Is there any sort of time limit as to how many hours before a flight you can check in/check bags at the airport? I’m arriving in Albuquerque for a 1 AM flight at 7 PM on Friday, and would prefer not to have any major problems.
I’m trying to ask the airline (Delta), but they’ve had me on hold for 15 minutes now, and my ears are threatening to rebel from the hold music. I can’t find anything on their site.
ETA: I can’t arrive later; I’m taking the last cheap shuttle from Santa Fe. I’m not spending an extra six hours in an airport for fun; it was the only ticket I could afford.
You can check in online on Delta up to 24 hours before the flight. I’m not sure how far in advance of the flight they’ll accept checked bags, however – six hours is swimming around in my head for some reason, but I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve seen the answer before or because I made it up. I did search Delta’s web site for this answer, and I’ve also tracked down Delta’s Domestic General Rules Tariff, which is explicit about the minimum time in advance bags must be checked, but doesn’t say anything about the maximum.
I know I’ve checked bags between three and four hours in advance on Delta (for a while, you had to be three hours early on Monday mornings in Atlanta to make it through the security lines in time for your flight).
I’ve never flown through ABQ – does Delta have self-service kiosks there? If so, you could take care of everything but actually checking the bags yourself, whenever it suits you. None of the Delta or Delta Connection carriers has any other flights going out in the interim, however, so they may not have anyone at the ticket counter/bag check until a couple of hours before your flight. I’d say your best bet is to high-tail it to the ticket counter as soon as you arrive in hopes of catching someone before they all go on break for the next several hours – there’s a SkyWest 6:45 flight to SLC that’s the last Delta-affiliated flight until yours, so there should be someone there up until 6:30 or so at least. And there are flights arriving from SLC and ATL in the meantime, so worst case you could go down to baggage claim and find the Delta baggage service office if there’s no one at the ticket counter.
Of course, if you can manage to do carry-on bags only, you can check in online and avoid worrying about it. Your flight’s on an MD-88, which doesn’t have tons of cabin storage, but at least it’s not one of the CRJs that SkyWest and ComAir fly. But I assume you’ve already considered that and ruled it out. One thing to consider is that many travelers believe that checking bags more than a few hours before a flight increases the chance of items being stolen, and that an early bag will be subject to the “first on, last off” principle. This could be a particular problem if you’re making a tight connection in ATL or if you’re connecting and there’s a delay on your ABQ-ATL flight.
You’re much more helpful than the Delta rep I (finally!) talked to, whose first language was Obfuscation. I’ll try to check in online before I leave on Friday. They do have curbside bag checks at ABQ, so I’ll try that as soon as I get there. I’ve got three hours in ATL, so that’s not a big concern. If they misplace my luggage, then…well, it’s happened before, and I’m going home to my parent’s house, so I’ll be covered for the basics until my suitcase returns from Timbuktu.
You sound like you know what the deal is, so - would someone in the baggage office be able to help deal with my suitcase if no one’s at the ticket counter? If I need to I can always just haul my suitcase around with me as I kill time in the airport, but I’d rather not, and I’m irrationally nervous that, like, security will shut down or something. Traveling without a checked bag isn’t an option, unfortunately, but I appreciate the advice. (Also, it freaked me out for a moment that you knew I was going through Atlanta; then I realized that it’s probably pretty easy to deduce where someone’s going when they’re flying from a small airport on a certain airline at an odd hour.)
My understanding is that the security checkpoints have to stay open until all flights have departed (though the folks making announcements at XNA last weekend seemed to think it was OK for the TSA checkpoint to close at 7 regardless of how delayed some of the outbound flights were), so I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t know if the folks in the baggage claim office will be able to check your bag, but the odds are pretty good in an airport the size of ABQ that they’ll be the same folks working the ticket counter (and even the gate) for your outbound, so they’d be able to tell you for sure when there’d be someone at the ticket counter to take it.
Delta flight from ABQ departing at 1 am? Slam dunk. The only DL-affiliated flights out of ABQ are to SLC, CVG, and ATL, and the only one at that time is to ATL. Sorry to freak you out, and hope it didn’t strike you as making public too much info about you – but as I said, it was nothing anyone else couldn’t have deduced from the info you provided with a couple of minutes effort.
Being a consultant who’s on the road all the time, based in Atlanta, I have Delta’s flight schedule app on my desktop, but the same info’s available online. Knowing how Delta works isn’t just a matter of idle curiosity for me – it’s an an essential survival skill.
[QUOTE=rackensack]
My understanding is that the security checkpoints have to stay open until all flights have departed (though the folks making announcements at XNA last weekend seemed to think it was OK for the TSA checkpoint to close at 7 regardless of how delayed some of the outbound flights were), so I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t know if the folks in the baggage claim office will be able to check your bag, but the odds are pretty good in an airport the size of ABQ that they’ll be the same folks working the ticket counter (and even the gate) for your outbound, so they’d be able to tell you for sure when there’d be someone at the ticket counter to take it.
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Okay, good. IME, ABQ has generally reasonable staff, even the TSA folks - they’re tiny but pretty efficient.
Nah, it’s not too public or anything, it was just a weird moment of “Whoa, how’d he know…? Oh, yeah.” I’ve been flying in and out of Albuquerque for a couple years now, and no longer need to ask which gate I’m leaving from, because the airline I almost always fly only has one destination from Albuquerque, always from the same gate.
Hmm. I’m sort of anticipating something like this, presumably for “security reasons”. I guess I’ll see what happens on Friday.
As a point of comparison, I was vacationing in Australia recently and had to transfer from United to JetStar, one of the low-cost carriers there. JetStar wouldn’t allow me to check in more than two hours in advance, which was annoying since I had something like six hours between the two flights. I assume this was due to the fact that it was a discount carrier — getting everyone to check in in a shorter period of time probably results in less overhead.
On a flight from Ottawa to Edmonton on Air Canada recently, I was informed that while I could get my boarding pass well ahead of time I could not check my bags more than 4 hours in advance.
My husband and I were flying back from New Zealand and had a very long layover in LAX. The Delta agent would not check our bags because we had more than 6 hours until our next flight. However, she did tell us that we can pay for a one day pass to the crown room (I think it was 25.00). They will check your bags in there and there are snacks and big comfy chairs.
No real advice, but in my experience, policy and reality are two different things. Check in and check bags up to 24 hours before? Great, until you get there and the check in counter is closed until they get within three hours of their next flight.
That said, I have zero knowledge of the airports you’re going through and the curbside facilities they offer.
