Do you get gut induced anxiety thinking about your air travel plans? Do you arrive to the airport 5 hours before departure? Does parking make you sick to your stomach, not to mention the transfer shuttle you have to take from the airport to your terminal? The list can go on, but I’m here to stop it. And to end your flight anxiety. See my top five tips below on how to best hack your airport commute. As a frequent flyer, I’ve taken my experience and wrapped it into an easy guide for you to have on any domestic travel moving forward.
1. Arriving at the airport
Now unless you are a dad of 5, you do not need to arrive 4 hours prior to take off. I would recommend similar to the airlines, 2 hours for domestic and 3 hours for international. For a trivial example: A 7 PM domestic flight, I would show up to the airport around 5 PM.
Now the real rule of thumb if you want to hack this a layer deeper, is to ask yourself, when is the latest I can arrive at the airport without missing my flight? Now this is the key question. For domestic flights, you must check your bag 45 minutes prior to your departure time. I’ll keep the same example rolling for domestic. A 7 PM domestic flight, I must check my baggage no later than 6:15 or they will not be accepted. I will also highlight here from point of arrival to checking your bag, should really not take you more than 20 minutes. Why? That is now due to the electronic kiosks at the front of each check in counter.
2. Pre-purchasing luggage
To ensure you hit the 20 minute checked bag chapter of your commute, you must have two things. 1) Luggage to check 2) Purchase that luggage as checked baggage. When can you pre-purchase luggage? You can purchase your checked baggage in two spots. The first is upon purchasing your flight ticket. When you choose your seat, extra add ons, etc, you will be prompted to purchase your checked baggage. The second, is upon check in. Flight check in starts 24 hours prior to departure time. You will receive your check in notification via email and sometimes via text if you have a loyalty account with the airline. My experience has been that I have the smoothest experience purchasing checked baggage upon check in.
I purchase my baggage upon check in for a few reasons. The first is that I am 99% positive I will be catching the flight. If I purchased the luggage upon purchasing the ticket, I run the risk of paying for an excess add on in the case that I end up cancelling my itinerary. The second reason I purchase my baggage upon check in is to ensure that I do not need to purchase it at the airport. Pre-purchasing your luggage online will usually be $5 cheaper than if you do it on demand at the check in desk with a human.
The airlines value you arriving to the airport ready to go. All purchases (minus the airport bar) should be settled prior to your arrival. That will save you time from seeing a human for assistance. The electronic kiosk is the first place you should go to once you arrive at the airport. Using your confirmation code (can be found on your flight confirmation purchase email receipt), you can pull up your reservation, print your bag tags, and print your boarding passes.
None of this would require a human being at this point, IF you had pre-purchased your luggage. Next is to tag your own bag (instructions on the back of the printed bag tag) and always keep your receipt. This is very important in case your luggage goes missing. You have a receipt of your tracking ID and can provide it to the airlines for easy tacking.
3. Printing/Downloading Boarding Pass
The key to a speedy commute through the airport is to be prepared. This includes having your ID (License, Passport) and Boarding Pass. The Boarding Pass can be obtained in a few ways, but only once you’ve completed your check in. Remember, check in becomes available 24 hours prior to departure. Upon check in you will be able to print, download, or add your boarding pass to your apple wallet. Now, printing is the OG way. Coming to the airport with your boarding pass is traditionally the way a prepared lad would travel. But in a constant effort to reduce our carbon footprint, my suggestion is to go paperless.
To go paperless, upon check in you would select > view boarding pass now. Once you are on your iOS device you can select “add to apple wallet”. That way your boarding pass lives within the Wallet application for you to retrieve at any time. I must mention the obvious. To add your boarding pass to your Apple Wallet you must be checking into your flight on an iPhone. If you are accessing your boarding pass through your computer and want it on your phone. I would suggest downloading it or airdropping it to your phone, then launching it through your phone to access the Apple Wallet functionality. Unfortunately this is specific to Apple users. Fortunately, Android users do have similar functionality included in Samsung Wallet or Google Wallet.
4. Check in early, Never Wait
The less obvious and almost most important step, is to never procrastinate check in. When you receive your check in email 24 hours before departure, you should never ignore it. The reason being, the order in which guests check in, is the order in which seat assignment is prioritized. I’ll type that out again. If you check into your flight as the 87th person, you will be given the 87th seat assignment. This is with the assumption you have not paid extra to purchase your seat. If you have paid extra for your seat assignment upon purchasing your flight, you have locked in that seat. This scenario goes for anyone who did not pay for their seat assignment and are waiting for the airline to assign them a random seat.
This is a real life example that happened to our family. This experience is the reason I will choose to check in upon receiving the email. Our 6 AM flight out of Myrtle Beach was going smoothly, until it wasn’t. We arrived at the airport with 5 minutes to spare. Testing you readers out there, if we must check our baggage 45 minutes prior to departure, when did we arrive at the airport? Contact me with the answer and I’ll send you a treat.
Any-hew, after the judgement from the airline representatives of a last minute check in, we did get our bags behind the counter. But we still had an issue. None of our tickets had seat assignments. We were told our seat assignment would be granted at the gate. And that we should head there right away as boarding was about to begin. Now you may not believe me, but small regional airports, can have very speedy security lines. So, by 5:25 we were at our gate. We waited and waited and waited. There were still no new tickets printed for us with our seat assignment. Boarding began and still, we were very confused. We learned that we were victim to a flight that oversold seats. Meaning, Google, the airline, 3rd party vendors, all collectively sold more tickets than there are seats. And because we did not check in via email 24 hours prior to the flight, we were at the bottom of the list for seat assignment priority. The only way we made it on the flight was due to a couple being a no call no show.
Now if we realistically could not board the flight, the blame would still lie on the airline. The airline oversold and underdelivered. Compensation to you would be given if it was a true involuntary boarding.
Now I know this story may have sent you into a whirlwind of anxiety, but I want to remind you. The worst thing that can possibly happen at the airport is that you are forced to take a different flight. Once you can grapple with that truth, nothing else seems to hold bearing anymore. The airport is chaotic because everyone is trying to get from point A to point B-Z. But, if you focus on yourself and your family (pre purchase luggage), come prepared (download boarding passes), and know where you’re going (research terminal and gate upon arrival), the signs will lead you to your flight gate. Good luck and let me know if this helped you in your future flight endeavors!