Buying the right amount of airport waiting time

The allowance runs from the actual landing time, not from the scheduled one and not from the moment the chauffeur parks. That distinction is the whole thing. A flight that lands ninety minutes late has not consumed a minute of your waiting time, because the clock did not start until the wheels touched. An operator whose allowance starts at the booked time is selling you an allowance that a delay can spend for you.

What it pays for is two people standing still: the chauffeur, who cannot take another job while he is in your arrivals hall, and the car, which is occupying a short-stay bay that is charged by the part-hour. Neither of those is free, which is why it appears in the quotation rather than being folded invisibly into a headline figure.

Some of them are predictable and worth building in. A non-UK, non-e-gate passport in a party of four is the biggest single one, because the whole party moves at the speed of the slowest queue. Requested assistance is another: wheelchair assistance is reliable but it is a scheduled service, and it can add twenty minutes at the aircraft door before you have moved.

Others are luck. A stand at the far end of a satellite, a bag that comes off last, a second flight sharing your belt, an e-gate bank that is half closed at four in the morning. The reason the allowance exists at all is that these are not rare, and a transfer priced with no slack in it is a transfer that will produce an awkward conversation roughly one arrival in five.

This is the part that rarely gets said. If you fly the same route every fortnight, land at the same terminal, carry a cabin bag and hold a British passport, you do not need sixty minutes of allowance and you should not pay for it. Book the shorter allowance, tell us you will be quick, and the chauffeur plans his day around a twenty-minute turnaround rather than an hour.

The same is true for a small regional airport at a quiet hour. A 14:30 arrival at Southampton from Jersey does not need an hour of cover; it needs twenty minutes and a phone number. Buying the long allowance there is not caution, it is waste, and we would rather tell you that than take the money.

What we will not do is sell you a short allowance on a wide-body arrival at Heathrow at eight in the morning because it makes the quotation look cheaper. That is the version that ends badly, and the cost of the extra half hour is smaller than the cost of the argument.

Ask three questions. Is the flight long-haul or short-haul? Is there hold luggage? Does everybody in the party hold a passport that clears an e-gate? Three yeses in the easy direction and twenty minutes will do. Three in the other and you want an hour. Most arrivals sit in the middle and forty-five minutes covers them without waste.

Then tell us the honest answer about the party rather than the flattering one. A family of five where two are travelling on non-UK passports and one has requested assistance is a ninety-minute arrival however well the aircraft performs, and pretending otherwise does not make it faster.

• Long-haul or short-haul, hold luggage or not, e-gate or not
• Add twenty minutes for requested assistance at the aircraft
• Add twenty for a party where one passport joins a staffed queue
• Regional airports need less allowance than London ones