I’ve been traveling for business more than usual lately. Five times in the last five weeks. Not long trips mind you, but enough to make my wife take notice.
Since it has been a while since I’ve spent any significant time traveling, it took me a while to get in the groove and optimize my travel time. If you travel, you know a lot of optimization can be done in the area of airport time and flight time. Since this is fresh in my mind from a few quick trips, here are my top ideas on how to get the most bang for your buck on air travel time.
1) Booking the flight. First, if you get good at using Expedia or Orbitz, you will save a ton of time in booking your flight. Always book the hotel, air, and car on the same reservation. Use a low-cost car company like Advantage, Thrifty, or Dollar (don’t use Fox – bad experience). There are lots of tips on simply using Expedia that I could write about but I’ll constrain myself and focus on the bigger picture for this post.
2) Choose a direct flight or long+short hop. Direct flights are the best if you can get one economically, but a long+short hop works equally well. The main thing is to try and get a lot of advantage from uninterrupted time on a long hop flight. For instance, from Austin, I would want to go through Dallas to get to San Jose, rather than go through Phoenix. That gives me one long leg from Dallas to San Jose and allows me to get a lot more work done on the computer. Spreadsheets, emails needing more time and thought, and doc reviews are perfect for this quality time.
3) Using your iPhone/Droid on the plane. Here’s a big one. For some reason, when you first get on the plane, the flight attendants won’t let you use your phone after the plane doors close. Yet on landing you can use your phones the nanosecond the plane lands and is taxiing on the runway. I don’t see the difference.
Nevertheless, you can use this common knowledge that you have to turn off your phone immediately when getting on the plane to your advantage. Use this time to quickly send a couple emails that are shorter and more cryptic than normal. People on the receiving end will understand. For example, let’s say someone emails you a long explanation of something that normally you would feel compelled to write a lengthy response or set up a meeting to discuss. You can instead type “plane door closing. I agree. Can we get Fred’s take?” The beauty of this is you acknowledge the sender, move the ball down the court to a next step, avoid a meeting (at least temporarily), and hopefully make you and the other person more productive.
4) Use the priority line at the security check-in. Ok, this one is probably not right to suggest, but if necessary in an emergency, it works very well. Normally this line is reserved for first class and airline personnel. If for example you travel on Monday or Tuesday morning, you might be surprised like I have been when you get to the airport and the security check-in line is practically wrapped around the terminal. Get your boarding pass as usual and try to change the seat to the bulkhead row, which is usually row six. The good thing about this is row six looks like it may be a row in a business class seat. Maybe this is just me being paranoid and this isn’t even necessary. But if you can jump in the priority line, I’ve personally seen it can save you as much as 50 minutes in some cases.
Those are a few tips. Since I’ve been traveling more, I’m looking for other smart time-saving ideas. Please let me know if you have any other good tips. J
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 1 trackback }