Easter travel, transport and shopping: a guide to useful holiday information

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/04/easter-travel-roads-trains-airports

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Easter weekend will see many in the UK take to the roads, trains and airports visiting family and friends or travelling to take advantage of the school break or bank holiday. But how will transport be affected by Easter? Will the shops still be open and where can you find out this kind of information?

We've put together a guide to useful websites, journey planners and travel guides to help you survive the Easter getaway and Bank Holiday traffic log.

If you've found other useful websites and links to help plan out your Easter travel, let us know by sharing them in the comments section.

What days are bank holidays?

Good news! If you get bank holidays off you don't have to work on Good Friday 6 April (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) or Monday 9 April (England, Northern Ireland and Wales only). See all the bank holiday dates for 2012 here and bank holidays for Scotland here.

You can find out more about your rights to annual leave and bank holidays here.

What time will the supermarket close/open?

This Opening Times website lets you type in your postcode and find out when the supermarkets and shops nearest you are open. iOpeningTimes is also useful for finding opening hours for specific store branches in your area.

Major supermarkets have their opening times written on individual store pages - just search through Tesco's store locator on its website, for example. You can check the opening times of your local Morrisons here, information for Asda at this link, more on Sainsbury's opening times and here's the Marks and Spencer store locator.

What shops are open at Easter?

Shops will often close for Easter Day, but it's worth looking up individual retailers' websites to see if the usual opening hours for the Friday, Saturday and Monday have been changed.

For the larger retail centres: Birmingham Bullring will open on Good Friday and Saturday, but will close on Easter Day and re-open from 10am to 6pm on Monday.

Westfield Shopping centre in London is open on the same days and closed on Easter Day, though it's worth checking its website for more details on changes to opening hours, as it will be closing an hour earlier than usual on Good Friday at 9pm. Stratford Westfield is only closed on Easter Day during the holiday weekend, but has more details on which facilities may be affected.

The Trafford Centre in Manchester is open from 10am - 8pm on Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Monday, but its shops will be closed and only the restaurants and leisure area open on Easter Day. Cabot Circus in Bristol closes at 6pm on Good Friday and is open for business as usual on Saturday 7 April. It's shops won't be open on Easter Day but will reopen from 10am-6pm on the bank holiday.

Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow says it opens on public holidays from 10am to 6pm - more details are on its website.

Are petrol stations open on Easter Day and Monday?

Yes. Motorway Services says all motorway service areas (anything signed as such from a motorway) must be open with basic services (fuel, toilets, hot drinks) on Bank holidays as a condition of their licence. However don't expect all the food and drink options, and you may have to endure a freezing cold walk over a motorway bridge to find a toilet. If signs say 'not 24 hours' it's most likely 8am-8pm. There's more on the motorwayservice.info site.

Moto also says its services are open 24 hours, 365 days a year and has a searchable map and Texaco's station finder is here. Shell has an online store locator and app for mobile too. BP has this open spreadsheet of all its 24-hour stores and there's also a branch locator page.

Opening Times has a list of UK petrol stations by location linking to more details for individual locations. You could always tweet @motorwayservices or @mwayservices and see if they reply.

Traffic and travel hotspots

At Christmas we asked for your help to map the roads, railways and journeys to avoid during holiday seasons. We're opening up this collaborative map again for your tips on avoiding travel trouble during the Easter holidays and weekend – we hope it will help you plan your journey. View the map directly by clicking on this link.

The map doesn't feature live traffic and travel updates, but we've included some links in this post for where you can find out this information for roads, trains, buses and flights.

Roads

The Highways Agency's website offers current traffic information and there are more helpful tools for planning your road journey here. You can search for roadworks or planned disruptions in England that might affect your Easter road travel, in Wales here, works in Scotland at this link and more from the BBC on roads in Northern Ireland. There are details of live traffic feeds and other ways to keep updated on the go on the respective sites.

Trains

This site gives an overview of the services that each train operater Company will be providing during Easter, including individual pages for train operators and a map of all rail engineering work taking place. There's more on these planned disruptions from Network Rail too.

For those travelling in London, Transport for London has a guide to planned works that might cause disruption on the underground.

Airports

With the school holidays in full swing it's safe to say that airports are going to be busy places over Easter weekend, but how can you plan ahead for a stress-free journey?

The best advice is to go direct to the live information on the airport's website (or your flight provider). Airportsinformation.co.uk links out to 23 of the UK's major airports, but here are also the direct links to live flight departure information for London Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton and Stansted, Birmingham, East Midlands, Manchester, Edinburgh and Cardiff.

BBC Travel has air information here including a list of delays and disruptions and you can check your rights for delays and cancellations on the civil aviation authority's website here.

National Rail Enquiries has a helpful page full of details on travelling to the UK's airports by rail over Easter.

Buses

Bus services may be affected by the public holiday on Monday and operators often run a limited service on this day. Individual service providers tend to list changes to services on their own websites, for example Arriva Midlands has an Easter timetable, First Group has Easter bus times for Leicester listed, so you are best to check in with the operator.

The busenthusiast site a really useful update linking out to the Easter timetables for more than 50 bus operators.

You can also check this live bus map, which covers local authorities in England and Wales, to see when your next bus is.

Please leave your tips and advice for Easter travel and links to more information in a comment.