Waiting Game at Airports: How to Sidestep Airline Delays and Secure Your Own Comfort –
Waiting Game at Airports: How to Sidestep Airline Delays and Secure Your Own Comfort
There’s a meme with a great deal of truth, that passengers have to walk to their gate to find that it exists before going off to get food.
People are concerned about leaving their gate, and so they often sit there rather than buying anything to eat or take with them on the flight. That’s why OTG first started installing iPads at gates, and why several airport concessions companies offer at-gate delivery. That generates more sales.
Passengers generally don’t have confidence in their travels. I didn’t when I was a kid! When I would fly cross country on my own when I was in junior high, especially if I was connecting, I remember going up to the gate agent and showing them my boarding pass just to confirm what I sort of already knew, that I was in the right place and that I had what I needed to fly?
This concern really resonated with me: someone flying American Airlines who didn’t “feel confident leaving the airport for a hotel” during an overnight delay. If the airline didn’t give them a hotel, they weren’t comfortable leaving the airport for one.
I don’t even feel confident leaving the airport for a hotel but WOW @AmericanAir this is how you treat your Advantage customers? pic.twitter.com/xkHufSSVLB
— Vaidehi Gajjar (@vgajjar95) January 10, 2024
I was already rebooked and that was not my complaint to begin with. Are you all comfortable with leaving your Advantage customers stranded at an airport overnight?
— Vaidehi Gajjar (@vgajjar95) January 10, 2024
There are some important things to think through before finding yourself in the position of having a flight cancelled and getting stuck somewhere for the night.
- While airlines will generally provide a hotel for you if they cancel a flight for a controllable reason (mechanical, lack of available crew) they won’t provide a hotel if it’s because of weather or air traffic control.
- You probably don’t want the hotel they’re going to provide for you anyway. Their obligation is to offer a hotel, not to offer one that you’re going to find sufficiently clean and comfortable. (I do happen to think there ought to be some minimum standards, but even where there are the sourcing of rooms is generally delegated to a third party – that wins the contract based on cost.)
- And you aren’t going to want to stand in line to get a voucher and to be told where to go. Often that can take an hour, losing precious sleep, and given the time to get to the hotel and back and perhaps for an early morning onward flight that hour may be crucial.
- So it’s better to source your own room if you’re in a position to do so, perhaps aided by the possibility of reimbursement through a credit card’s trip delay benefit.
In fact you may want to proactively call it a day on your travels rather than waiting for the airline to do it for you! If things are looking grim, with rolling delays, you’ll be far happier in a hotel and having a proper dinner followed by rest than you will be sitting at the airport until the airline finally cancels your flight at 1 a.m.
What this means is making the decision on your own to call it a day on your trip adn get rescheduled. Calling it a day earlier also may mean access to more inventory to get a seat the next day – you’re booking into that space before everyone else on your flight is trying to do so!
That often requires interacting with the airline, when phone lines are clogged and self-service tools may not let you reschedule. But also better to deal with those queues at 7 p.m. than midnight!
Remember that you have a number of different avenues to get customer service assistance in rebooking: telephone; gate; check-in desks; club lounge (if eligible); customer service counter; chat/messaging and more. So see what has the shortest queue and is most helpful, and if you don’t get the assistance you want and answer you want the first time go see someone else that might.