Originally Posted by
sbiddle
I've flown through there a few times (last time was 18 months ago however) and it's always been 3 hours.
On my last two trips I've ended up having to hang around for a while before it opened due to timings with dropping off a rental car and was really surprised how many people were there early.. Maybe that's normal in some places, but I normally don't get to an airport that early!
I was wondering the same about ORD...(sorry to hijack a little!)
We got in on the ORD-SYD deal but are based in NYC. We're flying into ORD the night before, staying at the ORD Hilton. Because we can't get NZ BPs until the counter opens (I suspect we will not be allowed OLCI given that it's our first time flying NZ), we can't use the Polaris lounge in T1 until we have BPs in hand. Going from T5 to T1 then back to T5 is a schlep, but worth it IMO for the Polaris lounge...but if NZ check-in only opens 3 hours before flight time, that will kind of make it hard to enjoy the lounge much...