Safely at Luton Airport, I had the excitement of staying up overnight whilst waiting for my early morning flight to Lublin. A cheap filter coffee at Pret was in order, which also allowed me to keep my devices fully charged. I do wonder, as an aside, whether this Pret might need to be more proactive about people who aren’t customers occupying several tables and preventing paying customers from finding a seat. Arriving early means I don’t have a problem here, but I notice that some potential customers do.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever noticed before how early security opens at Luton Airport, as I saw numerous passengers going through at 02:00 which is much earlier than somewhere like London Stansted. I decided to go through at 02:30 to help keep me awake and it was suitably quiet and peaceful.

The security process was efficient and the staff were kind and helpful as usual. No shops were open airside at this time, but there was plenty of seating.

A couple of hours after I took this photo, the terminal was packed and there were hardly any seats available.

Mine was the fourth flight of the day out of the airport.

Big Smoke is meant to open at 04:00, but this well-run venue seems to routinely open shortly after 03:00. They’re the first main food outlet that passengers see, so this seems a sensible call if they can get their staff members through security this early. I arrived at 03:30 and received a friendly welcome.

I get an £18 credit to spend at Big Smoke with my lounge pass and this cost exactly £18. A latte alongside avocado, eggs and sweet pickle on sourdough toast. This is actually really decent, there’s a depth of flavour and taste to the food, with the coffee having the required caffeine in it. I’m not in the market to spend £18 on breakfast, as I’m not decadent, but for those who are, this isn’t a bad option.

I thought that I’d pop into the lounge as well to get more coffee. And I managed to get another little breakfast.

Very nice. I’m not sure it would be worth paying £30 for access to this lounge, but my lounge pass means that I don’t need to be burdened with that decision.

I thought that it would be a little busier than this, but everything was clean and they had remembered to polish the cutlery this time. It’s normally caked in dry food which is entirely sub-optimal.

The gate was called a little early and so I meandered over there. The boarding process was clear and well managed, with the staff members ignoring the numerous passengers who seemed to be pushing their luck with large bags. It was a busy flight and there weren’t many free seats left on the aircraft.

Boarding the aircraft, which was G-WUKT that had taken me to Bratislava in June 2025. The seating gods had given me an aisle seat near the front which I was pleased with as it meant I could disembark quickly and I wanted to make a connecting train. The passenger in the middle seat asked me to switch with her boyfriend who was sitting around fifteen rows back. Although I am endlessly helpful, I refused this request as this seems to be happening on over half of flights now. The passenger was shortly afterwards moved by someone else as it transpired that she was in the wrong seat herself, so I was pleased that there wouldn’t be any awkward moments.

We had a wait at Luton Airport due to a lack of slots, but the pilot said he planned to push back anyway and see what happened. It transpired that we had just a short delay before we took off and all was well. The crew were professional and helpful, although they didn’t have much to do as the majority of the passengers were more interested in sleeping than buying food and drink.

I was delighted that by efficient speed walking I was able to be the second person at the border desk which sped things up. I’ve mentioned before that on Wizz Air, it feels that most of the passengers aren’t British in the way they often are with Ryanair. That meant I was through the border quickly and faster than many Poles who were using the electronic passport gates, with the member of border control deciding not to ask me what I was doing in Poland.

It was my first time back in Lublin in nine years and as we had arrived without any significant delay, it meant that I could catch one of the few train services of the day that departed the airport. My flight cost £8.99 and, once again, Wizz Air delighted me with their service.

My next little bit of travel has begun and there’s Liam driving off into the distance after dropping me off at the delights of Luton Airport’s long-stay car park. We saw the shuttle bus arrive and I assumed that it would pick me up promptly. I didn’t realise that it would first undertake a leisurely tour of the car park, taking nine minutes to reach the bus stop.

I didn’t think that it would be wise to stand by the fence taking too many photos, but I realised that the long-stay car park was next to the airside area of the airport. I could see numerous Wizz Air aircraft and the aircraft for my 05:55 flight might well have been among them.

Safely on board as the only passenger in the shuttle bus. I can’t imagine why people aren’t heading to the airport at midnight…. Maybe it’s because people like my friend Richard pay for decadent hotels rather than spending the night appreciating airport infrastructure. They’re definitely missing out.

It was my first time being dropped off at the long-stay car park and I was pleased to be at the terminal just a few minutes after departing. I now have a few hours in Pret before meandering through the security area ready for my flight. How lovely.

Staying at the Ibis hotel in Luton meant that it was only a ten minute early morning walk to the main terminal, although it was all quite a bit busier than I expected at that time.

All was though calm in the airport terminal.

Mine was the sixteenth departure of the day. I’m not entirely sure why I counted them, but having completed the research it would seem wasteful not to publish the findings.

The security process was fast, indeed so fast that I was seated inside Big Smoke restaurant within twenty minutes of having left the hotel. All very efficient.

I had £18 credit to use at Big Smoke with my Priority Pass card so went for the smashed avocado and latte, which handily came to £18.

Nicely presented and although I know that hot honey is a bit too ubiquitous at the moment, it added to the flavour here and the chilli flakes added to the taste. The eggs were slightly firmer than I would like, but the avocado was vibrant, the pickled pink onions added texture and I thought that this was really rather good.

The latte tasted of coffee which seemed positive and was brought over by a young waiter who was positively flirting with just about every customer. This worked better for some than others, he got an annoyed look from one older woman but another younger woman seems to be falling for his charms.

This remains a busy airport and there’s rarely much seating in the main areas, with many of the restaurants looking like they were reaching capacity as well.

The gate was called and all was efficient as ever, although three lads were spotted by Wizz Air staff with an extra bag and they each found themselves surcharged around £60 each. This seemed to be something of a body blow to them, although in general the staff were letting some slightly larger bags just go through without checking.

There’s something rather nice about morning flights and the airport waking up.

Boarding the flight after the usual ten minute wait standing on the stairs inside the terminal.

The aircraft was G-WUKN which appears to be yet another new one for me. I still diligently record which aircraft I’ve been on, although I’m not always entirely sure why. Future historians may be grateful, assuming they have first exhausted every other available source of information.

The seating Gods had given me an aisle seat and there was inevitably going to be extra entertainment as there’s the empty emergency exit row seat in front. Passengers can pay £20 to upgrade to sit there and crew members are very alert to those self-upgrading without paying, so I was hoping for drama.

The flight was relatively busy, at about 80% occupancy and the crew on this flight seemed particularly alert, although I think that the Wizz Air standard is pretty high in this regard anyway. The flight was relaxing enough so I got a little nap and there were no disturbances or random sales of lottery tickets. The crew announcements were clear, the pilot said sensible things and it was all reassuringly undramatic. Incidentally, the cabin crew chased three passengers out of the emergency exit rows seats so I was pleased for that extra entertainment.

We had arrived into Belgrade 25 minutes earlier than expected, although that’s more due to padded schedules than anything else.

This was another really rather lovely flight from Wizz Air, in my usual fan boy style of finding little to ever criticise them for, with the cost of the ticket being just £8.99. Reliable, consistent and back in Belgrade so this blog post series has finally now hit the Balkans.

The Balkans were getting ever closer with my arrival at the Ibis Luton Airport, although I accept that the immediate surroundings remained stubbornly attached to Bedfordshire.

The reception area.

There’s the old room style in these rooms, but it was clean and organised. I don’t use TVs in hotel rooms, but the room isn’t exactly blessed with the latest state of the art television and they seem to have kept the old one for some sort of heritage value.

The view from the room was good for plane spotting and I liked that they had given me a room far away from the lift, as that’s usually much quieter.

It was fortunate that I wasn’t looking for a pint of anything given these slightly sub-optimal technical difficulties.

I went for a non-alcohol Becks as my welcome drink and it tasted of ditch water. I understand that this is a national hotel chain and purchasing decisions are sometimes potentially complex, but they could do much better here given how good non-alcoholic beer has become.

I thought that I’d watch some planes.

There were also police chases to watch, as Luton thoughtfully provided some ground-level transport entertainment.

I set my alarm for 03:30 as I had an early morning flight, but I woke up naturally at 02:57 and so I just went with that. It was already busy outside the Ibis with people heading to and from the airport, with the weather being cool and inoffensive.

I like this hotel, although the pricing is often a bit decadent so I opt for other locations, but it was clean, the team member were friendly and there were no noise disturbances either internally or externally. The big convenience is that it is just a ten minute walk to the airport, which was handy given that I was still a little tired and so all really rather lovely.

After a little sojourn in Luton Wetherspoons, which is obviously where all the best trips start from, I had a walk to the airport hotel. Some travellers prefer private transfers, but they risk missing several miles of dual carriageway and an abandoned vehicle factory.

This is what was the Arndale Shopping Centre, then renamed the Mall Luton, then Luton Point and since earlier this year, it’s now Frasers Plus which is effectively Sports Direct. This is perhaps one of the nicer areas in Luton, but the shopping centre’s construction in the 1970s destroyed a lot of heritage and has messed up the town’s street lines.

I made a quick stop at Lidl in the Frasers Plus shopping centre because I urgently needed fruit suspended in sugar. I’m not sure I have ever craved fruit so intensely that I felt compelled to rush into Lidl for it, but there we are, life is an exploration.

This is the entrance to Kimpton Road, formerly known as Gallows Road, and I’ve never thought enough about that former bridge crossing there. The mainline railway (formerly known as the Midland Railway) is just behind it, but this separate line was once the Luton & Dunstable branch of the Great Northern Railway. This line ran to Dunstable and beyond, but it was closed down in 1965 which as usual was a sub-optimal decision as Dunstable really could have done with a railway line. That bus in the photo is relevant to this story.

I was standing where the ‘smithy’ is on the map.

That’s where the bus was heading, the former line is now the Luton to Dunstable Busway which opened in 2013 and is apparently the second longest in the world. It’s 13.4 kilometres (8.3 miles) and the guided track is 7.7 kilometres (4.8 miles) of that. I like railways, but there was a good reason not to rebuild this one as the expense was high and it would be difficult to connect it into the main rail network, which is always an optimal aim. It means Dunstable doesn’t have a railway station, but at least they have a guided busway station and that will have to suffice.

The war memorial outside the former Vauxhall Motors works. The factory was bombed in 1940, killing 39 workers and injuring over 40 others, and this memorial was redesigned here when the former buildings were demolished and converted to housing in 2022. Vauxhall car production came to an end in 2002 and those buildings were the ones taken down, with only commercial vehicles made here after that. Although more of that in a moment.

Some of the names from the Great War and I might well come back to this at some point….

For anyone who would like to see the memorial, it’s located opposite Luton Airport Parkway railway station. This is the station I complain about quite regularly, so my loyal readers may already feel they know it personally.

I mentioned that cars were made in Luton until 2002, but commercial vehicle production also came to an end in 2025. The final vehicle made here was a Vauxhall Vivaro completed on 28 March 2025, marking the end of 120 years of production on the site. There is now extensive security to stop the site from being taken over, this was one of the main entrances.

And this was another entrance and I remember the workers piling into these buildings when I was off walking to the airport, it all feels a little sad now.

There is at least still a Vauxhall dealership here.

And this little plaque was put up recently to mark just how many people used to work at the site.

After a little more walking and crossing busy roads I was nearly at the Ibis hotel and this is the Ibis Budget that has been closed for years.

And safely at the Ibis hotel ready for my early morning flight.

I accept that a trip supposedly involving the Balkans has so far featured Luton Wetherspoons, Lidl, a guided busway, an abandoned Vauxhall factory and two Luton hotels. It is perhaps not the most conventional introduction to the delights of the wider Balkans region, but international travel involves a certain amount of administrative build-up.

I am now writing this from Belgrade, though, so we are very nearly at the point where the Balkans finally enter this Balkans trip. The anticipation is almost unbearable. Although, after Luton’s second-longest-in-the-world guided busway, Belgrade has a great deal to live up to.

I decided this morning to walk the three miles or so from Luton Travelodge into the beating heart of Bedfordshire, namely Luton town centre. The Balkans would have to wait a little longer while I completed some important preliminary research into roundabouts, pavement parking and budget fruit salad.

As an aside, I hate this road crossing which is where Dunstable Road meets Chaul End Lane. A driver kindly waved me across, but it’s a roundabout with an unmarked pedestrian crossing just off it. A quick Google search shows that there have been accidents here before, including when a car ploughed into a mother with her pushchair. Is it really too much to ask that pedestrians should be able to cross safely?

The pavements through the Bury Park area presented a different challenge. Cars and vans obstructed numerous sections of the route, making progress difficult for anyone using a wheelchair, mobility scooter or pushchair. I have blurred the number plate of this particular car, although its parking position was making no comparable effort to preserve anyone else’s privacy, dignity or indeed access to the pavement. Anyone without restricted mobility could squeeze past most of the obstructions by stepping into the road or turning sideways. This is apparently considered an adequate local accessibility strategy and it’s perhaps all a bit sub-optimal.

Anyway, today is not a day for complaining, despite what appearances might suggest and I think that’s the limit of today’s drama.

And there’s the White House, which is Luton’s JD Wetherspoon outlet that I don’t need to write about again, it’s been recorded on numerous locations on this blog including at https://www.julianwhite.uk/luton-the-white-house/. There are limits to how many times one building can be presented to readers as a fresh discovery, even on this blog.

I think it’s fair to say that ordering fruit salad for breakfast isn’t usual for me, but sometimes the body craves this sort of cuisine. I mean, mine never has before, but variety is the spice of life and all that. After a brief stay of five hours drinking the unlimited coffee costing just £1.49, I felt sufficiently rested.

Properly nourished, extensively caffeinated and still some distance from the Balkans, I was finally ready to walk towards the airport hotel. I accept that this series is approaching its stated geographical subject with no great sense of urgency, but travel is all about the journey and all that. Unfortunately, quite a lot of this particular journey still involved Luton, but there we go.

Although I didn’t ask for this, thank you to Travelodge for offering me a free breakfast at a location of my choice (well, at a Travelodge hotel obviously and that’s not an unreasonable limitation) after I excited and delighted them about my experiences at Luton Travelodge. I am now disproportionately pleased by the prospect of a complimentary budget hotel breakfast, which is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that I need to get out more.

The morning after the night before. I accept that, for a series of posts labelled “The Balkans”, a detailed account of one night at the Travelodge in Luton might not immediately excite and delight. However, two loyal blog readers want regular progress and perhaps an occasional third reader has finally tired of bar billiards, so some variety is required. And for me to start complaining about things…

I arrived shortly before midnight and found nobody at reception, despite pressing the call bell twice. I’ve stayed here numerous times and had a fairly good idea which team member was working. He is always friendly, although I have developed an entirely unsupported theory that he relaxes in the staff room watching Jet Lag: The Game, the finest YouTube series currently available, and occasionally needs a moment to return to the reality of a Travelodge reception. He eventually appeared and was as welcoming as ever. I rather like things remaining the same, so even the short wait had a reassuring familiarity to it.

There’s no bloody KitKat. I’ve emailed Travelodge to complain. The upgraded room was supposed to include one, so its absence represented an early setback for Travelodge’s move into luxury hospitality. I had intended to eat it as dessert following the McDonald’s melon balls, although I accept that this was not an evening meal demanding a carefully considered final course.

I have genuinely emailed Travelodge to complain, although not specifically about the KitKat. Travelodge has upgraded a number of rooms by adding a coffee machine, a chocolate bar and a few decorative touches (I stress the word ‘few’ here and suspect they cost less than a fiver) before charging a little more for them. In fairness, this was the only room type available and it was still very reasonably priced. I therefore had no objection to paying for it, but once a company starts promising decadence, even budget decadence, it needs to keep a firm grip on chocolate provision. My friend Richard, who thrives on decadence, would have been displeased as well.

The more legitimate problem was that the soap dispenser contained only water, while the other dispenser was empty. There were also a few minor cleanliness issues. None of this constituted a hospitality emergency, but functioning soap feels like a reasonable expectation even before the hotel begins exploring the outer reaches of capsule coffee.

And, there’s perhaps a serious point here which is that Travelodge really have piled pressure on team members and given them more do so, whilst investing heavily in things that will annoy customers, like charging them to pick their room and forcing them to upgrade to luxury rooms without KitKats. They’ve perhaps forgotten issues such as security, cleanliness and basic functions. If a customer books with Travelodge now they get four emails, which is evidently in my mind as they’ve thought of new ways to get customers to pay more, whether it’s breakfast, evening meals, wifi, late checkout, room placement and so on. Individually, these are perfectly reasonable. Collectively, they create the impression that a considerable amount of corporate energy has been devoted to discovering further things that can be sold.

I’m an advocate of Wizz Air, which also charges separately for almost everything it can identify. The difference, in my experience, is that it generally gets the basic operation right. The aircraft arrives, the flight takes place and I am deposited somewhere that broadly corresponds with the destination on the ticket. If an airline can maintain that level of organisational discipline, a hotel should be able to provide soap.

But, back to positivity, the room was cheap, there were no noise issues internally or externally, there was a fan and since I’ve pro-active enough to have a back-up mini bottle of liquid soap, all was well. However, if Travelodge want to start selling decadence, they need to deliver, or just scrap decadence and focus on being consistently average.

I’ve had a slightly less productive weekend than I would have liked, which has meant I didn’t complete some blog posts that I had intended so they’ll have to wait for a few weeks as I’m now off on my next little research trip. Good intentions and all that. It’s the trip I mentioned some weeks ago to explore some of the Balkans, mainly by train, with my friend Jonathan which will let me visit a couple of European countries that I haven’t visited before. Much as I like exciting content, I’m hoping for not too much railway or border related drama.

My ever helpful friend Liam drove me to Luton Travelodge and we stopped off at the nearby McDonald’s. For reasons unknown I decided that I needed melon balls, which Liam seemed to be quite confused by, alongside a hamburger. I never knew that McDonald’s did melon balls, but they were rather delicious.

There was exciting drama, and I say drama as I haven’t been out much for the last few weeks, when the McDonald’s crew member told Liam that he had driven to the wrong window. It was the window he was told to drive to, so there’s nothing like a little internal confusion to pass the time with. Poor Liam had to deal with both that, as well as why I had ordered melon balls….. Incidentally, I’m impressed at how busy McDonald’s was at just before midnight on a Bank Holiday Monday and there seemed to be little prospect of peace for the crew members, particularly while customers were being circulated between windows under conflicting instructions.

But with that, I was safely in Luton. I would add that I accept this isn’t a riveting blog post, but it’s part of the story of the trip and so it’s going in. If every travel account began beside the Adriatic in glorious sunshine (in the shade obviously), nobody would fully appreciate the considerable administrative effort required to reach it.

Lovely as Luton is, I try not to spend too much time there, but as my flight was arriving relatively late I wouldn’t have time to get back to Norwich. So, as the Thistle seems to have gone up in price, I went for this poorly reviewed little arrangement located near to the railway station. One of the reasons that I ignored the reviews is that booking.com noted that there was a high number of guests who rebooked there, which is usually a positive sign.

I had a ten minute wait at reception but this didn’t concern me as there was air conditioning in this area and I was too hot. After several days in France, I was prepared to tolerate quite significant administrative failure provided something kept blowing cold air at me. There was a phone number to ring in the event of an emergency, so I eventually rang that and a team member came out to complete the check-in process.

A quick look at the fire plan shows the general lack of decadence about the room size, but I like hotels such as this as they’re cheap, affordable and don’t include luxuries that I don’t need. Like windows. There are people who want boutique furnishings, mood lighting and an inspirational selection of cushions from their hotel room. I mostly want somewhere clean to sleep with a plug socket and a temperature that doesn’t make me irritable.

The basic room which was clean, at a temperature that was acceptable to me although not overly cold, and which I thought was entirely satisfactory.

I’d stay here again, I didn’t have any noise issues either internally or externally, although it would have been surprising to have any of the latter given that there was no window. The prices were low (the room was around £35 for the night), the staff member was polite and I was near to JD Wetherspoon and the railway station. For anyone that likes comfort, space and a window, then this is perhaps a little sub-optimal and that would explain the rather poor reviews.