FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - "Please plan to arrive at least 2 hours before departure..."
Old Jun 5, 2019, 2:37 pm
  #50  
gregsfortytwo
 
Join Date: Oct 2016
Posts: 277
Originally Posted by RaflW
Or is this for families with no elite status, multiple checked bags, unsure about belts and baby bottles, etc?
Yes. The standard advice for air travel across the industry is that you should drive 2 hours prior to domestic flights and 3 hours for international ones. I think there’s a few reasons:
* this advice goes to people who ask and look for it. They tend to be more comfortable with time leftover than the reverse,
* Despite TSA’s target times, plenty of airport security lines can get really bad, especially in the standard lines. These days I get annoyed if CLEAR+PreCheck takes me more than 4 minutes, but in the past I’ve spent 45 minutes trying to get through LAX terminal 5 and that was just a normal business day morning with nothing gone wrong.
* It’s really easy to rack up time spent on bus transfers depending on the airport and your transit method. It might take 15 minutes for the parking lot bus to arrive, 20+ more minutes to the terminal (think LAX terminal 7), at some airports you have to wait for another internal tram to switch terminals...
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