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Travel to London 9 days

Posted by (Netherlands) on

Hello,

My husband and I are planning to visit London for a week(9 days). We would mostly be travelling in London seeing some attractions and museum. We arrive in Gatwick and leave from Southend. We are staying in London (Clapham South 7 days/ besides Thames for 2 days) for our entire stay. We also plan to take a day trip or so to Oxford and another day to Stonehenge or so. I had 2 questions:

  1. Looking at public transport options, would using contactless travel be the cheapest option (I checked a few calculations and seems cheapest but slightly confused)? We have Dutch contactless cards. I know we might encounter conversion rates and currency exchange fees, but apart from that will this be the cheapest option? This is considering we want to keep the plan a little open ended in terms of which day we choose to get out of London vs which days we travel in Zone 1 - 2 depending on the weather.

  2. I checked some websites to see train tickets from London to Oxford etc and I see different prices. Are the train prices not fixed? I know there is off peak and peak fares, but other than that are the prices not the same for all trains taken off peak?

Thanking all in advance!
Sheetal.

Posted by
27039 posts

Prices for many train trips vary just like those of budget airlines. Buy early, committing yourself to a specific travel date and time, and you can save big. But your flexibility goes out the window. Availability of bargain fares as you get closer to your travel date is rather unpredictable, but there are many, many trains to Oxford, which cannot hurt.

Check schedules and fares at the NationalRail website. I just took a quick look at the situation for tomorrow morning and found 9 AM and 9:30 AM departures from Marylebone at just £15 one way. Most other early-AM options (generally from Paddington) were £20 or £31. Looking at November 10th, I see fares as low as £5.50.

You are correct that peak fares tend to be quite a bit higher.

For the tube I bought an Oyster card and just loaded money on it since, like you, I wasn't sure what days I would make a lot of trips and what days I would not. I do not have a contactless card I could have used instead, unlike you. I don't know anything about the exchange rate you will encounter, but the savings from using a contactless or Oyster card are really significant, since the fare you pay is about half the regular fare, and on days when you use the tube heavily you'll get the benefit of the daily usage cap. I think with a contactless card there's also a weekly cap, which may further reduce your actual expenses, but that doesn't apply to Oyster cards.

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