My daughter used to work for Allegiant. She (and I) got to fly free on it, and get free checked baggage, but the advice was to never tell the other passengers you worked for them.
Count me as another who doesn’t mind adding a buffer to the scheduled time. An extra 20 minutes on the ground at my destination never hurt me (as opposed to more time at the departure airport wondering if my flight will ever take off.)
It might help buying a multi-leg ticket easier since it would make connections with a sketchy layover time seem even worse and thus downgrade them either psychologically or on the system end.
I guess I am lucky. Like I said, if I have one legit delay a year I can deal with that. I also said I don’t consider weather to be a delay. If I’m at home I’ll stay there until things get better. If I’m on the road I’ll check my bags at the hotel and hang around downtown visiting the city. If it’s a legit delay, be nice to the desk clerk or the one on the phone and you’ll get upgraded. They spends hours getting yelled at. They really appreciate nice. Actually, this works for weather delays too.
It’s much easier to “take this all in stride” when you are flying for work, not paying for your ticket, and not looking forward to a Caribbean cruise you have been saving for and anticipating for several months.
Shirley you understand this.
ETA: From one meany to another
mmm
I fly domestically 3-4 times a year, internationally 2-3 times. I haven’t gone a year without one significant delay that either involved missing a connection or an unexpected overnight, nearly always due to weather. Granted, we usually fly at least once a year for a ski vacation, so weather is always a concern. But the two recent bad weather incidents were in Birmingham AL and Washington DC.
Even if you’re staying at the (connected to the) airport hotel, one needs to leave early enough to get thru security one needs to leave early enough such that one doesn’t know if there will be delays yet.
Summertime, w/ a forecast of t-storms? They may not have formed when you’re getting groped in security theater, & if you leave to go there in the middle of one, chances are it will be long gone before you’re ready to board. Or your plane, which is coming in from somewhere an hour away might not have yet taken off when you need to leave, but it won’t take off on time (or at all) because they discover some mechanical issue on pre-flight.
No, you’ll need to be at the airport before you find out about many/most delays.
I don’t fly that often, but my husband spends about 6 months a year on business travel. He says that proportion sounds right as well. I think its more often because I’m the one waiting at the airport for him to show up, but he says that the clock stops when he is in the airport, not when he gets out the door.
Even traveling on business, its easier to take it in stride when you have extra time. When a delay getting home means missing your kid’s choir concert (has happened to me), its a little hard to take it in stride. Particularly when you don’t even schedule these things to cut it close. You are supposed to get back at 2 in the afternoon. Concert is a 7. Should be plenty of time - even accounting for some delay. You get back at 9pm.
Do you consider it a “delay” if it gets you diverted to a different airport at an ungodly hour, by the time you’re told where to file paperwork before you’re allowed to go in search of dinner every single food concession is closed, and you end up getting to your destination two days later than expected?
Because that happened to me a couple years back and fuckyeah I do consider it a delay. And you really don’t want to tell me “it’s not a delay” when I’m low sugar because I should have had dinner three hours ago. I bite when hungry.
And all my experiences with too-short connection times involve corporate travel. I think the (probably underpaid) people who handle corporate travel tend to have little to no plane-travel experience. I always leave enough time and always check distances from airport to hotel or rental-car location; they… don’t.
The other thing that happens with corporate travel is the cheapest flight policies. In some companies, if the flight is cheaper, you have to connect. But a travel day more than eight hours simply to make it cheaper for the company creates hassles for HR and Legal in some of those same companies, and so in a policy catch 22, you will often end up on a flight that could have been direct for $400 more, but instead you get 40 minutes to change planes in Atlanta with gates at the other end of the airport because the other cheap connecting flight option put you with a 4 hour layover in Denver and created a ten hour travel day which would have forced the $400 more direct flight on the travel policy flowchart and created a travel budget problem for your manager.
the only real flight delay ive had was when I was going back and forth between Indiana and cali for court appearances and court mandated visits as an unaccompanied minor
For some reason the plane couldn’t take off and the plane was delayed over night and the state ca and la county were taken to the cleaners because not only did they have to get me a new ticket they had to pay for a hotel on weekend rates and the case worker (did you know la county social services has a permanent office in lax ? I didn’t until this happened ) decided I didn’t need go to far and booked me a room at 150 a night place near by and gave me a voucher for room service and said if I touched the mini bar don’t tell her about as it was covered … gave me a key and told me not to go to far as I was leaving at 9:30 the next morning
the hotel told me I was one of the youngest people to stay there as they mainly got people who was there for work … But said worker dropped me off at the check in and handed me a slip for my ticket… which was even nicer as I flown first class for the first and only time in my life because the gate upgraded me because of the delay and my seatmate was celebrating her promotion so drinks were covered… so yeah I wasn’t exactly sober that weekend …
I’ really not making any of this up. I almost never have delays. If you want to call weather a delay, that’s fine, but you may as well call it a migraine or a flat tire, because it’s nobody’s fault and nobody can do anything about it. Plus, they have apps that will call you with flight status, or you can call them, and most hotels have a travel kiosk in the lobby.
There are a couple of dozen one hour flights every day and rarely do they have connections. If your flight runs into thunderstorms out of nowhere, that’s weather. 90% of the time you can stay ahead of any weather issues. Go to a movie and check flight status every 20 minutes or so.
Delays can be a real pain in the ass, but they’re rare. I’ve never had to stay overnight, even for weather, and I live and work (mostly) in the mountains.
I beatify you and nominate you as St. Lamar, the patron saint of travelers, salesmen, and commercial pilots. May you intercede for the rest of us and make our travels as smooth and uninterrupted as your own. Also, the next time American strands me at ORD overnight because another one of their shitty, ill-maintained planes can’t fly and they somehow don’t have a spare at one of the busiest airports in the country and within an hour flight of at least half a dozen other airports, I’ll curse them in your name. I expect fire and brimstone in response.
Stranger
I think it is airport dependent. Newark backs up and has delays often. But we have using Atlantic City when possible for years now and it almost never has delays.
Kennedy in NYC was notorious for delays.
I’ve had bad luck with O’Hare but don’t use it enough to judge it a trend, I could just be unlucky in Chicago.
I’ve don’t generally get delays as smaller, lower use airports. The Florida ones and New Orleans are never a problem unless severe weather is involved.
It’s a different sort of delay, but it’s still a delay, and, IME, it’s not always as predictable as it has been for you.
All too often, particularly on summertime trips, there’s a forecast of possible severe weather either at my departure airport, or my arrival airport. My flight could be on time, it could get delayed for hours, and it’s often not until I get to the airport (or even to the gate) when that reality starts to present itself.
Playing with this tool, Newark is indeed the worst, delays about 1/3 of the time. Confirmed by a separate CBS report my wife found showing Newark is the worst followed by O’Hare.
Whether it’s someone’s fault or not, it’s still there after it’s scheduled time; therefore, it’s delayed. Period. End of story.
If your plane’s first flight of the day was delayed because of fog & it just can’t make up the time by the time it gets to you, it’s fourth takeoff of the day, weather isn’t the delay, it’s the airline not having enough assets to overcome a delay.
Yes, spare aircraft & standby crews would be exorbitantly expensive, & raise the cost of your ticket, but that would work to overcome your flight’s delay.
I’d venture that most delays are weather delays, and many of them involve weather far from where you are traveling - for instance when your plane is very late due to weather.
My overnight delay in Denver started after I was on the plane already, so bopping around downtown in the middle of a blizzard was not going to be too useful. I’ve had overnight delays when the plane couldn’t land and had to return to another airport.
I was going to say that delays due to airline screwups are rare, then I remembered all the ones due to computer system foul ups recently. But if delays impact you, the source is not an issue, and weather delays are often worse since everyone is affected which means getting a room is going to be a challenge.
Do we light a candle to him or drink a sacramental cocktail at an airport bar?
Some people are lucky. When I flew from Champaign to NY on the late unlamented Ozark Air I never had a problem. A friend of mine never had a good flight. When we were on the same flight once, the plane blew a tire on landing and we had to be bused to the gate. It was my worst flight, and her best.
Fine, and you tell us the truth that your flight from Pittsburgh to O’Hare with a two hour gap was actually a couple of puddle jumpers from Vegas to Wendover, a change of planes and connecting to Great Falls with a 45 minute delay, I will.