Change to Outbound Travel Plans

I’ve been horribly remiss in writing about our time in Türkiye. I’ll try to get a summary footprint uploaded before we leave in a few days’ time. In the meantime, a quickie snippet about a change in our travel plans.

We were relaxing before breakfast this morning when Mui came across a news headline that had us scrambling to make new departure arrangements for 18 October.

Turns out that Lufthansa and Eurowings are going on strike starting on the 17th. Darn! Not good news for us since we’re scheduled to fly out of Stuttgart, Germany on Eurowings for the last segment of our three-flight travel day from Türkiye to England. It’s a real shame as the business class award tickets I purchased to get us to England required incredibly low miles to be used.

Nothing to do but make alternative arrangements. I knew we could fly THY from İstanbul to London’s Heathrow Airport (LHR), but were there alternatives with other airlines direct from İzmir? The short answer? Yes. But none of them flew to LHR. That might have been OK any other time, but we have National Express bus tickets to get us to Southampton from LHR.

Thus, I booked us on THY … a mid-morning flight from ADB to IST … an early afternoon flight from IST to LHR. The possible upside to the new plan? We might arrive early enough to switch to the 6:15p bus from LHR to Southampton🤞🏻.Read more