Booking Flights
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If you know you’re planning to go somewhere, please don’t wait until the last minute. Check the flight times and prices for as much time as possible before your trip. There are inexpensive Norwegian flights to and from Gatwick, as well as a myriad of other destinations. The key to booking early- you can select a seat that’s on an exit row. For US travel abroad, you must remember to update your luggage information before your flight. Otherwise, the prices increase considerably. Also, you must include all your passport information into your flight itinerary.
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Flight Transfers
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To save money, we had booked inexpensive tickets from home to London Gatwick, intending to take a connecting flight right away to Dublin. A few months before our trip, I was notified that each of these flight times had changed and we now had only 45 minutes to go through customs, find our bags, then get to our next gate. We ended up extending our trip by one day. We flew out a day earlier, stayed in a lovely B&B with airport transportation and had an amazing breakfast near the airport. The following day we caught that flight to Dublin. This gave us an entire afternoon and night to catch up on sleep and we were entirely refreshed for our trip to Dublin. I highly recommend giving yourself some time to catch that second flight.
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Flying Throughout Europe
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Wow. It’s really different over there. You don’t usually have to remove your shoes. Your Ziploc bags of carry-on fluids must be removed from your backpack and placed in a tray. The big difference is how the gate information works. Once you check in for your flight and check your luggage, they don’t tell you what gate you’ll be at. You just go into a big, main area with shops and refreshments and lots of other people to wait for one of the big screens to tell you where to go. Sometimes it’s fairly short notice, so you have to pay attention.