Can you recommend some lesser-known sights to visit on a trip to Berlin?

Q We are a couple in our thirties heading for Berlin for the first time in May. Can you recommend a few highlights that an AI-generated itinerary might miss?

Huw A

A May is excellent timing for the German capital, which is blessed with open space. Let me start with one interior attraction at Friedrichstrasse railway station in the heart of the city. The extraordinary Tranenpalast (“Palace of Tears”) is the old DDR processing area where citizens with permission to leave East Germany were sent on their way by train to the West – knowing they were unlikely to see their former homes and families again. It is preserved as a (free) museum to mark those tragic decades of division and despair during the Cold War.

Around the location of the now-flattened Checkpoint Charlie, you can learn more about the divided city. There’s a good exhibition on the actual site, and an interesting museum just south of the crossing point. More cheerfully, the Humboldt Forum opened in 2021, with a brief to chronicle “human history, art and culture”. The venue is spectacular, and you can access the roof terrace for a fresh view of the city.

Close by, the Pergamon and Neues museums do their bit to represent human history, art and culture in splendid surroundings. The main Pergamon museum is closed for refurbishment, but a temporary “pop-up” called Pergamonmuseum: The Panorama recreates the Greek city of Pergamon in Roman times.

Leave the city behind briefly on a two-mile walk that I don’t imagine AI would recommend. Take the S-Bahn (suburban railway) to Wannsee station. Look across the lake fringed by opulent mansions, then board bus 318 to the end of the line at Hahn-Meitner-Platz. A track runs west from here through countryside to the village of Klein Glienicker – carved up during the division of Berlin.

Soon afterwards you reach the “Bridge of Spies”: Glienicker Brucke. This steel structure once carried the main route southwest from Berlin. It straddled the frontier between Soviet and Allied sectors, making it the ideal location to trade people. Continue on by bus to Potsdam, the venue for a palace to rival Versailles.

Berlin has hundreds of good places to eat and drink, but for a final dinner I recommend the excellent Hugo Notte restaurant on Gendarmenmarkt. It occupies the magnificent crypt of the Huguenot church, also known as “the French cathedral”, but the cuisine is modern German at its best.

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Q Next summer I am flying from my local airport, Birmingham, to Ecuador, on KLM. The route is via Amsterdam to Quito, and the same coming home. But my travel agent now says KLM has cancelled the Amsterdam-Birmingham afternoon flight on 21 June.

I have been rebooked on the evening flight, but the gap between arriving from Quito at 1.15pm and leaving for Birmingham at 9.50pm is over eight hours. The agent said she could search for Manchester or Heathrow connections instead, but as I live in Derby, neither is suitable. Do I have the right to request an alternative airline for this leg?

Jacqueline L

A KLM is subject to EU air passengers’ rights rules. In a case like this where plenty of notice is given, the cancelling airline simply needs to offer “re-routing, under comparable transport conditions, to [your] final destination at the earliest opportunity”.

The obvious alternative (and I am surprised your travel agent has not suggested it) is flying from Amsterdam to Paris CDG and connecting there to Air France, which would get you back to Birmingham at 5.50pm. But would I take it? Certainly not. Your flight from Quito to Amsterdam is already too long for comfort: it is a “triangular” route that spends an hour flying away from Amsterdam to reach Guayaquil, the second Ecuadorean city, where it waits on the ground for 90 minutes.

Better to accept the later flight and make the most of a bonus brief city break in Amsterdam. Unencumbered by baggage, which will be checked through to your final destination, you can spend midsummer’s afternoon and evening enjoying the Dutch capital. The airport is only 16 minutes by rail from the city centre, so you could enjoy six rewarding hours in Amsterdam.

One other suggestion: I believe the law should allow you to claim back the inbound portion of the fare (leaving the outbound intact). If this would refund you £700, it would cover the cost of a nonstop Iberia flight from Quito to Madrid and an onward self-transfer on Ryanair to Birmingham. There is a 10-hour gap between, allowing you to explore Madrid instead, and it would shave at least four hours off the time you will spend in the air.

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Q I am booked with Turkish Airlines on a 6.35am flight from London Heathrow to Istanbul, with an onward flight to Trabzon in eastern Turkey. It requires a change of planes at Istanbul airport, from international to domestic. The gap between arrival and departure is 85 minutes. Is that enough?

Chris D

A The honest answer is that I don’t know if you will have time to connect. If all goes smoothly, there should be no problem. But you will need to clear immigration before transferring to your onward domestic flight, and that could be a hurdle too far.

Last time I arrived at Istanbul – in the early hours of the morning – the wait for passport control was almost an hour. You will be touching down in the middle of the day, at a time when I hope there will be more officers on duty. Even though Istanbul airport is huge, an on-time arrival combined with a wait of, say, 15 minutes should be more than enough.

But other factors are at play. I have looked at the past week’s performance on the first flight of the day from Heathrow to Istanbul. On five of the days, flight TK1988 arrived comfortably ahead of schedule. On one day, it was exactly on schedule. But on the remaining day, a delay in leaving Heathrow made it half an hour late.

Should there be a hold-up, you are not on your own. Turkish Airlines ground staff will be aware that you (and probably other passengers) have a tight connection, and will do what they can to help you make it. If, despite this, you arrive at the gate too late, the carrier has other departures later in the day. You should be rebooked without fuss – with lunch at the airport offered free of charge while you wait.

Should the cause of a delay be within the control of Turkish Airlines, and you arrive three hours or more behind schedule at Trabzon, you will be entitled to £350 in cash compensation – which is presumably more than you paid for the flight.

Such is the welcome spread of destinations across Turkey that Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast, is one of the few significant cities still without a direct link from London or elsewhere in the UK. I imagine it will get one soon.

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