Originally Posted by
jrl767
one guy’s opinion — I was never a “road warrior” in the classic sense, although I had more than a few months of weekly travel pretty much every year from 1982 to 2012, and with the exception of 2020 have logged 50 to 80 flights a year since — is that four hours was a reasonable number for its time
since ~2000: airline consolidation, the overwhelming dominance of hub-and-spoke route systems (with the attendant crushes on terminal infrastructure at those hubs), and the airlines’ obsession with maximizing aircraft operating time (with the attendant schedule ramifications that are the basis for this thread) have strained the system to where — from a passenger satisfaction perspective — six hours would make a lot more sense
While I agree 6 hours is obviously better than 4, I think it also depends a lot on how frequently the route is operated. For instance, why are international flights given a 24 hour connection window, or Alaska 6 hours? My guess is because those routes are only flown once or twice a day from a given hub. But if then a small domestic station is also only flown twice a day, why isn’t it also given those same longer windows?
I would be happy with 6 hours, if also longer windows were provided for those small destinations that may only have 3 or less flights a day.