Gatwick to Barcelona: two hours, two airlines, two terminals

London Gatwick (LGW) flies to Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat (BCN), the airport 15km southwest of the city that everyone means when they say Barcelona. The great-circle distance is 1,109km, about 690 miles, and the airlines timetable the sector at about two hours 10 minutes. That published figure is gate to gate, so the time actually in the air is a little under two hours.

One check is worth thirty seconds before you book, and it is not about Gatwick. Confirm the airport code on your ticket reads BCN. Catalonia has two other airports, Girona and Reus, which airlines have historically sold under the Barcelona name, and neither is in the city; both need a long coach transfer to reach it. The flights from Gatwick go to El Prat, but if you are price-comparing across London airports the distinction can cost you the better part of a day.

The route works the same in both directions. Outbound you leave Gatwick from either terminal depending on your airline and land at El Prat, which has two passenger terminals, T1 and T2, split by carrier. Inbound you fly back into whichever Gatwick terminal your airline uses, which for Vueling is the South Terminal, the one with the railway station inside it.

Two airlines operate Gatwick to Barcelona on their own aircraft. easyJet carries the larger share and flies from the North Terminal, as it does for all its Gatwick flying. Vueling is the Spanish low-cost carrier and treats Barcelona as home turf, which shows in the frequency and in how late in the day the last departures run; it flies from the South Terminal.

British Airways sells this route as well, and that is where booking gets confusing. A British Airways flight number from Gatwick to Barcelona is a codeshare on a Vueling aircraft, not a British Airways service. BA Euroflyer, the airline's Gatwick-based short-haul subsidiary, flies a good deal of Spain from the South Terminal, including Alicante, Malaga, Seville, Palma and the Canaries, and Barcelona is not on that list. Book the BA number and you get a Vueling aircraft, a Vueling crew and Vueling's rules. The full carrier roster with terminals is on airlines at Gatwick, and today's actual flying is on the departures board.

The codeshare matters most for what you carry. Both operators price cabin bags, hold bags and seat selection separately, so the headline fare and the final fare sit a long way apart once a family adds luggage. A British Airways flight number does not buy you British Airways' more generous hand baggage allowance on this route, because the allowance follows the airline actually flying the aircraft. Read the allowance against the operating carrier, and compare totals rather than teaser fares; the baggage guide sets out what each airline includes.

Two operators is thinner cover than it first looks, though better than the single-carrier position on the Gatwick to Dublin route. If a Barcelona flight is cancelled there is a realistic chance of a same-day seat with the other airline, and under UK261 the carrier rerouting you can use a rival's flight where that gets you there significantly sooner. That is worth knowing before you accept the first alternative offered.

Barcelona is the one route in Gatwick's Spanish set that runs as a year-round city rather than a summer coast. The city has a beach, but people go for the architecture, the food and the football, and those work in February. That flattens the fare curve compared with Malaga or Alicante: there is no dead winter month where the route thins out, and no single peak week where everything triples.

The best flying is in the shoulder seasons. April to early June and September into October give you warm days without the August combination of heat, humidity and crowds that makes the Gothic Quarter genuinely unpleasant in the middle of the afternoon. High summer is the worst value on this route: fares peak, hotel rates peak, and the city is at its most congested. Late autumn and the stretch from January to March are the cheapest, and Barcelona in the low season is a much better city to walk around.

Two things distort prices in ways that have nothing to do with the season. Barcelona hosts large trade fairs that fill the hotel stock for a week at a time, so a room can cost three times its normal rate while flights stay ordinary; check the congress calendar if your dates are flexible. Football fixtures do something similar on a shorter horizon. Time of day matters less than on business routes: both airlines run a wide spread of departures, and the early morning slot does not cost noticeably more.

This is a route where Gatwick's terminal split catches people, because the same city leaves from two different buildings. easyJet operates from the North Terminal only, a position the airline states plainly and which has held since it consolidated its Gatwick flying there. Vueling flies from the South Terminal, and so does anything sold under a British Airways number, since Vueling operates it. Turning up at the wrong one costs you a shuttle ride you did not budget for, so settle it with the airline-by-airline terminal lookup before you leave home.

If you do land at the wrong terminal, the fix is the free inter-terminal shuttle, a two-minute ride that runs around the clock; allow about ten minutes door to door. Arriving by train puts you in the South Terminal, because the station is part of that building, so easyJet passengers coming by rail should build the shuttle into their timing rather than discovering it at the platform.

Gatwick asks for two hours before a European departure, and check-in desks generally open about three hours ahead. The airline deadlines are tighter than the airport's advice suggests: easyJet closes bag drop 60 minutes before departure and shuts its gates 30 minutes before. Vueling sets its own cut-offs, and a British Airways ticket on this route runs to Vueling's, not to the ones printed on British Airways' Gatwick page. The check-in guide lists the deadlines by carrier; check them against the airline actually operating your flight. Security at Gatwick now takes containers up to two litres, but do not assume the same coming home: many airports abroad still run the older 100ml rule on the return leg, and the liquids guide explains what that means for a bag packed in Spain. Terminal geography is on the North Terminal map and the South Terminal map.

For a weekend in Barcelona from anywhere in the south east, this route is close to ideal. Two hours is short enough to fly out on a Friday evening and lose nothing, the competition keeps fares honest, and El Prat is genuinely close to the city with a rail and metro link that works. If you are flying with hand luggage only and your dates are flexible, it is one of the cheapest city breaks in Europe from Gatwick.

It suits families less well in August, and that is a fare problem rather than a flying problem. Peak summer on this route combines the highest prices of the year with the version of Barcelona that is hardest to enjoy with children in tow. If the dates are fixed by school holidays, the Costa routes further south give you more for the money, because a beach holiday is what that season is priced for.

The honest case against flying it at all is narrow but real. There is a surface route to Barcelona by Eurostar and connecting high-speed rail, and it takes the better part of a day with at least one change in France. Nobody should take it to save time, because it saves none. It is a reasonable choice if you actively want the train, have a reason to avoid flying, or are stopping in Paris or Lyon anyway. For a straightforward trip to Barcelona and back, fly, and pick your airline on the total price with bags rather than the headline fare.