Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

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> I've missed a flight once. From Europe to home Cost me $4K to get another.

> > If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.

Well, he might be balancing it against the time saved, no? Over 20 flights, missing one is a $4k cost, but being early for 20 flights is also a cost.

Assuming you're 30m early for each flight, you "lose" 10 hours by being early.

Comes down to personal trade-offs too (maybe missing a flight means you miss christmas with the family, in which case the $4k is irrelevant anyway).

My personal method is, the more important the journey, the more safety margin I assign it in terms of time.

Going on a 60m flight for in-office days to a destination with frequent flights throughout the day? If I miss it then no problem, I'll take the one 30m later.

Going to a destination with two flights per day, and it's for a court appearance? Cannot miss it unless i want a warrant of arrest issued against me.

You can be late for some things with small consequences as a result. Being late for other things might be a life-changing moment.

But it's not like many people are in a position to turn those scraps of time between 6am and 7am in the morning they could save from heading to the airport later, into a fraction of $4K or even valuable personal time. Usually when I fly internationally, It is a whole day event that I already have taken leave for.

I guess it depends on which flights you're missing - if it's a 1 hour flight that can be replaced with a 5 hour train ride (e.g., Munich to Berlin), then, after you take into consideration check in times, boarding times, waiting for your goddamn luggage at Tegel (glad to see they finally opened their new airport, they can remove that new future tense[0] they added to German just for explaining when the new one would open) then missing the flight isn't so bad.

But as I'm out of APAC and was working for people in EU, all my flights were very bad ones to miss, as in, the next available flight will be tomorrow, if you're lucky.

For my $4K example, I missed an Emirates flight (due to a calendar fuck up, entirely my fault, got timezone differences wrong) that ended up in my home city via Sydney, usually took about 19 - 21 hours, depending on delays in Dubai and Sydney.

The cheapest next available was an Etihad flight that involved a very long layover in their very badly designed airport in Abu Dhabi - there's bugger all space to sit and wait, so people just sit along the halls leading to terminals, but worst of all, it's shaped like a giant hamburger, and so are the terminals, and the dome ceilings amplify noise amazingly, at one point I thought people were going to lynch the parents of a 4 year old who wouldn't stop screaming, just because the terminal's design amplified the screams so damn much.

And then it was followed by a long layover in Brisbane (I think? I was somewhat in a fugue state by then, all I wanted was a shower, and I had no towel, Australian airports provide showers, but not towels, unlike Changi or München Airport do), so by the time I got home, it had been 36 hours since leaving Munich.

So, anyway, long rant done, I can conclude two things: 1) Umesh is privileged to have enough wealth or earnings that rebooking a flight isn't a significant cost for him, unlike the majority of air travellers, and 2) Umesh isn't flying half way around the world.

I'm not big on taking life advice from people who are more privileged than the general population, because well, life advice implicitly predicated on privilege isn't really applicable to the general population.

[0]: https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...

10 hrs waiting (i.e. catching up on email and social media, eating or shopping) for 4k? Does this seem reasonable to you?

Probably not in that case. My flights cost around ~100e though so spending even 1 hour extra to reduce my risk of missing it by 5% is already not worth it.

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