Cheapest way to travel from Stansted Airport for the time-rich traveller?

Ryanair at Memmingen Airport

Following a travel mishap over the weekend, I found myself in the position of booking a flight back to London with only two days notice. I try to avoid flights as much as possible and had been due to return to the UK from Bavaria using a combination of train and ferry. After having to abandon those plans, my only reasonable option from a cost perspective was a Ryanair flight from the small low-cost airport at Memmingen back to old favourite (note the sarcasm) Stansted. 

The flight price was surprisingly cheap: €19.90, plus €18.99 for my check-in bag (the cheapest luggage option in this case). That made a total of £33.25, which would have been decent if booking months in advance. However the sting comes at Stansted Airport with the costs for last minute options back to London being rather excessive, especially for a a one-way trip. 

Stansted Express comes in at £25 with no railcard discount available on their website. If you're savvy enough to use other ticket sites or purchase in person, a railcard can be added, bringing the cost down to £16.65. Cheaper advance fares are available. Fellow blogger Diamond Geezer helpfully investigated this only yesterday, finding that a single purchased at least a fortnight in advance costs £17, and reduces to £15, £13, £11 or £9.90 if you can lock in your dates even earlier, albeit with no railcard discount on these prices. 

Two coach companies compete on the route to London, contracted to do so by the airport. National Express have been running their operations since 2003, whilst new player Flibco commenced only earlier this month. 

The National Express network is more extensive, with destinations convenient for west London passengers (e.g. Paddington), for north Londoners (e.g. Finchley Road, Golders Green, King's Cross, Tottenham Hale), those heading east (e.g. Stratford, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street), and south too (e.g. Victoria, Waterloo, Southwark). Fares start from £7.50, but I would of paid the standard fare of £17. 

Flibco have one route to Liverpool Street via Stratford with a fixed price of £13.99. However it charges extra for luggage. The cost with a suitcase is £15.99, or £16.99 with two. 

As my flight was due to land at midday, I had time on my side to experiment with a different route using local buses to reach TfL-land, with the England fare cap still in place. 

I began by looking at which buses from the airport would take me southwards. Harlow was the most reasonable option, with buses departing every ten minutes on slightly different route variations via Bishop's Stortford. 

Once in Harlow I would have a couple of options. One that I briefly considered is the marathon journey on the 724 that links the Essex town with Heathrow Airport. With a journey time of nearly four hours at only £3 it's one of those great single journeys that has really benefited from the fare cap. For my destination in south London, I would have used that to link with the Superloop for a bus-filled day. However sense prevailed and I decided that would be hellish after an early start for my flight. 

Waltham Cross was another option, but I found Epping more appealing, with a bus roughly every 15 minutes, and the Central Line able to take me onwards from there. A search of TfL's single fare finder showed that with my Oyster railcard discount the journey would only cost £1.55 all the way to south London - a true bargain!

So how did the journey go?

Bus 510 at Stansted Airport Coach Station (top) and temporary traffic lights impacting our progress (bottom)

My flight arrived early and I managed to head through passport control and pick up my bag in record time. I walked over to the bus stop and caught the 12.07 departure of Arriva's 510 to Harlow. We left on time with a good number of passengers on board the single-decker. The mire of roadworks and the temporary traffic light reared it's head as we encountered three on our way to Bishop's Stortford and a further one on the way to Harlow. This meant we were delayed by around nine minutes by the time we reached Harlow's temporary bus station at 13.19, a travel time of 72 minutes.

Double-decker route 20 to Ongar via Epping at Harlow's temporary bus station

At the bus station it's an easy transfer on to either the 20 or 21 operated by Central Connect towards Epping. Luckily for me the smart single-decker 21 was running a few minutes late, so I boarded at 13.23. It's a simple journey straight to the entrance of Epping underground station where I found a Central Line service ready to leave within two minutes.

Central Line at Epping station

To get the £1.55 fare I would have to avoid zone 1, which meant changing at Stratford. From here I transferred to the Jubilee line which took me to Canada Water, tapped on the pink card reader, and waited for the Windrush line train to my destination. 

All in all, the journey from the bus in Stansted to my destination station was 3 hours, 13 minutes at a cost of £7.55. I'm pretty sure it's the cheapest option and would work for anyone living outside zone 1 in north/east/south east London. The equivalent journey via coach would have taken at best 1 hour, 50 minutes via Stratford. But it's quite possible I would have had to wait a little while for my coach (they operate every 20-30 minutes, and there was a queue as I arrived).

Receipts from the bus journeys (top) and the TfL journey (bottom)

It's a route I would consider trying again, especially if returning from Stansted in the morning or early afternoon. The buses to Harlow actually run 24/7, although less frequently outside of daytime, whilst the last Harlow to Epping bus is 21.45 (or 19.30 on a Sunday). It's probably not worth the risk of arriving late if heading towards the airport, but then again, the regular departures mean that risk isn't unsuitable high. But from an overall value-time axis, I think it's a suitable option.