Heathrow Trasnfer Advice

January of next year I'll be transitting through LHR and need some advice. Usually we are on VS020 which arrives 11am or UA954 which arrives 7am. This gives lots of time to meet family in London prior to the 6pm departure of VS601, however UA have knocked off the noon flight ex SFO and now it leaves at 7pm. The LHR arrival is 1:25pm, this means no meeting family, which I can live with, or a switch to the SFO-ORD-LHR route (no way am I doing this in winter!), so its the afternoon arrival for us.

Question, normally we would check bags through from SFO-LHR-JHB, then in London, leave the airport, see family and then check in at UC as normal and head to CH.

This time I need to know the best approach to take, once before we followed the in transit option and got stuck in a huge queue, because only BA had priority, I'm thinking it's better to just walk from T1 to T3 and use regular check in proceudres given we're in UC.

Thoughts?

If you do SFO-ORD-LHR you get to fly the new biz class Twice if you go on the 8:48am from SFO. But, yes, January's a bit of a risk. Going to try it in early November, myself.

Assume you are not coming in with VS20, then, but with the later United flight. I'd check the bags through anyway, since United will do this for you, and do the transit. It's not a busy time of day you are arriving at, and there isn't a lot of cross terminal traffic from T1 these days, the odd folk going over to T3 or T5 really. I did it in Feb coming off the later SFO flight with UA, going over to T5, there were three of us on the bus. No lines to speak of for T3 either. I've seen crazy lines in the morning in T3, but with the alliance restructuring in LHR and the generally lower volumes it's been a while since I've noticed anything like it.

The only reason to go through the regular channel is to benefit from the VS security line, which is nice. Won't get that on a transfer. Not sure it's worth the hassle of going through T1 passport control - which might end up being the longest line of all.

Thanks Marked Man. I actually flew on a 3 class 767 from ORD-SFO last week. I've never been a fan of the backwards / forwards seat layout and anyway we're in 1st, so even though the UAL refurb is about a year behind schedule, we still get the old first seat which is a lie flat bed, and we don't have to worry about ORD in January.