Heathrow Airport

Heathrow is scheduled to open on Monday. The best thing to do is keep track yourself and if there are changes, contact the airline. You'll beat most everyone else waiting to be notified. If you "twitter," you could subscribe to Heathrow's Tweet (which has been very active today), and your airline if it has one. (Most do.)

Thanks Frank for the helpful information. It is frustrating seeing the weather reports in England and Ireland. I just hope we are able to get there to enjoy our vacation. I have never tweeted before, I will have to look into that.

Darla, The news reports this morning showed Heathrow still badly congested, with restrictions especially on incoming flights. In the same situation, I'd check with the airline on a regular basis (especially close to departure time). I doubt that the airlines have enough staff to start phoning thousands of passengers to keep them updated on the situation. Frank II's suggestion about the Heathrow Twitter was a good one! That's not something I've ever considered. One of these days, I'll have to figure out exactly what Twitter is, and how it works???? Good luck!

Ken, Twitter is like one long ongoing onslaught of public instant messages, with many people. You "Follow" someone and you can see their "messages" and either respond to them as well or reply to their posts and type your own message. When they "follow" you, they can see YOUR messages, reply, etc and it goes on and on...

Hi Darla, this is from Heathrow's website~~~~~~Monday 20 December
Heathrow Airport will be open and operating a limited schedule of arrivals and departures today, but we expect further cancellations and delays in the coming days, as airlines move diverted aircraft and crew back to their normal positions and we continue to manage the impacts of the poor weather over the weekend and in the days ahead.

Well, I'm glad I bought the flight insurance this time. My kids fly into Heathrow on Thursday so I have to worry about their flight too. I will keep checking and keep my fingers crossed that we all make it to Ireland for our vacation. Thanks everyone for the updates.

Contact your airline for flight status. Look at changing flights if allowed and necessary. Check your travel insurance policy and do everything they require to the letter. It is probably not too soon to contact your insurer. Keep documentation of every conversation and online contact.

Which airline are you flying with? BA or AA? If you are flying One World Alliance, it may be worth looking into flying via Madrid. See if your airline could book you through there. Then again, I just read in the Telegraph that Dublin is closed at the moment too.

Heathrow is going to be a mess til Dec 24th earliest. If you can avoid it, you'd be smart to do so. It's chaotic here. I speak as one who has just spent a very tense few days waiting to see if my flight to Rome tomorrow (BA, Terminal 5) will be going. And it's not. And there is absolutely no chance of finding another way there.
So now I'm off to unpack my suitcase.

And do your best to check on BOTH of your flights, although the status on your flight to Cork might change while you're on your flight to Heathrow. If your flight doesn't leave from Heathrow, you're stuck in Heathrow, possibly for Christmas. If you don't get your flight from LAX, at least you can be home at Christmas. Not where you're planning to be, yes, but better than sleeping in airport chairs with hundreds of other people and living off of airport food for a couple of days. The good news is that you will get priority for your flight to Cork if it leaves as scheduled. If it's cancelled, you're thrown onto a standby list with all the other stranded travelers trying to get to Cork.

And for pictures of what Heathrow looks like now, with all the crowds, click on "News and Events" above and check out the BBC pictures from today.

Well, as of today at 6:30 both of our flights are confirmed to leave. I am kinda scared that they could cancel one of the flights at any time and I could be stuck. I worry more for my kids traveling on Thursday. The good news is that the weather should be good on Thursday and Friday at Heathrow. Please keep your fingers crossed for us, we will need it.

Good News for LHR! I just read on www.airliners.net that several European carriers are sending bigger jets to heathrow to clear the backlog of passengers and luggage. Hopefully that will translate into no headaches for you.

Hope you made it Darla, and everything has gone OK for your kids too!

I hope Darla comes back on here and lets us know if she made it!

So what happened Darla? We all want to know! Well, I do anyway, nosey whatsit that I am!

Hi everyone, I just returned home last night from our trip. Well, we made it to Ireland. Our flight to Heathrow went as scheduled and we had no problems with that. We were delayed for 2 hours for our flight to Cork. We meet several Irish families that are living in England and were not able to fly into Dublin for their holidays. Our luggage was lost also for a few days so that was a hassle. Our kids flights were fine and they made it too on time as expected. We went to the airport the following day and our luggage was there. The girl at the desk said that they did not have it, but we had bought big yellow name tags with our name on it and she happened to notice them when she was in the luggage area earlier in the day. Thank God for those tags because the computer said they did not have them. I will try not to fly into or out of Heathrow again in the future. They hold you hostage in one area and they do not let you go to the gate. We were given very little information about our delayed flight. We had two hours between flights on our return flight and we barely made it because the long lines at security and they would not let us to our gate. Very strange system that they use. Ireland was just beautiful and we had a great time even though it was a little colder than we expected. Thanks for the help.

So happy to hear that you made it. The lost luggage was probably par for the course with the mess over there. Luckily it was just a tiny bump in the road.