Day trip to Scotland by plane-common?

possible but not recommemded, lot of money for not much in return.Just give London a miss and come to Edinburgh.

People take day trips to Paris from London on the Eurostar so why not to Edinburgh. A waste of time in my opinion but to each his own.

Just remember, with fliying you have to be at the airport two hours ahead of time. Then the time to travel from the airport to city center. And the flights themselves. You won't have much time in Edinburgh.

My estimation is 8.5-9 hours just traveling from city center to city center. Not going to leave you a lot of time to do much.

I have regularly flown from London Gatwick to Edinburgh for the day on business - it’s a long, exhausting day.

If you are prepared to leave your accommodation in central London around 6am, you could fly from Gatwick and return to your accommodation after midnight, flying EasyJet, to maximise the length of time in Edinburgh. You would get 6-7 hours in the city centre.

Booking a couple of months or more out, prices are cheap, but then you also have the cost of getting to and from each airport.

You don’t need to be at the airport 2 hours ahead for a domestic flight - I would allow an hour.

Go visit Scotland when you have time to do it properly. A one day trip is expensive for what you get.

i like the idea of staying in one city/country for a week so as not to
waste time packing/ unpacking / traveling/ checking in/ checking out/
getting acclimated to ones surroundings multiple times in one trip.
It’s exhausting.

Getting to the airport, checking in, going through security, spending 1,5 hours in small seat and so on is hardly relaxing either. It's 7 hours or so of travel in a day, not worth it in my opinion.

Friend of mine has to do this for work about once or twice a year and he hates it. But he’s being paid to do it and if he needs to be there in person with no advance notice, there’s likely a loss of one of their clients at risk.

There’s so many day trips available from London that Edinburgh seems insane. If something goes wrong then you could be spending valuable hours of your vacation being bored at an airport.

Keep in mind that even day trips by train eat up a lot of time, not just with the travel time but the time spent getting to and from train stations and waiting around for the trains.

Well —-back to the drawing board....lol!

thanks for the advice

We did this. It was the only way I could convince my husband to 'try' Scotland. We flew up on an early morning flight, then we wandered around Edinburgh, did some sightseeing and some shopping, had supper and took an early evening flight back. It was a long day, but well worth it. He got 'addicted' and many times after that we would train up the coast- often making a one or 2 night stop in York then on up to Edinburgh and into the Highlands!!!!

I agree with the others. While it might be feasible, it's not really practical for the reasons mentioned - time to & from airports, security, check-in, boarding and de-planing, etc. That whole process is going to take the better part of a day.

It would probably be just as fast or perhaps faster to take the train from London to Edinburgh. There's a direct departure at 07:00 that would get you to Edinburgh at 11:22. For the trip back there's a departure at 18:30 that arrives back at London King's Cross at 23:32. That would give you 7H:08M in Edinburgh, which is only enough for a brief look at a few of the sights.