FlyerTalk Forums - 4 hr max for connection

Quote:

Originally Posted by indufan (Post 36682983)

And Delta gets to decide (and always has) the limits both on the short side (MCT) and long side. Although I admit, I did talk them into letting me book under MCT at SLC once.

If not four hours, how long? Six? Eight? 24? A week? A month? A year?

Quote:

Originally Posted by jrl767 (Post 36683033)

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

I think six probably makes more sense if you're applying a universal rule (especially since I think that's basically what they do with Canada?). The rule that I would apply would be something like this:
"Four hours is the standard maximum. However, you can always take the next flight regardless of this maximum, and if the next flight is less than MCT+[X] after you land, you can always take the second flight out. Additionally, if an indirect legal routing is permitted, any direct legal routing that would be barred by connection maximums but is faster is also permitted." X would be a bit variable (I think I'd say MCT+45, but I'd raise that threshold for cities with known congestion issues). It'd require a bit of Boolean logic (lots of if/then statements), but I think that would be reasonable.

Another reasonable version would be "X is the standard maximum, but for any city with less than X flights per day the maximum goes up." I might go so far as to suspend the maximum for any city with two or fewer flights per day on a given pair (basically applying the international rules, which effectively account for both customs time (letting pax make a judgment call on how long they expect to need to clear) and the fact that a lot of those routes are once-daily-or-less.