HI everybody!
Playing around with Flights on the Interwebs this evening, wondering if it's possible to fly from Seattle to Heathrow, spend a few days in London, then rent a car and drive to Scotland...only THIS time NOT driving back to Heathrow, but dumping the car and back to Seattle from...Glasgow? Edinburgh? Ah dinna ken! It seems possible, but also horrifically expensive...has anyone done this?
It can be done. It need not be extra expensive. But you may have to change plans enroute.
Use the "multi-city" option when searching for fares rather than "one way." It shouldn't be that much more than roundtrip to London.
It's easy to book an "open-jaw" flight. Just make sure you don't incur a drop-off fee for your rental car that make your trip more costly overall.
Often the price difference is minimal, especially when you consider time wasted in backtracking: transportation, hotel, etc.
The airlines call it “multi-city”. If you don’t see that option while using an airlines’s app, switch to the full site.
I'm using Skyscanner, doing an "open jaw" flying into Heathrow and out of Glasgow seems to nearly double the price!
We have done multi city often. No, it isn’t expensive rather good planning!
Hmmm....now I've found a price on British about the same as roundtrip including a connecting flight. Don't know what I did differently, but thanks for your help!
Any particular car hire companies that price gouge for a different drop off location? Any that don't?
We do open jaw flights all the time. It just seems to work best for us to start somewhere and keep progressioning until we end.
I'm not sure what your planning is but my question is about your motivation for driving. Do you want to explore the country between London and Scotland or do you just want to get to Scotland? The drive does sound grand. However, there are great train connections between London and Edinburgh. Once in Scotland, you could rent a car there. Planned carefully, that might avoid the drop-off fee.
Just a thought. Sometimes, it's good to challenge our thought and planning patterns. It all seems good!
Auto Europe is a US-based brokerage that offers lots of car rental options and has worked well for me and others. You can use the website to compare costs for different companies, vehicle types, and rental scenarios. Generally you don't incur significant dropoff charges within the same country. I'd assume Scotland and England, being in the UK, are the same "country" for rental car dropoff purposes, but I don't know this for sure. A UK-based poster will have a better answer.
Open-jaw flights, like Seattle to LHR + Edinburgh or Glasgow to Seattle, are often the best way to go. If one costs a little more than a round-trip, it's probably still cheaper than backtracking to where you started in Europe. And it certainly saves backtracking time, which ought to be worth something on a time-limited vacation. Round trips make sense if you're taking a circular route on land, but it often makes more sense to start your ground trip at point A and finish at point B.
As the other poster said, driving from London to Scotland is great if you want to stop along the way on your own schedule, but the train is much faster and easier. Or you might consider a train to, say, York, then getting the car for the scenic and interesting trip north from there. (No disrespect meant to places south of York.)
Right, well tickets booked, at about the price I expected. Don't know why I was getting such differing prices and the "multi city" feature kept saying "no flights available", but I closed everything and tried again, and...spit spot Bob's your uncle.
We're spending 4 nights in London then picking up a car (wish it could be motorcycles) and heading north, dumping the car in Glasgow 11 days later. We'll be visiting friends in Wiltshire, then meandering...Driving is half the fun, we like exploring!
Thanks so much for the help and suggestions!
You will find very often that cars that are dropped off in another country must be physically delivered back to the original country. And those drop off charges get expensive.
If you're going in the direction of Scotland, we have found flights into Dublin to be the cheapest around. We have also found inexpensive flights into London from our local airport--cheaper than ATL or BNA even.
The budget European airlines are a godsend to travel. Sometimes you can catch RyanAir, EasyJet or other airlines for absolutely ridiculously low prices.
Scotland isn't a different country yet
We found the train from London to Edinburgh a splendid ride (we chose to stop for 36 hours in York as a bonus). When we had several days in Edinburgh, we rented a car travelled some and then flew home nonstop to Boston on Delta, but looking now all flights from Glasgow or Edinburgh to Bos have a stop. Depending on what airport you fly into, it may be different. But the train vs rental car may improve your costs.
We're spending 4 nights in London then picking up a car (wish it could
be motorcycles) and heading north, dumping the car in Glasgow 11 days
later. We'll be visiting friends in Wiltshire, then
meandering...Driving is half the fun, we like exploring!
A better option is in my opinion to take the train to Wiltshire and rent the car there. Driving is not half the fun around London.
Will arrival at Heathrow and departure at Glasgow help?
The fees of Heathrow are on a steady rise. Not sure if that jacks up the fair fare, too.
I took the train from London to/from Edinburgh two weeks ago—day trip to Edinburgh, sleeper to London. It was a wonderful ride with some nice sights on the way up. There is great info on both trains on seat61.com (sit on the East side of the train for views). But of course I couldn't stop to see sights. If driving, I highly recommend stopping to see Hadrian's wall at one point or another. I had a picnic lunch on the wall many years ago (I learned later this isn't allowed) and it was very memorable. Read up on the history ahead of time.
