Any tips for international flights?

In My Humble Opinion
61

I have two kinds of experience here. One is transatlantic (Chicago to Madrid en route to Rome/Athens), and the other is domestic, but long-haul (Chicago to Anchorage via Phoenix).

Internationally, Iberian Airlines was okay. Not super great, but not terrible. I believe we were in an Airbus 340, and the seats were…well, they could hold me, and I was pretty big at the time (and “pretty big” is an understatement). The staff were reasonably polite and courteous. I was surprised that we got both dinner and breakfast.

If you’re awake, as I am, make sure you walk about some. You’ll feel less crappy, reduce the chance of leg blood clots, and make it out of there less stiff than you otherwise would. Bring a decongestant if you’re often stuffed up, and take it before you take off. Unless it makes you jittery and wired, in which case, find one that doesn’t and take that instead. Bonus points if it includes a painkiller. Double bonus points if it knocks you out. This advice comes from flying domestically on the tail end of a cold. I was in agony due to the pressure changes.

Make sure you have your passport somewhere you can access it without having to get up into the bin or otherwise contort yourself. You’ll need information from it to fill out the customs form, and it’s just awkward to have to go through the overhead compartment mid-flight.

If you can, one bag it. This greatly reduces the chances of complication if one leg of your flight is delayed; I especially recommend using something you can carry on your back or shoulder, as I wouldn’t want to muscle a rolling bag through rush hour on public transit (Rome was like freaking sardines, even on the train from the airport). Also, it gives you more flexibility; twice now I’ve taken earlier flights in order to shorten my layover, and I wouldn’t have been able to if I’d had checked baggage.

Expect the plane to be full. You wouldn’t expect, say, a plane to Anchorage in the middle of January to be full, but it was. Plan accordingly. As slaphead said upthread, lesspectations are key.

62

My SO is a Delta Skyclub member and we load up on the Biscoffs and bagels. Membership also gets you all the cocktails you want to (where served, of course). When we were in Istanbul at Atatürk airport, the spread of drinks and food with sandwiches was a nice relief especially with the big couches to relax on while chatting with other folks. If there’s a delay, they notify you. They also usually have a wide selection of free newspapers which I hoard to do as many crossword puzzles as possible.

To be honest: these are all wonderful luxuries that is a benefit of him traveling for work, but I probably wouldn’t pay for it. No matter how tempting and seemingly more civilized it is in there.

63

A couple of gin and tonics really calm the kids down, eh?

:smiley:

64

Well, they make you not *mind *the kids quite so much. :wink:

65

What teetotaler nonsense. All these thousands of blissfully intoxicated miles under my belt, and by your hyper-paranoid standard, I must very well be the luckiest man in the sky.

66

Sorry I forgot to add the link.

Here it is.

Yes the A380 has a longer range than the various 747 classes. I was responding to a question about whether any smaller airliners can travel the 7500+ miles between the US and Australia or India. And as you can see some variants of the A340 and 777 can (and some of the soon to be flying A350s and 787s will be able to as well).

67

I’m no teetotaller, and I’ve seen it done.

68

Very true. Counter staff are people too and if you’re courteous and polite when others are being rude and obnoxious it will be noticed and may be rewarded. Plus its the right thing to do anyway.

Once as a penniless student my flight home was cancelled for a mechanical reason and one poor stewardess had to rebook the entire planeload of people. Being in no particular hurry I was at the back of the queue and watched as person after person tried to bully her into getting them on the very next available flight or else. When my turn finally came I told her not to worry, any flight would do. Somehow she managed to put me on the first flight the next morning. When I turned up the same lady checked me in, slapped priority tags on my luggage and gave me a pass to the members lounge. All because I’d been polite the day before when other people hadn’t.

69

Airline karma is a real thing, at least sometimes. I got bumped from an over-booked flight many years ago (that’s a thing that needs a rant, but it isn’t the fault of anyone you speak to at the airport!). I wasn’t too fussed, and like you I just hung about until the half-dozen or so ranters had had their spittle-flecked say. I got the flight in the same slot 24 hours later, but in first class. I could get used to first class, to be honest.

70

It depends. I wouldn’t pay for an ongoing membership unless my career had me on the road with great regularity. But when we did our short but intense burst of international travel while adopting the Firebug and ultimately bringing him home from Russia, it was well worth it to pay for the 30-day membership. The first round trip, we did without, and hours of hard chairs in the gate areas, having to move all our carry-on luggage if we wanted to go get food, having to take turns watching the bags if one of us wanted to go to the restroom, go get a newspaper, or just walk around…it got damned tiresome.

Hell, at $22.50 a layover ($90 temp membership, 4 layovers), the free food and drink pretty much covered our cost by itself. But even if we’d had to pay for that, soft seats and quiet, and having food and restrooms all close by, would have been worth it. It was a long haul, and it was a significant upgrade in the comfort level of the trip, and cost only a tiny fraction of our travel costs.

71

Not much different at all, except that in addition to a lot of hurry-up-and-wait I expect some generalized unpleasantness to be an unavoidable part of the process.

And I guess I wasn’t clear enough - airport/airline employees can make your stay a bit nicer or a lot worse, and usually respond in kind if you are nice them, likewise if you are rude to them. Grin and bear it, hope for the best.

For example - we got kicked off a massively overbooked flight because we had discount tickets. Since we were chilled out about it and everyone else was being assholes it ended up with the gate staff letting one of our group fly to London in the cockpit jump seat :smiley: while we headed to the lounge to wait for the next flight, with a fistful of complimentary drinks vouchers:D

To extend the simile, don’t say or do anything to the TSA, gate staff or cabin crew that you wouldn’t say or do to your dentist or proctologist before the procedure starts :smiley:

72

Oooooh useful thread! I’m doing LAX-Tokyo (Narita) at the end of the month on Singapore Air, A380 plane. I’m pretty terrified, especially since I’ve never done a flight like that.

I’ve got:

  • earplugs
  • noise cancelling earphones
  • travel pillow
  • ibuprofen
  • chargers for electronics (seats have outlets!)

I’m thinking of trying Benadryl or another sleep aid ahead of time. I did do 6 hours to Mexico once and didn’t sleep too much at all, I just couldn’t get comfy. Do you guys have a rec for another sleep aid that doesn’t use the stuff in cough syrup? I don’t recall it making me sleepier when I was a sick kid, but OTOH, I’m just bad at getting sleep when sick.

I’m also trying to figure out my seat stuff. The tour company I’m going with says Singapore Air doesn’t do seat reservations ahead of time, but I was able to use my ticket info to hop on their website and reserve my seats. I know a lot of people prefer window seats on long flights for sleeping, but I think I might get claustrophobic and I need to pee a lot so I grabbed edge seats on the 4 seat config of a 3-4-3. I figure the middle two seats will only get up to go on the edge closest to them, so I’d only have to deal with one person instead of two if I did the edge of a 3 seater.

I am also prepared for the gropings of the TSA, seeing as I have to go from my local Canadian airport to Denver to LAX!

73

Don’t forget to buy/fill a big bottle of water before you get on the plane. The cabin crew won’t give you enough, I promise.

Bring entertainment. You mentioned NC headphones; I hope you also have an MP3 player along with them. Bring also some video games, magazines and/or books - including enough for your return trip, unless you plan to buy more in Japan before returning home. They’ll show movies and TV shows on the plane, but you may not want to watch them. Last time I went to Japan we rented a few DVD’s and used AnyDVD and HandBrake to rip them into a format for the iPod. Yeah, it’s a tiny screen, but when they’re showing a lame-ass sitcom or “edited for content” movie on the main cabin screen, it’s sometimes nice to watch your own programming.

Seriously, bring entertainment. You’ll be sick of browsing every corner of the Skymall magazine in pretty short order; ten hours from LAX to Narita will have you going “holy shit is this plane ever going to land” if you have nothing to do after the first two hours.

Will also echo recommendations upthread for a timepiece so you can keep track of how long before touchdown.

If you’re going to get up a lot, then yeah, you’ll want an aisle seat. Barring that, if you’re traveling with someone you know, put them in the aisle seat and sit next to them; it’s less intimidating to climb over a friend than over a total stranger, so you won’t be tempted to sit there for hours on end, desperate to pee or get the blood flowing in your legs.

In fact, if you’re traveling with just one companion, you’ll want to pick an aisle and middle seat from the four-seat center section (on planes with two aisles). This way you won’t have a stranger trying to climb over both of you to get out.

For solo travel, yep, I think you’ve got the best answer.

74

I’ve got an iPhone (yup, don’t worry, I know how to turn off my data!) and an iPad that will be loaded up. I’ve also checked the airline website for their movies and TV shows for the month, each seat has its own screen. I’ve got the entertainment covered!

Also, I am solo travelling.

75

Some people use Tylenol PM or Advil PM, or even Melatonin (it is the most natural, but you should probably start using it a week out to get your body more used to it). I prefer benadryl simply because it not only helps me sleep, it prevents me from becoming congested.

Ativan also works very well if you can get some. Your doctor might be willing to prescribe you a half dozen or so for travel.

Regards,
-Bouncer-

76

Cool, electronics plus chargers = blissful bubble of contentment. And ereaders like Kindle are super-mega-f****ing-awesome for long flights and all the time-killing at checkins, baggage carousels etc. Bear in mind that if a few of their planes have a mechanical at the same time, airlines will wheel out whatever crusty old piece of junk they recently retired but haven’t sold yet - this may be a plane with big old CRT screens above the aisle, no power sockets, 5 audio channels, tattered carpet and a mysterious big structural-looking plastic thing (unidentified by me or the stewardess I gave it to) lying loose under a seat. Thanks for that, BA!

Personally, I try not to rely on sleeping - allow recovery time on the far end and have enough reading material/movies. I’m OK with sitting in a chair for 10+ hours if I have (several) good books and some decent earplugs. If you sleep, that’s a bonus but you never know. One redeye trip I fell asleep as we were pushing back from the gate at JFK - magic! Something woke me up a few hours later and we still hadn’t taken off:smack: so that turned out to be a whole-book flight.

For travelling solo, if you don’t have a camel bladder then the edge of a 4-block is a sound choice. Handy to be close enough to the toilets so you can see when they are free but you do NOT want to be near them due to the smells & traffic.

And yes, having your own water (and ideally - meal/snacks) is very nice. Gum/sweets are handy if you have trouble with your ears when landing - very few airlines seem to bother giving these out anymore.

77

What Slaphead said. years ago I travelled from London to Singapore on a 747 - I didn’t have an Ipod or they weren’t invented. I don’t watch the movies so I was listening to their canned music. The one channel I listened to jammed after the 7th song and constantly replayed those songs. Gah!

78

I’ve never been on a transatlantic flight where the majority of alcoholic drinks weren’t free. You want champagne, you pay for it - but a beer or a glass of wine with your meal and a mini-bottle with your after-dinner coffee? That’s free.

If you really really want to be sure, check the airline’s website.