The Time Out London blog team

Finally, Stansted Airport is catching up with the rest of London’s airports and introducing contactless ticketing at its rail station.  The arrival of pay-as-you-go contactless payments at Stansted is a big deal because thousands of Stansted Express passengers travelling from Liverpool Street have wrongly assumed that they would be able to tap in and tap out, then fined up to £100. In 2019, watchdog London TravelWatch estimated that 16,000 travellers per year were being fined for not buying their ticket ahead of time. The airport was supposed to launch its tap-in tap-out tech back in December but that was delayed because of software issues. Now, that problem has been fixed and the machines are ready to be rolled out. Here’s everything you need to know about the contactless ticketing coming to Stansted Airport.  When is Stansted Airport getting contactless ticketing? Passengers on the Stansted Express from London will be able to use contactless payments from Sunday March 8.   Nineteen other stations in Hertfordshire and Essex, including Southend Airport, will also get contactless machines on the same day.  How much will contactless tickets cost?   The journey will still cost the same as a ticket bought on the day – around £21.90. While it’ll certainly be the most convenient option, contactless tickets won’t be the cheapest option. If you book well in advance, you can get a Stansted Express ticket from just £9.90 and, if you have a railcard discount or concession rates, it...

When it comes to choosing where to jet off to on holiday, Londoners are not exactly short on options. Between Heathrow (one of the planet’s busiest air hubs), Gatwick (which counts among the biggest airports in Europe), Stansted, Luton and City, there are very few places you can’t get to from the UK capital. And this summer London is getting even more flight routes. Gatwick has revealed that new services will fly from the Sussex hub to 12 airports around the world, with those destinations spread from Europe and North Africa to the Middle East, Asia and North America. A whopping eight new carriers are coming to the airport in time for summer. So, where will you soon be able to fly to from LGW, and who with? One of those routes is from Jet2, which is expanding its London route options. Jet2 will operate a total of 29 Gatwick routes in the summer season, including a thrice-weekly service to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. In terms of further-flung destinations, Beijing Capital is launching a weekly service to Qingdao in China – all the better for making the most of the recent relaxation of visa rules for Brits. Photograph: ShutterstockQingdao in China Air Asia X is kicking off a service between Gatwick and the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, which will run seven times a week, while Air Transat is kicking off a three-times-per-week route to Ottawa in Canada. Royal Air Maroc will run twice a week to Tetouan, as Air Arabia flies 14 times weekly to Sharjah. And that’s without...

PSA! In less than a week, using London’s tube is going to get more expensive. Despite a freeze on rail fares across other parts of the country, tube and TfL rail fares are being hiked by an average of 5.8 percent, though some cheaper ticket types will be going up as much as 10 percent. Travel within Zone 1 will rise from £2.90 to £3.10 while Zone 1-2 will go up from £3.50 to £3.60. No single pay-as-you-go fare on the tube will go up by more than 20p. That increase is down to an official order from the government that told TfL it should increase prices by the RPI rate of inflation plus one percent every year until 2030 in order to receive £2bn of funding.  In a bit of better news, the price of London Travelcards will be frozen until March 2027 and their weekly and daily caps won’t change. All that will be different is that holders will hit the cap sooner. Discounts like Zip photocards and 18+ Student photocards will also stay the same. And if you prefer the bus over the Underground, you’ll be glad to know that fares are staying exactly the same. There are even a some bus routes that’ll be free to ride for the next few months.   Read on for the exact date of London’s tube fare increase and the new prices that you can expect to pay.  When will tube fares go up in 2026?  The new fares across the London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth line and DLR will be implemented from Sunday March 1, 2026.  'Photograph: I Wei Huang / Shutterstock.com' Full list of new tube ticket...