Commuting by plane - advice needed
 

I'm considering a position in Paris. I live not far from Birmingham. There are multiple daily flights although I'd be in Paris 3 days per week, tue to thurs or something.

Having worked from home for many years I'm a bit nervous about taking on that commute.

Some things I'm wondering:

- How much before your flight do you arrive at the airport. Doing my holiday 1.5 hour wait twice per week would be a pain!

- Do you have to book flights individually or can you block book, like a travel card?

- How bad is a commute like that? Does it get you down? Is the time away from kids productive for sorting out other things?

- Is it better to fly early before work like 6am or last thing at night and go the night before?

Thanks for any advice!

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

Only you can judge how much of a risk you're willing to take of arrival before flights, but if you travel that much you'll be elite before long and will be waiting in lounges, so can get more work done.

Normally flights need to be booked individually. Certain routes and carriers have special offers for very frequent users, such as "Routepass".

No idea about the last two as I've not done it.

On arrival times, I think you'll start to figure out what the acceptable time to show up is based on the first few flights. You'll soon enough learn how little time you can get away with.

Commuting like this can get you down. I did it for 10 years before giving it up. I was a bit of an old-timer by that time - most people can do it for a couple years before giving it up.

A few key approaches help in making it bearable.

First, I think you need to use the opportunity to explore where you are - treat it as a bit of adventure to go out and explore a new city each night.

Second, you can't carry guilt about those back at home - the wife and kids in your case. If you are constantly feeling guilty while eating in a restaurant in Paris thinking about the wife back at home making beans and toast for the kids, you'll burn out quickly.

Finally, do take opportunities to treat the family. Instead of flying home, have them met you in Paris. Perhaps dump the kids on grandparents / aunts and uncles and treat the wife to a romantic weekend in Paris. Or a trip to Disney for the family.

Greg

Hey,

Tues-Thurs is fine. I actually quite enjoy mixing countries up a bit. Do much more than that with a family and you'll soon become a stranger though.

I tend to prefer leaving the night before as I don't like early mornings, but as you have family you will almost certainly rather go for the early flights. Remember you lose an hour going to France, so you will want to take the earliest flight and hope you're going somewhere near to the airport!

I don't know how it works at Birmingham, but in Heathrow (with fast-track security access) I would tend to arrive about 45-50min before departure. Every now and then I'll miss a flight if something gets in the way of my journey, but relatively rarely.

In terms of booking flights, I would tend to do 2-3 at a time to save on admin - I'd also do expenses at the same time as otherwise I found myself doing 15min several times a week just on logistics which drove me mad. If you are senior enough to have a secretary of course I'd just leave it to her to figure out.

Easier said than done. I did this for 7 years. I always felt guilty eating out. So I tried not to. Some days,I would get back to my apartment witn little or no food in the fridge or the pantry. It's not easy to keep them stocked if you travel home on the weekends and work long hours weekdays. On one of such occasions, I was too tried to even go out to eat. My dinner was boiled beans and an egg broken over the beans. It was simply ghastly.
I can absolutely attest to that. I worked on the U.S. Gulf Coast and the family lived near Washington, D.C. Some weekends we met in Europe--Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Budapest, Istanbul. My reasoning was that going home meant more work for my wife--wake the kids up, haul them to the airport to pi8ck me up around mid-night Friday night, get my washing done on Sat, pack me up on Sunday and drop me off at the airport on Sunday night. meeting in Europe saved her from all the dreary chores.

a lot of people do an out monday, and back friday commute. a lot do this in a car, or a bus, or on a train. the 1.5 hr wait a pain, being away from the kids, does it get you down. a whole lot of people commute and survive. i think you forget this job. you will not be able to handle the stress.

Never mind, wrong airports

There are no overnight flights from BHX to CDG/ORY :confused:

I think that he is in Birmingham, England, not AL. Less jet lag that way.

Thanks so much everyone for the comments. I think I should have been clearer on my route - sorry about that!

It's BHX, Birmingham UK to Paris, France CDG. The flight is about 1h:20. So I was planning on mondays to catch the 20:00 flight arr 22:00ish. Then straight from work Thursday do the same one coming back.

I can get a train to the airport which takes about 20 minutes. At the paris end I'm expecting a 1 hour train ride to a nearby hotel. So door to door would be about 4 hours.

I commute weekly from CGN to LGW and have been doing so for the last 15 months or so; previously I've also commuted to EDI from LON, so here's my EUR .02 on the subject...

(Both are/were typically about 4 hours door-to-door, so broadly comparable with what you're considering.)

I commute with easyJet (U2), so I tend to rock up to the airport about 60 minutes in advance in order to get a good seat. I'm planning on reducing that once they start with assigned seating in November. Time needed depends very much on the airport though and I can imagine that AF at CDG can be a bit messy.

I block book two or three months' worth in advance typically. U2 let me put 20 or so flights on one itinerary, which saves me paying them a booking fee for each flight and means I average out at about £30-35 per segment all-in. Your mileage will vary by airline, but it'd be worth you checking if any bearable (i.e. not FR) low-cost airlines fly the route you're after. (Also YMMV if you don't have to pay for your flights yourself :D )

I don't mind commuting to London as I have lots of friends there so I use the evenings to catch up with them, plus I'm typically working long days there in any case. But I do miss my wife of an evening.

When I commuted to Edinburgh, it did get me down a bit -- I didn't know many people there and the winters get pretty dark...

Don't have kids so can't comment on that other than to note that when I was a little kid in the 1970s, my father commuted from London to Canada fortnightly for two years; by the end of that, I hardly knew him (and my mother was about ready to divorce him).

The flip side is, how much do you actually see of your kids after work now? I don't know how old they are but a colleague of mine who commutes EDI-LON and has fairly young kids pointed out to me that even if he worked in EDI, by the time he'd get home, his kids would be in bed anyway.

Depends on your flight timings and costs, whether you're a morning person, and whether commuting out the night before costs you time with your family/kids. I quite like commuting Monday evenings for a Tuesday morning start, but the disadvantage is that if my flight is running badly late I get to my flat past midnight and then have less than 6 hours' sleep before I need to get up. On the plus side, I'm not getting up at sparrow's flatulence in order to go to the airport.

Also bear in mind that the time difference between BHX and PAR means that even if you take a 7am flight, it won't get in to PAR before 9.30-10ish am, which may make you late for work, especially if delayed.


All in all, whether commuting works for you or not will depend a lot on your individual circumstances, i.e. your family, airports and airlines involved, days of the week, cost, etc...

do not let your management/company read this. if they have/had any common sense, they'd fire you before the sun went down. daily 2 or 3 hr each way commutes are the order of the day for a significant percentage of the working population here in dc. i presume it is the same in many metropolitan areas.

just do yourself and your company a favor, and stay home with the kids.

It's really funny how people feel they must qualify Paris with France, but assume that Birmingham must be in Alabama. Simply Birmingham, Paris or Vienna means the cities in the U.K., France or Austria, not AL, TX or VA. If one is talking about their namesakes in the U.S. the names should be qualified.

I used to fly out of BHX pretty regularly for work, getting either an early flight (7am) or an evening one (8pm). For the early flight I would generally aim to be parking the car by 6am – security can be pretty busy as there are a lot of morning commuter flights. That was without bags but I rarely saw a queue for bag drop at that time of the morning as most of the business travellers seem to go carry-on only. In the evening, on the other hand, security was a lot quieter but the people who were flying were all taking bags so you’d queue to drop your bag. I generally found arriving about 6.45/7 for an 8pm flight to be OK though (and DH and I once rocked up at 7.40 for an 8.30 flight and still made it absolutely fine). But as somebody else says, start early and shave off time as you feel comfortable.

Would you be getting an apartment in Paris? If so, my advice would be to take as much stuff as you can over the first few times to enable you to mainly travel hand luggage only after that, as reclaim at Birmingham is sloooooooow (especially from Flybe flights, IME).

I generally arrive at the airport (Luton in my case) about 1.5 hours before departure and use the time for a leisurely breakfast. But this morning I really couldn't be bothered and so arrived just over an hour before. Depends on how busy the airport tends to be - you'll get used to it.

easyJet let you book as many as you want on a single booking. Just about every other airline doesn't allow that and means you have to do each at a time. No such thing as unlimited-travel travelcards, though.

I'm single and live on my own, and on that basis it's acceptable. I wouldn't even consider it if I had a young family - kids are more important than anything else. But YMMV - some may find they enjoy the time with their family all the more on the other days - particularly if you have the option to work from home rather than say commuting to the big city each day.

Depends how late you'd arrive. With the timezone being +1, late can mean very late, then there isn't much in it, though having taken the 0725 easyJet LTN-GVA this morning I'm half asleep. Also depends on whether you would want the extra evening at home. Notably, the flight is 0625 in winter, and that's far, far harder - going to bed about 10:30pm (I can't sleep much earlier really) there is to me a huge difference between a start at 0330 and at 0430.

Neil

Forgot to add that I am now commuting 90 minutes each way every day – by car. Frankly I’d swap it for an arrangement like the one you are proposing in a heartbeat. But then I don’t have children and my husband is away 3 days a week himself!

You presume wrongly. In the UK I think it's only London where even near that is common, probably capping out at 2-2.5 hours really (Brighton and the likes).

The usual in the UK would be 30-45 minutes in most cases, not usually over an hour. And very long daily commutes are neither good for the environment nor for the individual's health.

Neil

Nasty, and probably quite dangerous when tired.

I would, and in fact when working at our base office do, choose a 2.5 hour cross-London train journey at twice the cost to avoid doing a 1.5 hour car commute. I made that decision after a narrowly avoided accident (avoided by the other driver's actions, would have been caused by mine) which resulted from me "autopiloting" because of the tiredness that amounts up with an early start and spending those 90 minutes trying to be attentive.

Neil

Yes, and yes. Sadly the job market is also nasty.

Even in my office in London, I'd say I'm one of the few commuting over 1h (generally 1h-1h15) - and that's for a 50-mile train/bicycle journey. Personally, I wouldn't like to do much more than that, and certainly not on a form of transport where I couldn't read for the bulk of it - life's just too short. I do realise that now's not a great time to be overly picky, however...

To the OP - only you can figure out what your time means to you.

Personally, I've done LCY-AMS for 3-day-week stints and loved it (single, good friends with my colleagues) and done LHR-OSL for 5-day-week stints (married, variable relationship with colleagues) and hated it. I wouldn't go back to that kind of travel again now I'm married, and have specifically sought out work that has the right balance of home/travel time for me now. But I can't tell you what the right balance is for you.

Another consideration - it sounds like you're paying for your flights. Realistically, if you add all that up - and accommodation too? Extra food costs if you don't have cooking facilities? - how worthwhile is the remaining salary? Make sure you do the sums properly, too - see what flight costs are at the time you'll be travelling, with the kind of advance booking you can manage.

Finally, how well do you know France? It's a very different working culture to the UK - some good and bad points - and it takes some time and mutual understanding to adapt (particularly if there's a language barrier - I don't know if there is in your case).

Thanks to everyone for your advice. It seems like it's doable for a while. My plan would be this:

fly to paris on a Monday night, Fly back on Thurs night. Yes I pay/book everything myself, flights are about £150 return. Hotels are about £70 per night. So that lifestyle would cost me about £360 + food per week. It's within budget.

Eventually I would move to Paris for a year or so, but I imagine I'll be commuting for 4-6 months.

Interesting, never thought about that. I just tried a couple of searches on Flybe and they work out the same as the other way round - but it's a handy tip!

True.

Neil

Significant? Even Richmond, lots of WV, and Baltimore are under two hours. I don't think a "significant" group of DC-workers commute further than that. In all my years of working in DC, I think the number of people I've known with a 2+ hour commute is less than 5.

I don't know how good AF are, but if they're an option it is probably better than the organisation best known as "Flymaybe", unless they have seriously improved their on-time performance.

Neil

Worth your while checking whether this is the case year-round before committing to anything; if you find a hotel you like, it's also worth trying to negotiate a discount with them given that you'll be staying with them quite a lot.

Either way... Priceline, Hotwire, and biddingfortravel/betterbidding etc are your friends.

May also be worth checking that for air fares. LTN-GVA is massively cheaper in winter than summer (because they operate so much extra capacity).

Booked one or two months in advance, I tend to get around the £50-80 mark one way in summer, but base fares £19/£29 (from/to UK due to APD) very often in winter.

Neil

It will depend on exactly where in relation to Birmingham you are (ie which side and near which train stations), and where exactly your office is in Paris, but a friend who lived within striking distance of Birmingham preferred the Eurostar - even having to go into London - because he found it easier to do his work on the two trains, the timing worked for him (although this was a couple of years ago, not sure how the times work nowadays) and he could make / take calls when he was above ground. He also liked being very close to the office when he got to Paris, and not having a 30 minute cab ride, which could be longer in traffic. The lack of long check in times also swayed him as he could get home quicker than heading out to CDG, no need to check bag etc. Oh and he liked that they fed him a 'proper' breakfast and 'proper' evening meals too (I think the wine may also have swayed his opinion!)

I'd strongly disagree. In the event of a problem, Hotwire/Priceline are not going to be there to help you out, and you will invariably be allocated a less than great room over a wide-range of stays via their "mystery" programs.

Negotiate something directly with your preferred hotel. It may end up being cheaper to keep a room 30 days per month rather than checking-out Fri-Sun depending on the property's location and primary clientele. Also, as it is Paris, be sure to ask to see a variety of rooms/suites and select one that works best for you (some of us prefer luxurious bathrooms, others a nice breakfast nook, etc). Even if you do a Sun-Thurs arrangement, in the long run the ability to call a hotel manager directly when your plans change or you have a special request (or just want someone to have a drink with) will pay off.

Have you considered taking the train into London, and the Eurostar to Paris from there? I imagine you would be able to get some reasonable fares if you book far in advance, and you won't have to deal with delays at the airports either. The trip shouldn't be much longer than by air, and it's possible you may save time yourself?