In honor of Nate Silver's analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it's been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.

Buying The Ticket

As far as I can tell, the major booking portals for tickets are all basically the same. I’ve been using Orbitz for a long time because I’m used to the interface, it is clean and I have confidence it works. The times I checked Kayak and so on they all seemed to be exactly the same.

I still book tickets manually rather than using an AI agent. There isn’t much time to plausibly save and by the time I fully express preferences and enter my information anew I might as well have just done it myself. It also means I look at alternatives, which helps me keep tabs.

My heuristic is to [...]

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Outline:

(00:29) Buying The Ticket

(02:09) Planning To Spend Time At The Airport

(03:41) When To Head To The Airport

(08:35) Packing Your Own Bags and Boarding the Plane

(09:20) All Aboard

(09:35) What Happens After The Airport

(10:23) What To Do In The Air

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First published:
August 15th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqmTsC6AHqrNgoS3i/spending-too-much-time-at-airports

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

United Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft in flight against blue sky.

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“Spending Too Much Time At Airports” by Zvi

LessWrong (30+ Karma)