Varadero Airport

The Outward Journey

We flew to Cuba with Thomas Cook, which I was dreading due to reading pervious reviews of their flights being really cramped. Everyone had their own seat back TV's, which had around 5 movies showing but the only downside to this was that when they played the movies they all started at the same time you couldn't control when you wanted to watch them and when they finished, so you had to wait for all of them to finish before you could start to watch another one which was a little annoying but it could have been worse.
The meals were of a reasonably good standard, they serve the main meal around 4 hours into the flight and we got a hot snack as well around 2 hours before we were due to land. There were also complimentary soft drinks.
The flight took ten hours from London, due to strong winds but only 8hrs and 40 minutes on the way back.

Once we arrived we had to queue for ages to go through customs, as everyone has to go through individually to show their Visas and passports. Once through things went a lot quicker our bags were already off loaded and we found our rep who pointed us in the direction of our coach. When we got on the coach there is a man on board offering cocktails, what you aren't told at the time is that these are not free, luckily I had done my research and knew this so turned the drinks down as we didn't have any Pesos to pay with.

You can get your money exchanged at the airport but everyone else has the same idea so the queues were pretty long, we decided to wait until we got to the hotel, where they accept Pounds Sterling.

It took around 30 minutes to get to Varadero resort from Varadero airport, once inside our Hotel, The Iberostar Tainos, there was another long queue as quite a few holiday makers had arrived at the same time, but the reception ladies were extremely friendly and told us all the information we needed to know at the time.

The Trip Home

On the flight home what ever you do make sure you do not go over your weight restrictions because they will charge you for this, there were a few people in front of us who got caught and they had to go and get some money changed up to pay for it, we were OK thankfully.
Once we had checked our luggage in we had to go over to the booths to pay our 25 pesos departure tax (everyone has to pay this on leaving Cuba). We where then advised by a woman who worked at the airport not to go straight through to the departure lounge as it would be extremely busy and pointed us in the direction of a Café to go and get a drink and wait there, well this is a scam when we were sitting in the café we saw the same woman, it turned out that she worked in the café and was drumming up some business, so we made our way through to the departure lounge which wasn't busy at all and it had many more shops and places to eat.

Cigarettes

Also if you're a smoker the cigarettes were much cheaper in the duty free shops, I brought 200 Marlborough Lights which cost me 22.50 Pesos, if I had brought them before we had gone through to departures they would have cost me 36 pesos so there is a big difference in price. Also they will accept Sterling but try and get it as close to the pound as possible as they will give you change in Pesos and you are not allowed to take these out of the country due to it being a closed currency.

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