Spending Too Much Time At Airports

In honor of Nate Silver’s analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it’s been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.

Buying The Ticket

As far as I can tell, the major booking portals for tickets are all basically the same. I’ve been using Orbitz for a long time because I’m used to the interface, it is clean and I have confidence it works. The times I checked Kayak and so on they all seemed to be exactly the same.

I still book tickets manually rather than using an AI agent. There isn’t much time to plausibly save and by the time I fully express preferences and enter my information anew I might as well have just done it myself. It also means I look at alternatives, which helps me keep tabs.

My heuristic is to book a little over two weeks in advance, but not to book much more in advance of that in case plans change or want to change, since in expectation price changes are pretty small and maybe you decide to stay an extra day for some reason even if you are confident you won’t cancel.

I almost always book the minimum flight, basic economy, whether or not I am paying. There is so little to be gained from moving up compared to the price. What I will pay a substantial amount for are nonstop flights since connections create bad luck surface you don’t want, flights at the right time of day so I don’t lose a bunch of sleep or work for no reason, and avoiding terrible airlines, with only minor preference between the normal options.

Terrible airlines mostly means avoiding Spirit and other ‘bargain’ options. I’ve given up on caring about frequent flier programs. I’ll still enter my information because who knows, but they’ve raised the barriers a lot and I don’t fly as often as I used to, and they frequently don’t even offer credit at all for basic economy. That last point seems like an obvious mistake by the airlines.

Planning To Spend Time At The Airport

You intentionally can spend a bunch of time at airports without spending too much time (per flight) at airports, unless that extra time is expensive for you in some fashion.

Maia: Something that the evil efficiency freaks on this place don't understand is that spending time at the airport is fun.

Elizabeth Van Nostrand: "Should I take 5% risk of missing an irreplaceable Christmas flight, or be on my laptop in a slightly worse place for 30m?" Easy choice.

Airport time beyond that first walkaround period is not as fun or productive as time at home. It is still for the most part totally fine?

You have your laptop and your phone, if wise you have your headphones, you bring a book, you can go for a stroll, you have an excuse to relax and reset.

The bigger your buffer the more relaxing it is. Unless you are extremely pressed for time, the number of flights you should miss is essentially zero.

The food at the airport is not ideal, and it is more expensive than usual, but even if you do end up eating there so long as you have an option you don’t mind the cost in absolute terms is quite low. You should scout this ahead of time. I have notes for all the New York airports.

The reason not to spend that much time at airports, even though that time is cheap and you want to mostly never miss a flight that is expensive to miss (not all of them are), is that you don’t have to spend a full two hours to get your risk near zero.

When To Head To The Airport

Nate Silver, taker of many flights and cruncher of many numbers, tells us when we need to arrive at the airport. As he says, the standard advice of allowing 2 hours before a domestic flight makes absolutely no sense in today’s world.

Nate Silver: My default is to allocate 60 minutes — one hour, not two — from walking through the airport doors until departure time. There are several important assumptions behind this, however, which usually fit my circumstances but might not match yours:

• I’m flying within the United States.

• I have some form of expedited security: CLEAR, TSA PreCheck or the priority lane.

• I’m not checking bags.

• And there are some reasonable backups if I miss the flight, as is almost always the case since I mostly fly from New York to other major cities and have decent status on some of the big carriers.

This won’t give you much time to hang out — but it’s enough of a buffer that you’re very unlikely to miss your flight. There are more things that can add time to the baseline than subtract from it, however — so let’s consider those complications.

I, also a taker of a reasonable number of flights and a cruncher of many numbers, agree with this. One hour from arrival at the terminal is very safe in 2025 in American airports. Maybe add on a few minutes each for lack of PreCheck (more if it’s a big travel day too) and the need to check bags, but realistically no, an hour is still fine even if you are trying to maintain full peace of mind.

Maybe, as he notes, add another 15 minutes if you’re in an especially slow-to-navigate airport, or if you have kids with you or are otherwise going to move slow.

If missing the flight is an epic disaster, as in there are no backups and you lose an entire day, then you do want to allocate some extra time, but that extra time is more about guarding against delays in the commute rather than at the airport. Kids similarly should make you leave early because they add variance getting to the airport.

As we all know, the estimated travel times that Uber or Lyft shows you are often optimistic. You’re rarely going to be put in too much of a pickle in, say, Pittsburgh. But New York or Los Angeles is a different story.

So as a default, I’d round up that commute time by 30 percent if there’s a reasonable likelihood of encountering traffic.

This is the tricky part. You need to know the worst-case scenario for the trip to the airport. This is why I love taking trains to the airport, even when they are on average slower than a taxi. You have a safe upper bound of how long it takes. I agree that adding 30% is mostly safe enough for taxis, largely because the hour once you arrive also has a bunch of buffer in it.

What about international flights?

To break it down more precisely [for international travel]:

• As a default, even if you think you’re fully checked in, I’d add 20 to 40 minutes to your domestic flight baseline for international travel, depending on your general experience level with flying abroad.

• If you do need to visit the check-in counter, I’d add a further 15 minutes for business class and 30 minutes for coach.

• And if you need to clear immigration before you take off — remember, this is not true for most destinations, but the most common exception is Canada — I’d add another 30 minutes.

If missing the flight would cause a huge inconvenience — your best friend annoyingly decided to hold a destination wedding in Buenos Aires, you’re the best man and it’s last flight of the day — you might add more time still. But this sort of situation can also apply for domestic flights, so we’ll cover these cases later.

He also emphasizes the need to consider what happens if you miss the flight. Are you out a day? Do you miss an important event? Is there a next flight?

Nate offers a handy spreadsheet for doing approximate calculations.

The two most underrated considerations are how much you like airports, which Nate Silver does take into account, and peace of mind. If you don’t mind the extra time, why not play it safe? And most of all, if you or someone you are traveling with is easily stressed about missing a flight, why not play it safer to avoid the stress? When I travel with anyone in the family, I’d much rather be a lot too early than have to cut it close even if I know I’m never actually going to miss the flight.

If you are aiming for two hours or more at the airport, then either you have something specific you actively want to do there, or you had nothing better to do, there was very large uncertainty about your trip getting there, you took the only available shuttle or ride you had available, or you are almost certainly making a mistake.

Packing Your Own Bags and Boarding the Plane

It saves you a bunch of money and time and also trouble and worry if you can move from checking bags to not checking bags, or from an overhead bags to only a backpack. Put more value on ‘moving down a tier’ on this than you might think.

If you have an overhead bag, you have to worry about them forcing you to check it. That means you have to aggressively board the plane, and sometimes that will not be enough, and you have to worry and argue about this. Also they make you pay for it. If you check a bag, there is a substantial delay that can become a considerably longer one, and the probability of your luggage being lost is nontrivial.

So consider this an excuse and opportunity to travel light.

All Aboard

If you do not need to fight for overhead bin space and are not in first class, you should consider being one of the last to board the plane. Why do you want more time in that seat instead of staying at the gate?

What Happens After The Airport

Maxwell Tabarrok asks whether air travel is getting worse. The conclusion is that typical flights now take longer, but we pad the schedules so much that flights typically arrive ‘early.’ And then we have several times as many delays of three hours or more, although the chances are still recorded as on the order of 1% (I very much press X to doubt based on my track record).

In exchange, travel has gotten cheaper in real dollars. These days I am consistently happy with the prices I get. Part of this is I am happy to fly basic economy with no checked bags and often not even an overhead bag, so I get beneficial price discrimination, and I’d want to make sure the graphs showing constant prices incorporate average actual net prices paid.

What To Do In The Air

Unless you have something urgent, focus on comparative advantage.

You have time away from it all, or when various activities are hard to do. I’ve long had a rule that I don’t seek out internet on the plane. The plane is an excuse to not have internet.

The mistake is to try to use that time to do the things that are harder to do in the air, or less fun to do, and force them to happen anyway. The other mistake is to fiddle away the time aimlessly.

The correct play is usually to take advantage of the isolation and lack of distractions. That makes some activities actively great to do. Reading books or listening to music or podcasts if you have good headphones are excellent picks.

Watching movies is common. The screen is small, but the flight is an excuse to gain the focus that is even more important to watching movies than the big screen. You also have temporary access to movies you might not have otherwise considered, which can be exciting. So contra Tyler Cowen I think this is typically only a small mistake.

Trying to sleep is of course great if you can pull it off, but be realistic and know thyself.

What about working on the plane or preparing for when you arrive?

To the extent that this is necessary to get you into the right mindset, to review information you will need, or it was impossible to do earlier? Sure, go ahead. But to the extent you can take care of it ahead of time, you want to do that.