Heathrow Express versus Elizabeth Line

I’ve had a very interesting time over the last few months wrapping up planning my first international trip since 2020. One of the first things that surprised me when I started looking at getting to and from Heathrow was how cheap it was.

Now, there are lots of airports that offer cheap connections to downtown on public transit (the Silver Line connection from Boston’s Logan airport to South Station and travel onward on MBTA is completely free), but what surprised me was that ever since they opened Heathrow Express, the nonstop train between Heathrow and London’s Paddington Station, I’ve only heard complaints about how expensive it is. So here I was, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Why were they just charging me £5.50 for a 15-minute, nonstop train that drops me off at the front door of my hotel? What were people complaining about?

A few weeks went by as I finalized our return plans, then I hopped back onto the Heathrow Express site to book tickets back to Heathrow, and the price had jumped. It wasn’t extortionate, but now tickets from Paddington to Heathrow were £16.50. A price I was happy to pay, but I had to get to the bottom of it.

Fortunately this didn’t take very long: it turns out Heathrow Express runs a kind of primitive dynamic pricing system, with tickets starting at £5.50 “around” 90 days out, and increasing to £25 in roughly the two weeks leading up to your travel date. I say primitive because there appear to be a finite number of price points: £5.50, £10, £12.50, £16.50, £18, and £25, and they increase at roughly 2-3 week intervals, although sometimes prices dip and sometimes they pop, presumably around dates that are manually entered as “high” or “low” demand days.

What this means is that even if you are unsure of your travel dates, you are better off booking a couple of dates at the lowest rate far in advance than waiting until your plans are firmly settled, let alone booking a ticket on your day of arrival; if I had booked before finalizing my plans, I could have booked tickets on 3 different days for the same £16.50 I ultimately paid. Either way the tickets would be non-refundable and good only on the day of travel, but I could have preserved the optionality of a 3-day travel window, a worthy consideration given the current mess facing busy, understaffed airports in the UK and Europe.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Elizabeth Line

All of London is in a tizzy over the long-awaited opening of the Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, which runs from Reading in the West to Shenfield in the East, with a spur running from Paddington to Heathrow, which reproduces the functionality of the Heathrow Express, although adding 10-20 minutes to the trip by making several intermediate stops.

My initial assumption was that the Elizabeth Line, as it is integrated into the London Underground, would be a low-cost alternative to the Heathrow Express, but oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, because the Underground charges fares on a point-to-point basis, and the Elizabeth Line fare is £10.80 (off-peak) or £11.50 (peak). Obviously that would be a sensible option if the alternative was paying £25, but if you’re able to plan even a month in advance, the Heathrow Express seems obviously superior in both cost and convenience.

The one wrinkle here appears to be that Transport for London caps the total amount you can be charged each day within their “zones 1-6,” which includes Heathrow and central London, at £14.10, and the £11.50 charged for the Elizabeth Line counts against that “cap.” That means if you do end up outside the cheapest Heathrow Express booking window and find yourself taking the Elizabeth Line instead, you should also use the same cap period (beginning at 4:30 am and ending at 4:29 am the next day) to explore as much of London by transit as possible, since you won’t pay more than £14.10 no matter how much you use the system within zones 1-6.

Conclusion

Given the current labor and COVID crisis in the UK I’m totally agnostic about which pieces of this trip will fly by seamlessly and which will require last-minute adjustments and accommodations, so I’m just trying to be as forearmed as I am forewarned. What else do I need to know about transit in London and the UK?