If you are flying to your theme park vacation this summer, here is some advice.
Do not listen to these three air travel tips you might see on social media. Let’s preface this with an explanation why you might be seeing so much bad travel advice online. Current social media algorithms value “engagement” above all else. And nothing drives engagement like bad information.
There’s an Internet-ancient theory that says the quickest way to get good information online is not just to ask a question, but to post the question with a wrong answer. It’s the foundation of ragebait – provoking people to correct you when they perceive that you are wrong.
Over time, however, if enough people who don’t read the comments just see the bad information in their feeds, many of them begin to believe that it’s actually correct. That’s where we are now with so much advice that is posted online. Here are three pieces of airline travel advice that make me roll my eyes every time I see them.
This advice suggests that you can arrive at the airport as little as 15 minutes before your boarding time and easily make your flight. It’s pushback against the long-cited advice that people should arrive at the airport two hours early.
Can you do this, and make it work? Sure, it’s possible. If I am flying out of LAX at the right time of day, I can roll up to the Delta terminal and make my way through the Delta Digital ID lane and walk to my gate in less than 10 minutes from the time my ride hits LAX property.
But offering that as iron-clad travel advice is survivorship bias at its worst. The average TSA wait time nationwide last year was a little over 15 minutes. But if you have flown out of Orlando anytime recently, you know that the regular TSA lines often take way more than that there.
The time it takes to get from your car to the gate depends on multiple variables. Is someone dropping you off, or do you need to park? If you need to park, how full is the lot or garage? How long will it take to walk, take a train, or wait for a shuttle to drive you to the terminal from where you parked?
Are you checking a bag? Do you have PreCheck or some other way to skip the regular security line? (How much time does that save you, anyway?)
Finally – and this is the big one for people who live in large cities – what is the traffic like between your home and the airport? Driving to LAX from my house can take me anywhere from 35 minutes (dream scenario) to more than 90 (much more common). That’s about an hour of variance, which I need to consider when deciding when to leave for my flight. Sure, you can check traffic in advance, but I have lost count of the times that someone else wrecked along the way, inflating my drive time.
If you do not have a lot of travel experience, planning to arrive two hours before your boarding time (which is often 40-50 minutes before the plane’s scheduled departure), allows plenty of cushion should everything go wrong for people who does not know where they are going. And if you have years of experience traveling out of your home airport, well, you don’t need some influencer telling you when to arrive.
This one suggests that couple book the aisle and window seats on planes with 3-3 configurations. The idea is that the middle seat between them will be one of the last seats reserved on the plane, increasing the chances that the couple get an empty seat to share between them.
But airlines do everything they can send flights full these days, so the chances remain strong that some stranger will be assigned that middle seat. If that happens, and you plan to talk with one another or share anything during the flight, it’s just rude to do that with someone sitting between you.
Book your seats together and forget the middle seat hack. If you insist on trying it, then you are duty bound to offer the middle-seat stranger their choice of your aisle or window seat when they arrive. Whichever they select, that person slides over to the middle seat.
Let’s make this the only acceptable situation for attempting the middle seat trick - if neither one in a couple wants the middle seat, but neither is willing to accommodate the other by selecting it. Now, that couple probably needs therapy more than they need online travel tips. But the middle seat trick allows that couple to outsource the decision on who gets the middle seat to a random stranger.
Many influencers admonish airline passengers to remain seated after the plane lands, until the row in front you leaves.
How selfish.
When the row in front of you starts moving, you had better be standing up, bag in hand, ready to follow right behind them. Otherwise, you are just slowing down the deplaning process, creating a longer wait for the people behind you.
When that seat belt sign turns off and you are seated within five rows of the exit door, you should get up and get your bags down from the overhead bin right away. Even if you are not seated close to the door, if you want to stand up - go ahead. Anyone with even the slightest back problem will want the relief of standing ASAP after a long flight, and who are you to judge them for that?
Just don’t rush down the aisle, cutting the rows ahead of you. That is acceptable only if the flight crew has told everyone to remain seated so that people with tight connections can get off first – and you are one of those people. Otherwise, wait your turn.
But do not wait even a second longer than that. When people five rows ahead are moving, that’s your deadline to get up and start getting your bags. Waiting until the row directly in front moves is just another piece of bad, selfish travel advice.
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The middle seat hack is valid but only if the couple is willing to change seats once the middle person shows up. If you decide you don't want to move then talking through the middle seat person is unacceptable to me.