New York for a first visit

New York rewards a bit of preparation more than most city breaks, not because it is difficult but because it is large, and because a few things work differently enough from home to catch people out on the first day.

What follows is the practical groundwork: getting in, paying for things, finding the way around, and what the weather will actually be doing.

Before booking

British citizens travel to the United States under the Visa Waiver Programme, which means applying online for an ESTA before departure rather than getting a visa. It permits stays of up to ninety days, allows multiple entries, and lasts two years or until the passport expires, whichever comes first. There is a fee, and it is paid during the application.

Apply early. The official guidance is at least seventy-two hours before travel, and applying as soon as the flights are booked avoids the one scenario that ruins a trip — an application that is not approved automatically and needs looking at by a person.

One trap worth knowing about, because it catches British travellers in particular. Previous travel to certain countries makes a person ineligible for the ESTA entirely, and they must apply for a visa instead. The list includes Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for visits from March 2011 onwards, and Cuba for visits from January 2021 onwards — which is the one that surprises people, Cuba being an ordinary British holiday destination. Dual nationals of several of those countries are also ineligible. A visa application takes considerably longer than an ESTA and needs an appointment, so this is a thing to establish before booking flights rather than after.

Eligibility rules change, so the official ESTA site and the UK government's travel advice for the United States are the places to check rather than any travel guide.

Travel insurance matters more here than in Europe. There is no reciprocal health agreement with the United States and medical treatment is expensive to a degree that is hard to overstate.

Getting in from the airport

Flights from the UK land at John F. Kennedy or Newark, both of which are comfortably connected to Manhattan, and both of which involve a change. LaGuardia handles domestic flights and is unlikely to come into it.

From either airport the rail option is an airport shuttle train to a main-line station, then a commuter train or subway into the city. It is much cheaper than a taxi and usually not much slower in traffic. Taxis and licensed car services run from both, and from JFK the yellow cab fare to Manhattan is a fixed amount rather than metered, which makes it predictable.

Newark is in New Jersey, which matters only in that the commuter rail into Manhattan is a different operator from the subway, and the subway payment method described below does not cover it.

The flight is around seven to eight hours westbound and a little less coming home. New York is five hours behind the UK, so an afternoon arrival leaves a long first evening, and the clocks change on slightly different dates either side of the Atlantic, which briefly makes it four.

Paying for the subway, which has changed completely

This is the single most out-of-date thing in most guidance about New York. The MetroCard has been retired. Nobody buys a card at a machine and swipes it any more.

Payment is now by tapping, which the transit authority calls tap and ride, and the system is called OMNY. There are three ways to do it:

• An ordinary contactless bank card, including a British one. Tap it on the reader at the turnstile or on the bus.
• A phone or watch with a card in its wallet.
• An OMNY card, bought from a vending machine in any subway station or from some shops, and loadable with cash. This is the answer for anyone without a contactless card.

Three details that are worth more than they look:

Use the same card or device every single time. Fares are capped — after a set number of journeys within a seven-day period, the rest of that period is free. The cap only works if every tap is made the same way. Tapping a phone on Monday and the physical card on Tuesday splits the count and loses the benefit. The seven days run from the first tap, not from a Monday.

Everyone taps separately. Beyond being necessary for a group to each earn their own free rides, there is a catch on arrival: a card or device being tapped for the very first time cannot pay for more than one person, because the bank has to clear the first transaction. So a family arriving together should use a different card each for that first journey rather than tapping one card four times and finding it refused.

The same card gets a free transfer between subway and local bus within the journey.

The subway runs all night, which is unusual and useful. Trains are lettered or numbered, run uptown and downtown, and the thing that trips up newcomers is express versus local: an express skips most stops. The platform signs and the announcements say which is which, and getting it wrong costs twenty blocks rather than anything worse.

Finding the way around

Most of Manhattan is a grid, and once the logic is clear it is close to impossible to get lost in it.

Streets run east to west and are numbered, climbing as they go north. Avenues run north to south, numbered from First near the East River up to Twelfth near the Hudson, with Fifth Avenue in the middle. Fifth is also the dividing line for addresses: East 54th Street is east of Fifth, West 54th is west of it. Broadway ignores all of this and cuts diagonally across the island, which is why the places where it crosses an avenue open out into squares — Times Square and Union Square among them.

Twenty blocks going north or south is about a mile. Blocks going east to west are much longer, so three or four of those is a similar distance. This is the single most useful conversion to have in mind, because it turns an intimidating address into a fifteen-minute walk.

Below about 14th Street the grid stops. Greenwich Village, SoHo and the Financial District are older and their streets wander, which is where people genuinely do get lost and where a map earns its keep.

Manhattan is more walkable than its reputation suggests. The island is roughly thirteen miles long and a little over two at its widest, and almost everything a visitor has come for sits in the stretch between the southern tip and the top of Central Park. Walking is frequently faster than the subway for anything under a mile, and it is how the city is best seen.

The weather, and when to go

New York has a harsher climate than Britain in both directions, and the old description of its winters as rarely snowy is simply wrong.

• Summer is hot and humid, often in the high twenties and regularly above thirty degrees, with thunderstorms. Air conditioning is everywhere and ferocious, so something with sleeves is worth carrying indoors.
• Winter is properly cold, around or below freezing for long stretches, with wind off the rivers and real snowfall — a foot or more in a single storm is not unusual.
• Spring and autumn are the best times by a wide margin: mild, bright, and the autumn colour in the parks is worth planning around.

Prices and crowds peak from late spring to early autumn and again around Christmas. January and February are the quietest and cheapest, and are cold enough that an itinerary should lean on museums.

Money, and the bits that catch people out

Tipping is not optional and service is not included. In restaurants with table service, around a fifth of the bill is the expectation, and leaving the British ten per cent reads as a complaint. Bartenders are tipped per round, taxi drivers are tipped, and so is hotel housekeeping. Card machines often offer suggested amounts, which is the easiest way to handle it. Counter service — a coffee, a sandwich eaten standing up — does not require it.

The displayed price is not the price. Sales tax is added at the till rather than included on the shelf, so everything costs a little more than the label says. The same applies to restaurant menus.

Contactless works nearly everywhere, and a card with no foreign transaction fee is worth taking. Some small places are still cash-only. American cash is all the same colour and size, which takes a day to get used to.

Tap water is drinkable and good, and bringing a refillable bottle saves a surprising amount over a week.

Two assumptions worth correcting

On safety. Older guidance to New York sometimes claims the city has the lowest crime rate of any major American city, which is not true and never was. What is true is more useful: New York is among the safer large American cities, the areas visitors spend time in are busy and well policed, and the subway is used by millions of ordinary people daily including late at night. The sensible approach is the one that applies in any large city — attention to bags in crowds, awareness on a near-empty carriage late at night, and no particular anxiety beyond that.

On museum admission. Several of the big museums operate pay-what-you-wish admission, and it is widely assumed to apply to everybody. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art it applies to residents of New York State and students from neighbouring states only; overseas visitors pay the full admission. Worth knowing before arriving at the desk with a handful of coins and a plan.

What costs nothing

A week in New York is expensive, and some of the best of it is free. The Staten Island Ferry runs all day and all night at no charge and passes the Statue of Liberty, which makes it the best value view in the city. Walking the Brooklyn Bridge costs nothing. So does the High Line, the elevated railway turned park on the west side. So does Central Park, and the Staten Island and Brooklyn ferries, and standing in the middle of Times Square at midnight wondering where all the light is coming from.

A realistic first trip

The commonest mistake is attempting too much. The city rewards choosing a neighbourhood and walking it over cramming four boroughs into four days, and the distances on a map flatter the time things take.

Four or five days is enough for a first visit if it is spent on one or two areas a day. A week allows Brooklyn and one of the outer boroughs without rushing. Beyond that, the thing most people say afterwards is that they wish they had walked more and queued less.