There are many worse places to be stranded on Boxing Day than the shore of Windermere. Here beside England's largest lake, dawn has chased away the stars of Christmas night. Ice-blue light tinged with pink is filtering through the skeletal trees on the waterfront. Who would want to leave such a perfect winter's day? Well, people with places to go and things to do. But if you are one of the 20-million plus British people without access to a car, covering any distance today is likely to prove a problem. The first of four buses today to Windermere railway station and the town of Kendal does not leave until this afternoon. Reaching a station would not do me much good, as no trains will run until tomorrow – which is the case at the vast majority of stations across the UK. ScotRail is offering the closest to a Boxing Day network, linking Edinburgh and Glasgow with each other and nearby towns – as well as the cities of Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen. In and around Liverpool, Merseyrail has trains every half-hour "calling at selected stations on each line" plus extra services to Aintree racecourse. Chiltern will connect London Marylebone with Oxford Parkway. And Southern is providing a London Victoria-Gatwick-Brighton service augmented by some suburban trains. National Express and FlixBus, who are picking up the slack, will testify to strong demand for intercity travel – as will British Airways, which flew six times each way between Edinburgh and London Heathrow yesterday and has 10 round trips today. Need to travel from Newcastle to Bristol? EasyJet will take you, with no competition from trains. With such an appetite for travel on 26 December, the Christmas shutdown of almost all trains looks increasingly strange. Railway bosses could argue that having two days of closure allows for more Network Rail engineering projects to take place, but there are not enough engineers around to work on more than a tiny proportion of lines. They are concentrated on some key projects, which will keep Waterloo and Liverpool Street stations in London closed when other trains resume tomorrow. The West Coast Main Line is blocked south of Rugby, with work here in Cumbria continuing to mid-January – mitigated by a scenic shuttle between Preston and Carlisle. Elsewhere, though, the railway industry is forsaking much-needed revenue as prospective passengers stay put or switch to coaches and planes. Festive travel: How to navigate road, rail, air and ferries in late December
Entry-exit pain: EU digital borders scheme causing 3-hour waits, say airports
Stansted surge: Expansion plans approved for Essex airport
Boots on: Best Boxing Day walks across the UK | |
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Good place to be stranded: the shore of Windermere at sunset on Christmas Day |
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| We'll be seeing more 'quiet luxury' on the water in 2026 than ever – along with a dose of wellness. Read more. |
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| A look at landscapes as the Tate Modern stages a retrospective of Emily Kam Kngwarray's work. Read more. |
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| Cruise editor Marc Shoffman highlights eight of the best new vessels to sail on next year. Read more. |
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We love to fly – but the UK and Europe more widely get nowhere close to troubling the scorers who calculate the top 10 air links in the world. Airline analyst OAG has revealed the world's busiest air routes this year. Clear winner is a domestic link in South Korea, connecting a secondary airport in the capital to a holiday island: Jeju. The beaches, mountains and gardens of Jeju provide a tranquil escape from high-pressure urban life. The island is also prime territory for honeymooners. As a result of its popularity, seven airlines compete ferociously on the 75-minute, 280-mile journey, offering almost 40,000 seats and producing incredibly low fares. Air Seoul, EastarJet, Jeju Air or T'Way will fly you there on New Year's Day for around 20,000 won – a flat £10. All the rest are domestic flights, too. Second, third and seventh places in the chart all start or end at Tokyo's main airport, Haneda. The route to Sapporo on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido has just over 33,000 seats per day; Fukuoka has 31,000; Okinawa, in the far southwest, has 22,000.
Vietnam takes fourth place: Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City has 30,000 daily seats. In fifth: the connection between Saudi Arabia's two biggest cities – the capital, Riyadh, and the Red Sea port of Jeddah, with 27,000 seats per day. Yesterday there were 14 departures each way between midnight and 6am alone. Australia's sole representative takes sixth place: Melbourne to Sydney, at nearly 25,000 seats per day. It is the highest-rated journey not to involve a national capital. The two cities are less than 450 miles apart, making them ripe for high-speed rail. (Paris and Marseille, a similar distance apart, are connected by frequent expresses taking barely three hours.) But there seems no great enthusiasm in Australia for such a project; the current rail link takes 11 hours.
For frequency of flights, Europe comes in behind every other continent except Antarctica. The busiest route is between Barcelona and Palma, with 8,000 seats per day. What explains the relatively low ranking of Europe? Partly, the multiplicity of airports. The OAG rankings are airport-to-airport. In 2025 London has once again been the world capital of aviation, with more passengers flying in and out than any other city. There are loads of flights from London to Milan. But they start in any of five airports in the capital, and end at three different airports serving the Italian city. The success of high-speed rail is another factor. London to Paris, Milan to Rome and Madrid to Barcelona used to have extremely high-frequency flights. While airlines are coming back to the London-Paris route because of high fares on Eurostar, rail has almost entirely displaced air. Where once there were flights every 15 minutes between Spain's two biggest cities, now there are three-hour gaps between departures.
Read more: The world's top 10 busiest air routes
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New Luton links: Alicante or Faro? |
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| Just before Christmas, Wizz Air announced new links from Luton airport to a number of destinations next summer – including a couple of Spanish and Portuguese favourites. I want to know which holiday you would prefer: Alicante or Faro? Vote using the buttons above. Last week, I asked whether mandatory social media inspections would deter you from holidaying in the US. With Donald Trump demanding that foreign visitors be "vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible", an overwhelming 85 per cent of you said it would put you off visiting. |
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Bulgaria switches to the euro on New Year's Day. It replaces the lev, which will be accepted equally during January 2026. After that, and until the end of June 2026, old notes and coins can be exchanged at banks. The Foreign Office warns: "There may be some temporary disruption to card payments and to cash withdrawals from ATMs around 31 December 2025 to 1 January 2026 due to the changeover." Six EU countries have not so far adopted the euro: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Sweden. Kosovo and Montenegro, despite being outside the European Union, use the euro. |
Pay-as-you-transit at Lima airport |
Peru's leading airport has introduced an "international connection fee" for passengers transferring between international flights. The new charge for "using the airport facilities as a layover" at Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima is US$11.86 (£9). Unlike with many other fees, such as UK air passenger duty, airlines do not collect the levy on behalf of the authorities. Instead you must pay online, at a kiosk in the terminal or at a service counter. Laura Rendell-Dunn of specialist tour operator Journey Latin America says: "We doubt clients will be put off booking as the fee is quite small, but it is annoying to have another procedure to contend with when in transit. A similar fee proposed for domestic connections has been suspended until further notice – a welcome decision, as it would have added both cost and unnecessary complexity for travellers navigating a busy airport." |
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How to make the most of a flight change in China? |
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I have eight hours at Guangzhou airport in China between flights on a journey from Melbourne to London. I looked for some kind of lounge or hotel in the terminal where I could rest, but the price appeared to be around £100 – which is a quarter of what I paid for the entire flight. Any suggestions? |
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For a trip on China Southern, you will probably have paid much less than on better-known airlines such as Emirates, Qatar Airways or Singapore Airlines. The inflight experience won't be as good. But the aircraft themselves will be modern Airbus A350 and/or Boeing 787 planes, with a three-three-three seating layout that is reasonably comfortable. In addition, you will spend less time actually in the air compared with most other routings, because Chinese carriers fly across Russia – saving about two hours.
I looked at the timing and can see why you would like somewhere to rest: you fly overnight from Melbourne, getting in shortly before 6am to Guangzhou, and depart again at 1.40pm. In Terminal 2, which is where your flights will arrive and depart, the Plaza Premium Lounge costs £25 – for a maximum of two hours. Eight hours would indeed rack up a bill of £100. In your position, I might go along to the lounge in person and discuss a solution with them: perhaps to pay for a pair of two-hour sessions but stay for the entire eight hours.
Had I managed to grab a bit of sleep on the flight, though, I would do something entirely different: exercise my right as a transit passenger to leave the airport and head into the centre of Guangzhou, a vast but manageable city. Terminal 2 has its own Metro station ("Airport North") . Trains take about 35 minutes on line 3 to reach Yantang, where you change to line 6 and continue to Beijing Lu. Everything is clearly signposted in English. You will be able to explore the historic core of the city, which is something of an oasis compared with the high-intensity activity elsewhere. After a few hours of soaking up the atmosphere and eating some outstanding street food (get the WeChat or Alipay app for easy payment), retrace your steps and, hopefully, doze most of the way to London. |
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