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I am planning to book the itinerary Mumbai-Dubai-London Gatwick on Emirates in mid-January. The flights are EK505 and EK9. The layover in Dubai is 2h 15m. Question:

  • I need to take a bus from London Gatwick at 23.30 to reach university. The plane lands at London Gatwick at 18.25. Is this enough gap to complete all immigration formalities or should I switch to a morning bus?
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    If you've got all your papers in order, immigration shouldn't take very long at all; mostly dictated by how long the queue is at that moment. The longest I've ever queued for immigration anywhere is maybe 45 minutes. In general, from landing to leaving the airport, you should usually estimate an hour, but may be as quick as 20 minutes or so if everything goes super smoothly.
    – deceze
    Commented Nov 8 at 7:57
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    5 hours between your arrival time and the bus departure is ample. You could book a flexible ticket in case your flight is late. To answer the question about a transit visa, we need to know your citizenship. You can check using the Emirates travel document tool
    – Traveller
    Commented Nov 8 at 8:10
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    Post answers, not comments.
    – Willeke ♦
    Commented Nov 8 at 9:13
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    @deceze you must be lucky (and have a “good” passport). For a long time queuing times in some US airports for visitors routinely reached 2 hours. And in the UK the queue for visitors has regularly taken hours (among other reasons, as soon as there was a failure with their IT systems, which was quite frequent at some point). While in general it usually takes way less than an hour, it can be longer, especially for people who require visas etc. But except in exceptional circumstances, 5 hours should be plenty (unless of course the flight arrives very late).
    – jcaron
    Commented Nov 8 at 9:29
  • @jcaron Yes, I'm lucky enough to have a "good" passport, and I've always taken care to have my papers in order, filled out online forms in advance etc. I was taken aside once in Japan, which then took several hours to resolve, but at that time I really didn't have my stuff in order and I'm not counting that as a usual experience. That's what makes writing an answer here difficult: if someone has specific stats for Gatwick, that'd be great, but an hour or two at most should suffice for the average traveler. Unless OP can contribute more details why they think it mightn't.
    – deceze
    Commented Nov 8 at 9:39

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In general, 5 hours should be more than enough.

While queuing times and processing times vary, based on:

  • The date and time of day
  • The type of passport you have (especially if you require a visa or not)
  • The type of visa
  • Whether this is your first visit
  • ...

I would expect immigration formalities to take less than one hour in a majority of cases, maybe 2 on a busy day (most of that is just queuing).

Of course, there can be cases where even 5 hours aren't enough:

  • Your flight is very, very late
  • You miss your connection in Dubai and are rebooked on a later flight
  • Your flight is cancelled and you are rebooked on a later flight
  • The UK Border Force have one of their meltdowns (usually an IT problem). They had plenty of those these past few years but they seem to have resolved issues (at least I don't think it has made the news recently).
  • There are issues with your paperwork and you have to go into secondary and it takes a lot of time to sort out ...

Note that in some of those cases you may even be rebooked on a flight to LHR rather than Gatwick.

So while there's no guarantee that you will make that bus, it remains very, very likely that you will (I don't know which bus it is and how often it runs, but it's probable that you could even use an earlier one in most cases).

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  • In the absolute worst case, you can communicate the urgency to the people managing the lines (idk if Gatwick has them but Heathrow does) and ask for priority. You could also try talking to passengers in front of you to get further ahead in the line. No guarantee of being given priority. of course, but it does not hurt to try. Airports probably do not want people to be stranded there for the night. In my experience it takes ~2-5 mins per person/group to enter UK on the non-EU line in heathrow, you could do some rough calculations based on amount of people/groups and open passport lines.
    – ave
    Commented Nov 12 at 10:31

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