Lets say for work it is necessary to travel between many locations all over the country (US), get to as many as possible in a given time frame. The modes of travel available are:
A: Go to the airport, buy a ticket for the next available flight to the next city, then rent a car (sometimes a cab would be used). (rental car will be dropped off at this airport regardless of where is was picked up)
B: Drive the rental car from one location to the next
The expense of either modes is not important - time is.
I would like to get some guidelines as to what mode should be used depending on the distance that has to be traveled. I know it’s going to be different for each location, but is there some guideline like if the travel time is more then 3-4 hours by car it’s faster to fly?
Additionally, so I can calculate it myself, what is the typical time it takes for:
From: Driving into the airport ‘A’ (getting on airport property)
Doing all the following: , dropping off the rental, buying the ticket, security, getting on the plane, getting off the plane, getting a new rental
Excluding: the time in the air
To: Driving off airport ‘B’ property
IME, flying, renting and returning a car, has an overhead of about 3-4 hours. Do your math from that. Consider the time it would take driving from the airport to your actual destination. Some cities have airports that are fairly far away. Some others have terrible driving access.
Driving gives you the added bonus of being freer to eat, rest and sleep at your discretion. You can sleep in cheaper motels along the way instead of more centric hotels if you fly in.
Flying has the benefit of having some extra down time when you can “rest” or get some work in your laptop/paperwork.
And just driving into an airport to try and find a ticket could leave you with some insane wait times if you are not doing your homework. That could easily kill your time planning.
I would probably prefer a 5-6 hour drive over a flight.
I am a seasoned traveller for work, and flying is better 99% of the time. I am flying to Washington D.C. later this morning, in fact. I am in Denver, so this one is a no-brainer. It’d take days to drive.
I used to go to Salt Lake City at least once a month. That is about an 8 hour drive on I 80 through Wyoming (boring) or 9 hours on I 70 (beautiful). That kinda restricts you to certain hours of travel (you wouldn’t want to leave at 8 PM) and if you leave in the morning, it kills an entire day. Flying is a 45 minute trip to the airport (I check in online, it doesn’t matter if you need to check luggage anymore). 20 minutes through security, and the flight is 1 hour and 15 minutes. Sign up for a rental car program and they will take you right to your car and give you the keys. Even if the car lot is off- airport, this takes 15-20 minutes tops. Driving to town took ten minutes. Assuming I left home 1 1/2 hours before the flight left, the whole trip by air takes 3 to 3 1/2 hours, less than half the time to drive. I can still get in one or two appointments the same day.
If you’re doing only short hops, like on the east coast or Chicago/Milwaukee/Detroit, it might make sense to drive, but the traffic is much worse there, too. As a rule of thumb, I’d say any trip that takes more than 4 hours to drive is better done by air.
Even if the drive time is about the same as the fly/deal with airport BS time is the same, it’s reasonable to ask someone to fly three hours, work eight hours, fly three hours home. It’s not reasonable to ask them to drive three hours, work eight hours, drive three hours home.
I would also argue that for whatever reason, late to a meeting because you have car trouble or there was more trafffic than expected sounds like an excuse or flakiness: late because your plane was delayed is just something that happens.
Another former road warrior here. I had an office in East Bay San Fransisco area, that is 327 miles from my house.
At 70 MPH average that is about 4.5 hours. It usually took me about 5 and change when you add in time for a stop.
Oakland Airport is just about 1 hour flying from LAX. Add in 1 hour to get to the airport, park and shuttle. Add in 1 hour for wait time, check in, and security at the airport. Add in 1 hour at the other end for baggage claim, and a cab to my office. About 4 hours total.
While the total is close, it does not really tell the story. Flying gives me a chance to read a book, work on my laptop, or sleep. I can’t do any of those things if I fly. On Friday night, I could also have a drink at the airport, or on the plane. That would be a Bozo no-no if I was driving.
Also don’t forget bad weather. In the winter when the toolie fog hits the central valley of California, there is no way in hell you can go 70.
I think it has a lot to do with where you’re flying into. If you’re only going to major hubs, then flying is probably better for anything for than 2 or 3 hours. If there will be connections to get there, the trip could be much longer due to the time sitting around in the airports during the layover. For example, if you fly out of my town in West Virginia to Asheville, NC, it takes about the same length of time to fly as it does to drive, about 8 hours. That’s not including the trip to the airport, and the time for check-in and security is pretty low due to the size of the airports.
Every so often, someone from a newspaper will stage a race where two people take off from a hotel in downtown San Francisco, with a Los Angeles hotel as the destination. Various permutations of airport shuttle vans, rental cars or public transit to the airport have been done, and for the most part, flying just barely edges out driving for time, but costs significantly more, even for one person. If you’re traveling with someone, the cost for flying doubles, but the incremental cost for driving is a buck or two more worth of gas, plus you have the option to swap drivers to break the monotony of I-5.
The differences work out along the lines of flying SF - LA is about an hour faster, but costs five times as much as driving
The rule of thumb seems to be that if a trip is 400 miles or less, it’s faster to drive. Longer distances may work out faster to drive as well if flying involves a connecting flight.
About a year ago, I was ringing up the frequent-flyer miles and 3-4 hours of “overhead” for rental car return, shuttle bus to the terminal, check-in, security, re-packing and re-dressing post-security, boarding, baggage claim, airport shuttle back to home is a good starting point for a non-stop flight. Add at least an hour if you need to connect flights.
I believe it. I made it from the Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA to Church & Market in SF in 4:59. Flying probably wouldn’t have been that much faster, and I got to blast music and eat where I wanted, and I didn’t have to take my goddamn shoes off or go without my Swiss Army Knife. Stuff like that is why I’m going to drive to Seattle next month, instead of fly.
We have a raging debate in my office whether it’s better to take the Acela train or fly between NYC and DC or Boston. I have yet to take a flight out of DC that doesn’t get me to NY 4 hours late so train IMHO is always the way to go. Flying down to DC usually isn’t bad though.
In general, for business you want to not take a car long distances if you don’t have to. Trains or planes let you do work or rest while you travel so you can show up prepared and refreshed.
Anything under 300 miles, I’ll drive, unless I’m going someplacce where driving is an unusual pain, like NYC. Anything under 800 miles, I’ll consider driving. Anything over that, I’m flying.
In addition to the 3-4 hours of overhead, consider that the flight rarely leaves exactly when you want it to.
From Orlando, I could make it to a Savannah or maybe even Atlanta destination slightly before my flight/rentacar would get me there (~300 miles to Savannah), even if I would be able to leave my house at the same time. For travel up I-95, the breakeven point is probably somewhere in the Carolinas, and that’s assuming no connections or inconvenient timing of flights.
Actually, if timing were critical, say, I had to work the day before, but then go to a convention in Atlanta the next afternoon, the critical factor, time-wise, would be the aforementioned timing of flights.
But if the travel were for a series of connecting business trips, I’d want to travel by plane for any that involved Atlanta-Orlando distances and size of cities if direct flights were available, since days of driving 400+ miles would wear me out. But I’d drive if the distance were < 300 miles since that much of a drive might be less stressful than an airport trip.
Another thing to add is that car travel is more predictable, time-wise. I’ve even had massive delays where I would have reached destinations in PA faster by driving than by flying out of Orlando! Whereas if you will not be traveling during a major holiday or through construction, you can have a very good idea of how long your terrestrial travel will take just by looking at normal driving times on the roads.
So your confidence interval you need in your arrival time also needs to be taken into account.
So let’s say you were going to Atlanta from Orlando. If you needed a 96% chance you’d make it in 7 1/2 hours, you could drive. You wouldn’t have a 96% chance to get there in 7 1/2 hours if you flew. Whereas you’d have almost no chance to get there in 5 hours if you drove, while the chance to make it in that time by plane would be more than 70%.