Travel

This blog is very much about travel. Allow me to congratulate Heathrow airport on some of the recent changes. Today we pulled up outside Terminal 3 and it was clean, well policed and the roads were working well. The general opening up of the entire area in front of the terminal is a tremendous improvement, long overdue, but excellent.

I parked the car in the recently finished car park for Terminal 3, and it was also clean, easy to park in and well organized. All of this, so far was terrific, and was much to my surprise, as it wasn’t always thus.

Then we went to the Virgin check in which is also hugely enhanced by the widening of the area, which makes it feel much less crowded. There were problems with the conveyor belts but they were coping with the problem. I don’t know how that will work out if the problem continues.

Then we had breakfast upstairs which was edible, very pleasantly served and not too unreasonably priced by English standards. We also visited some shops and these were also acceptable. There is nothing terrible to report in any of these aspects.

Our only gripe was about the lousy signposting between the departure section of terminal 3 and its short stay car park. Please BAA, it would be really easy to correct this and we were not the only people with this observation.

Have you noticed how much it cost to renew your passport?

We are one of the most expensive countries in the world at £72 ($145) for an adult and nothing for a child. There is a comparison price list on the Passport Office web site and this confirms that we are top of the costs. If you live abroad it costs much more to simply renew your passport. I know this through my daughter who lives in the States. Her next passport is going to cost her $250 (£125) and for her children, presently 4 and 7 years old, $160 (£80) each.

Why should it cost that much more for those of us who live abroad to have our passport processed?

Another question we should all be interested in is why the UK produces 6.3 million passports per year whilst countries listed, with similar population to our own, such as Germany, Italy and France only issue 2.5 million, 1.4 million, and 3.3 million passports respectively?

Japan, with a population of nearly twice that of the UK only issued 4.3 million passports. Why is the UK producing so many more passports proportionately?

These figures are those issued by the Passport Office itself.

All of this came to light in the last day before my daughter and her children, Maya and Soli returned to their Los Angeles home. It is, as you with families who live a long way off know, wonderful when you get together with your kids after a long gap, but its awful when they have to go back.