Tips for avoiding airline delays

Peter Greenberg wrote an article for Best Life Magazine last November that’s got a hefty collection of useful tips for making sure that your travel goes as smoothly as possible.

Here are just a few:

Watch the calendar. Schedule air travel for the first 20 days of the month. That reduces the chances that your flight will be canceled because the pilot or crew has already hit the maximum monthly limit of 100 hours of work.

Avoid “direct” flights. The only good flight is a nonstop flight. Labeling a flight “direct” is an airline euphemism that means you’ll stop at least once, exponentially increasing your chances of being delayed.

Sign up for e-mail alerts. Many airlines offer this service, as do Travelocity and Expedia. Or you can go to flightstats.com, a free service that tracks flights and alerts you when things are going wrong. To have text messages sent to your cell phone alerting you to flight delays, sign up at flightstats.com. You can also find updates at fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp.

Several of these things I’ve already been doing accidentally - I like to fly nonstop whenever possible (who doesn’t?) so I usually check the details to see if there are any stops regardless of what the initial listing states.