I suspect this has been covered somewhere but after a fair amount of searching I have not found it, so I am asking again.
We are flying through London (Heathrow) on our way to Germany. Will they check our bags all the way through? Or will we need to collect our bags in London and go through customs? If so, will we need to go through customs again in Hamburg? Also, from the looks of it our inbound flight (Virgin Air - Chicago to Heathrow) will come into T3. If my research is correct, our outbound flight (BA) will use the new terminal T5. (We are not thrilled about that :S ) Can someone tell me how tricky it is to get from one terminal to the other? If our first flight is on time, we will have a little over two hours to find our connecting flight. Thanks everyone!
Posted by
New Paltz, NY
9099 posts
I have bad news for you. BA and VA will not handle each others checked baggage-the two airlines hate each other. This means you will have to go through immigration and recollect your baggage and head to the BA check-in desks. This might be tough to do in two hours at Heathrow. Also, you will have to go through immigration/customs again at Hamburg as the UK is not a Schengen country.
Posted by
US Pacific Northwest
10344 posts
And more bad news: news reports last week said the new T5 Terminal is still losing 900 bags a day.
Posted by
XXX
1170 posts
Kent, we went through Terminal 5 twice and checked our luggage. No problems whatsover.
Posted by
Laguna Beach, CA, USA
272 posts
Flew through Heathrow in May. I can't remember the Terminal I arrived at from LA but I do remember I then had to switch to T5 to get my onward flight to Athens. I was nervous about my bags but all made it to Athens with me! whew. As far as transfer...my rule of thumb is that anything less than 2 1/2 hour transfer time through Heathrow makes me nervous. I usually won't book a flight with less of a layover than that. You should be OK with your transfer time but keep it moving when you get off your first flight! If you look on the Heathrow airport website, they provide a step by step "transfer plan"...you put in which Terminal you arrive at and the terminal you need to get to and it tells you the exact "path" to take. Helpful.
As previously mentioned, you will need to collect your bags.
Posted by
OP
Milwaukee, WI
15 posts
Thanks for all the replies. We arrived home yesterday and everything went smoothly. Apparently there have been some changes based on most of your replies. They DID check our luggage all the way through. We had plenty of transfer time thanks to how easy it was to find the terminal transfer buses - even found ourselves sitting around bored at the airport :) The only confusion was on the way back when T3 had us go through security before checking in and getting our boarding passes (something I thought was never done anymore). All of our baggage (6 pieces between our group) made it through the transfer safely with no problems whatsoever. Thanks for all of your replies and help.