day. You can rent sledges/toboggans (or I think some of the hotels just have ones you can use if you’re staying there) and it’s quite hilly, so there are slopes where kids can have fun. There’s also some more serious tobogganing at the ski resort (https://skisaariselka.com/aurora-tobogganing – not for small kids, think it requires helmets!).

I would recommend the Aurorapolku trail in the national park as a fairly short winter walk. The park entrance is past the Santa Tunturi hotel, marked by a massive wooden teepee. The trail is about 2km and clearly marked with purple signs. It’s a maintained winter walking trail, so they flatten the snow down to keep it easy to walk on, or put extra grit on it if it gets icy. There’s a hut partway round where you can stop and warm up; I’ve heard people say there are fire-pits you can use to toast marshmallows there, but haven’t done that. They illuminate the trail at night (with lights pointing downwards, so no light pollution) and even if there’s no northern lights, on a clear night the stars are beautiful.

Bear in mind that there will probably only be anything resembling daylight from about 10am – 2pm. The roads around the village are well-lit though and a few hours outside per day is generally enough in the really cold temperatures anyway.

There’s a good supermarket (K-Market) which is normally open 9am – 9pm every day and sells pretty much anything you need, albeit at expensive prices. There’s also an alcohol shop in the same building, though with less generous opening hours. Plus quite a few restaurants scattered about, so it’s easy to find pizzas, burgers etc.

(In case it’s not obvious, I love Saariselkä and have been many times! I don’t have kids so do normally go in January, when there is no Santa but a lot of snow and cheaper accommodation.)

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Glad you’ve got something booked – I’m sure you’ll have an amazing time 🙂

I love the huskies, but only as the passengers in the sled; I’m too scared to be the driver so always make my other half do the hard work!

I also really enjoy snowshoeing (because it’s easy – just walking with big things on your feet – doesn’t require any skill).

I’ve tried cross-country skiing a few times but concluded it’s not for me!

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I don’t think there’s loads to do in Ivalo itself (it’s more just a normal village rather than a resort) but it’s the airport for Saariselkä (which is more touristy and has all the activities you’d expect in Lapland). There’s a bus from Ivalo airport directly to Saariselkä (but it may only be timetabled to meet Finnair flights from Helsinki; not 100% sure whether it runs for the BA one).

I think there is probably more to see in Rovaniemi overall and that’s definitely where the main Santa village is. However, a couple of considerations which sometimes make Ivalo/Saariselkä a better choice:

1) It’s significantly further north, so depending on how early in the winter you’re planning to go, you’ve got a bigger chance of snow there. The weather has been really weird in Lapland this year (very hot summer), so it’s hard to know what the winter is going to be like.

2) It’s probably easier to see the northern lights from there without having to pay for an expensive tour. You need to avoid artificial light as much as possible and with Rovaniemi being a bigger town, it’s harder to get away from street lights etc to look at the sky properly. Saariselkä has street lights too, but it’s on the edge of a national park so it’s very easy to walk a little way into the forest and get dark skies.

Regardless of where you go, I’d recommend looking at:

Lapland Safaris (https://www.laplandsafaris.com/en) for activities. Like with everything in Lapland, prices are horrendous, but I’ve always had a positive experience when I’ve booked with them.

The NL Alert app (https://www.nlalert.fi/) for aurora alerts. You have to install the app, then pay for a log-in key for the nights you’re there. The app then gives you alerts when northern lights are spotted. Unlike some of these apps, which can be rather hit and miss, these guys have cameras situated around Lapland which monitor the sky for aurora activity. So when you get the alert, you can look at the screen-capture from your nearest camera and decided whether it looks worth putting on multiple layers of clothing and going out in the cold!

As Princess says, accommodation in Finland can be a bit on the basic side. If you’re booking an apartment rather than a hotel, make sure to double check whether it includes towels & bed linen. There seems to be a cultural assumption over there that you’ll bring your own, so it sometimes costs an extra €10/€15 if you want them provided!

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I went to a conference in Arusha last year. I flew with Qatar; Birmingham to Doha, stopover in Doha, then Doha to Kilimanjaro. The Kilimanjaro flight landed in Dar es Saalam before continuing onwards and quite a few people got off there. I paid cash so can’t comment on the avios unfortunately. Kilimanjaro is definitely the most convenient airport to fly into though!