The best way to get to Amsterdam from Birmingham?
Q. I'm wondering what is the best way to get to Amsterdam from Birmingham. Not Alabama, the UK.
How long would it take to drive there?
What if I went via boat from Newcastle?
Are planes to Amsterdam really expensive?
If I took the Eurostar to the Gare du Nord or the station in Brussels(whichever is closest) how could I get there without a car?
Hopefully people can just inform me a bit about the most efficient way to get there. Thanks in advance!
How long would it take to drive there?
What if I went via boat from Newcastle?
Are planes to Amsterdam really expensive?
If I took the Eurostar to the Gare du Nord or the station in Brussels(whichever is closest) how could I get there without a car?
Hopefully people can just inform me a bit about the most efficient way to get there. Thanks in advance!
A. It would have been easy if there had been one best way to travel, but what is the best way depends on what you want and like, how many people you travel with and how much luggage you need to bring, and what you have to pay for your tickets which in turn in partly decided by when you book.
Tickets run from less than 50 pound return, can be found on a regular base when booking far in advance, to more than 200 pound for the same plane or ferry, when booking late.
Cheaper and more expensive do exist
My friends from the Birmingham area always fly to Amsterdam, as the easy choice. If you have little luggage and book early I think this is the best option, which airline I can not say, which airport is not always easy to say, sometimes you pay only half by driving to the next airport. Remember that Eindhoven, the airport Ryanair uses is 2 hours and â¬27 away from Amsterdam. Rotterdam is less far and a bit cheaper, Schiphol is only 20 minutes and about â¬4.
You can find flights here:
http://www.skyscanner.net/
Or on one of the other ticket scan sites, sometimes it is better to buy from the airline itself, sometimes it is worth walking in at a travel agency, they sometimes have flight and hotel packages that are worth more than you pay.
My friends near Leeds will always travel by the Hull to Rotterdam ferry, overnight and rather luxurious, I have done that one as well as the Newcastle-Amsterdam one, (both have coaches going to Amsterdam,) and find the Newcastle mostly cheaper and less over the top, but still good enough.
You can travel to Hull or Newcastle by train or maybe coach and there will be a connection to the ferry from the station. If a lot of people travel to that ferry from your town there might even be a direct coach, phone the ferry company if you contemplate doing that.
Which one is cheaper overall depends on which one has a special offer and whether you bring your car, how lucky you are in booking a cabin and how many people share a cabin. Mostly more expensive than flying, but more fun in my opinion.
From Birmingham you can get to London by coach or train, from Brussels to Amsterdam you would travel by train, easy journey, but it does take most of a day and quite a bit of money.
If you want to travel by train you should look at this page:
http://www.seat61.com/Netherlands.htm
He has listed all ways to travel from the UK to the Netherlands, mostly concentrated on Amsterdam, and with prices and ways to buy the tickets, he also mentions those ferries which do not have train connections for those traveling on by coach.
If you still can book 3 months in advance, if it is less than 3 months book as soon as you are sure of the date. Prices do go up, sometimes by the minute, because all of these travel options have a system where they sell a few cheap tickets when those are sold they have more moderately priced tickets and at their last tickets are most expensive.
Only some airlines might have good last minute deals, specially the big names like BA and KLM are known for that. Your travel agency might have some special deals, otherwise the websites of the airlines themselves.
Driving is an option, specially if you need a lot of luggage, but remember that parking in Amsterdam is very expensive and often hard to find, and bringing your car on a ferry will cost you way more than just you yourself. When traveling with 3 or more people or when getting a good deal on a weekend break or something like that, you might be cheaper by car.
From each of the ferry ports in the Netherlands you can reach Amsterdam in less than 2 hours, mostly it will be about one hour for most, half an hour for the Newcastle ferry.
If you travel via Calais it will be 2 to 4 hours depending on whether you get stuck in the rush hour.
How long you drive in the UK I do not know. You can find expected travel times from your home to the ferries with sites like Google maps, add one hour for each city you pass in the morning or evening rush.
Tickets run from less than 50 pound return, can be found on a regular base when booking far in advance, to more than 200 pound for the same plane or ferry, when booking late.
Cheaper and more expensive do exist
My friends from the Birmingham area always fly to Amsterdam, as the easy choice. If you have little luggage and book early I think this is the best option, which airline I can not say, which airport is not always easy to say, sometimes you pay only half by driving to the next airport. Remember that Eindhoven, the airport Ryanair uses is 2 hours and â¬27 away from Amsterdam. Rotterdam is less far and a bit cheaper, Schiphol is only 20 minutes and about â¬4.
You can find flights here:
http://www.skyscanner.net/
Or on one of the other ticket scan sites, sometimes it is better to buy from the airline itself, sometimes it is worth walking in at a travel agency, they sometimes have flight and hotel packages that are worth more than you pay.
My friends near Leeds will always travel by the Hull to Rotterdam ferry, overnight and rather luxurious, I have done that one as well as the Newcastle-Amsterdam one, (both have coaches going to Amsterdam,) and find the Newcastle mostly cheaper and less over the top, but still good enough.
You can travel to Hull or Newcastle by train or maybe coach and there will be a connection to the ferry from the station. If a lot of people travel to that ferry from your town there might even be a direct coach, phone the ferry company if you contemplate doing that.
Which one is cheaper overall depends on which one has a special offer and whether you bring your car, how lucky you are in booking a cabin and how many people share a cabin. Mostly more expensive than flying, but more fun in my opinion.
From Birmingham you can get to London by coach or train, from Brussels to Amsterdam you would travel by train, easy journey, but it does take most of a day and quite a bit of money.
If you want to travel by train you should look at this page:
http://www.seat61.com/Netherlands.htm
He has listed all ways to travel from the UK to the Netherlands, mostly concentrated on Amsterdam, and with prices and ways to buy the tickets, he also mentions those ferries which do not have train connections for those traveling on by coach.
If you still can book 3 months in advance, if it is less than 3 months book as soon as you are sure of the date. Prices do go up, sometimes by the minute, because all of these travel options have a system where they sell a few cheap tickets when those are sold they have more moderately priced tickets and at their last tickets are most expensive.
Only some airlines might have good last minute deals, specially the big names like BA and KLM are known for that. Your travel agency might have some special deals, otherwise the websites of the airlines themselves.
Driving is an option, specially if you need a lot of luggage, but remember that parking in Amsterdam is very expensive and often hard to find, and bringing your car on a ferry will cost you way more than just you yourself. When traveling with 3 or more people or when getting a good deal on a weekend break or something like that, you might be cheaper by car.
From each of the ferry ports in the Netherlands you can reach Amsterdam in less than 2 hours, mostly it will be about one hour for most, half an hour for the Newcastle ferry.
If you travel via Calais it will be 2 to 4 hours depending on whether you get stuck in the rush hour.
How long you drive in the UK I do not know. You can find expected travel times from your home to the ferries with sites like Google maps, add one hour for each city you pass in the morning or evening rush.
How can eco-tourism work in a capitalist society where more tourists = more money?
Q. Just thinking if the aim of tourism is to make money then surely all "alternative" forms of tourism whether its "eco" "cultural" or whatever are still just money making ventures that will aim to make profits and therefore grow irrespective of well meaning regulations. This will just push the eco-tourist to constantly new destinations as the prev one becomes spoilt leaving a wake of disaster. At least with big beach resorts eg Benidorm, Malaga, the infrastructure is already there and the tourist can be kept contained?
A. Eco-tourisim only works in communist or socialist countries. In capitalist countries, you have to pay for your trip and they treat you like just another tourist. And, what's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day." And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big a-rse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged w-o-p waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Pow ell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion....... crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco.
How much will Birmingham, UK airport taxi cost for 30mins away?
Q. I'll be landing in Birmingham, England from USA, and I'm trying to figure out where my hotel or cottage rental will be at. All I know it it'll be near Coventry or Wolverhampton. I'm thinking of using a taxi to get from the airport to the hotel. About how much would it cost? Thanks for help. It's my first trip! :)
A. Hello,
When you say it will be near Coventry or Wolverhampton, are you still deciding on the specific accommodation. Coventry is much, much closer to Birmingham airport, whilst Wolverhampton is the other side of the City and around 15 miles away, through mostly heavy traffic.
Depending on where the hotel is, a train from the airport station could be easier and cheaper as there is a direct link to both Coventry and Wolverhampton.
However, to answer your question, a taxi to Coventry would probably be around the £25-£30 mark depending on where it is exactly of course. Wolverhampton would be a lot more expensive, at least £50.
When you say it will be near Coventry or Wolverhampton, are you still deciding on the specific accommodation. Coventry is much, much closer to Birmingham airport, whilst Wolverhampton is the other side of the City and around 15 miles away, through mostly heavy traffic.
Depending on where the hotel is, a train from the airport station could be easier and cheaper as there is a direct link to both Coventry and Wolverhampton.
However, to answer your question, a taxi to Coventry would probably be around the £25-£30 mark depending on where it is exactly of course. Wolverhampton would be a lot more expensive, at least £50.
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