EL AL check in at Heathrow
Steve Rainbird
How long should I really allow for Check in?
--
Steve
--
Steve Rainbird
Principal consultant
MSS International Ltd.
www.mssint.com
Remove "nospam" from email address to reply
Lansbury
<steve.r...@nospam.mssint.com> wrote:
>I am flying to Tel Aviv on Monday with El AL.
>
>How long should I really allow for Check in?
What do El AL advise. Their check in queue when I walked through T1
yesterday was very short.
--
Lansbury
Martin WY
<steve.r...@nospam.mssint.com> wrote:
>I am flying to Tel Aviv on Monday with El AL.
>
>How long should I really allow for Check in?
>
>--
>Steve
What the airline and your ticket tells you!
Martin WY
wrote:
and a lot of us still remember 'Airport' and the weekly El Al check
in frolics.
Lansbury
>and a lot of us still remember 'Airport' and the weekly El Al check
>in frolics.
that had more to do with over booking and the problems it caused at the
gate, rather than check in.
--
Lansbury
Martin WY
wrote:
So this gentleman is not ever likely to come across the same
situation? Dont tell me El Al never ever overbook! :-)
Lansbury
>>>and a lot of us still remember 'Airport' and the weekly El Al check
>>>in frolics.
>>
>>that had more to do with over booking and the problems it caused at the
>>gate, rather than check in.
>So this gentleman is not ever likely to come across the same
>situation? Dont tell me El Al never ever overbook! :-)
I'm sure they do, but he did ask about how long he should leave for
check in. How long he should leave for them to sort the mess out at the
gate is another matter :-)
--
Lansbury
Martin WY
wrote:
True..... but alas I cannot quite get the reasoning why anyone should
post a message on here for advice on when to check in. Anyone with
any sense at all, refers to the documents they have been given for
that flight, with the advice attached thereto. If in doubt,, they
dont ask on here, the ask the Airline they are travelling with. One
of these days I can just see a check in agent getting the comment....
*im not late.... they told me on usenet that I should check in 1hour
before departure*.........gawds help us all!
Miss L. Toe
> post a message on here for advice on when to check in. Anyone with
> any sense at all, refers to the documents they have been given for
> that flight, with the advice attached thereto. If in doubt,, they
> dont ask on here, the ask the Airline they are travelling with. One
> of these days I can just see a check in agent getting the comment....
> *im not late.... they told me on usenet that I should check in 1hour
> before departure*.........gawds help us all!
The thing that 'gets' me is that airlines give the checkin time, not the
time you should arrive at the back end of their queue. and dont seem to take
responsibility if a checkin deadline is missed because the queue was long.
OK - more and more seem to be calling flights forward from the longer
queues, but not all and not every time.
Malcolm Weir
And quite right to. The problem is, as another traveler noted in a
focus group I was in a few years ago, that this rewards poor behavior.
Show up late? That's OK, you can jump most of the queue...
The real problem is that the airlines don't provide a measure of the
"expected queue time", because that will show up which are more
dreadful than the others.
Malc.
Roland Perry
<ma...@gelt.org> writes
>The real problem is that the airlines don't provide a measure of the
>"expected queue time", because that will show up which are more
>dreadful than the others.
As airports are designed to have cascaded queues (I was there when a lot
of the design to cope with huge passenger traffic expansion was done in
the early 70's) then the customer's perception is that the time they
need to aim for is the time they join the first queue. It really doesn't
matter to them whether they are queuing for check-in, queuing for
passport control, queuing for security, etc etc. They expect the
"system" to have factored all that in.
Conveniently, the sort of extended check-in times that are common today
often result in spending an hour or more in the shopping mall ^H^H
departure lounge. I wonder how that happened ;-)
On the other hand, I've often seen check-in queues at LHR T3 that take
over an hour. But that's entirely under the airline's control. They are
the ones who have chosen to limit the throughput.
--
Roland Perry
Martin WY
wrote:
That is very true, and a fine example until last year was Britannia
Airways, where their tickets stated *Latest Check In Time * (printed)
which was always one hour prior to departure. So many turned up an
hour before - as you state above, trusting that all situations were
factored in - and that they would be checked in. Alas it meant, the
desk was closing and you must have been checked in by this time.
They altered it last year to 2hours (2.5hrs for some long haul)
Thai have always for years stated check in 3 hours prior to flight,
this is to allow that *factoring* business and ensure that they are
checked in and through to departures an hour before flight.
Steve Rainbird
"Martin WY" <a...@nomail.com> wrote in message
news:9v6nrv0a7qnc1cd1i...@4ax.com...
Ok, The reason I ask is that many many times I have been advised that I
should check-in 3 hours before departure, Never ever has this actually been
necessary.
I just wanted to know if the 3.5 hours was an exaggeration or whether it was
actually going to take that long.
Lansbury
> If in doubt,, they
>dont ask on here, the ask the Airline they are travelling with.
Not check in but:-
The documents for our next trip say I need six months in my UK passport,
the book we have which is published monthly and gives passport/visa
requirements for all countries say I need a passport valid for 3 months.
The airline says it doesn't matter as they will be in the EU when I
travel, so an ID card will do.
The ID card comment came from the airline ticket desk at LHR after I had
specifically mentioned a UK passport. So they should know as I'm British
I don't have an ID card.
The airline will tell you, you should check in x amount of time before
the flight. They don't tell you how long you might have to queue to
reach the desk by x, so asking for a pointer to such here is not
unreasonable as a guide.
--
Lansbury
Roland Perry
<a...@nomail.com> writes
>So many turned up an
>hour before - as you state above, trusting that all situations were
>factored in - and that they would be checked in. Alas it meant, the
>desk was closing and you must have been checked in by this time.
yes, I had a nasty shock a few years ago with a charter airline at
Stansted where a combination of a misunderstanding over the time they
had quoted [1], and a tradition that 1 hour before departure was "plenty
of time" at such a small and efficient airport, and almost missed the
flight :-(
[1] I think it was 2hrs, but others in the party claimed it was 1hr,
only transatlantic being well known for 2hrs at the time.
--
Roland Perry
Roland Perry
<lans...@spamcop.net> writes
>The airline will tell you, you should check in x amount of time before
>the flight. They don't tell you how long you might have to queue to
>reach the desk by x, so asking for a pointer to such here is not
>unreasonable as a guide.
I once had a *very* early flight from Gatwick on a small carrier that
had been absorbed by BA (forgotten their name, but it was a flight to
Amsterdam), and at the departure time minus two hours (I think they
quoted two hours) the checkin desk was unmanned, and we had to wait half
an hour for the staff to turn up! It was the south terminal, just to
confuse everyone.
--
Roland Perry
Miss L. Toe
"Roland Perry" <rol...@perry.co.uk> wrote in message
news:OQB$DZjQdWv$EA...@perry.co.uk...
I've had a similar experiance at LHR T4 with KLM, turned up 2 hours before
the (6am I think) flight, joined the back of the long queue, and waited one
hour for any staff to turn up - Then the staff started panicing because they
were short of time. One would think they hadn't done this before....
Lansbury
<steve.r...@nospam.mssint.com> wrote:
>Ok, The reason I ask is that many many times I have been advised that I
>should check-in 3 hours before departure, Never ever has this actually been
>necessary.
>
>I just wanted to know if the 3.5 hours was an exaggeration or whether it was
>actually going to take that long.
They are not saying how long it takes for an individual person to check
in ie 3 hours. However the travelling public being what it is if they
say, as some airlines used to, one hour then the great majority would
not turn up before that and hence cause real problems trying to get them
all checked in.
So they started saying 2 hours and now, with increased security, for
long haul I believe a lot say 3. El Al having their own extra security
add on another 30 minutes.
If everyone was in line when check in opened my guess is the guy down
the back would get checked in about an hour before the flight. As it is
passengers do not turn up all at the same time and so often the check in
queue doesn't take too long.
Remember boarding commences and hour to 45 minutes before departure time
so a check in of 3 hours is in fact 2 hours before you should be at the
gate and ready to start boarding.
As your experience tells you it will not take 3 hours to check in,
arrive there when you consider it most appropriate between the 3 hours
and when check in closes. If you miss the flight because you haven't
checked in by the time check in for the flight closes El Al are not
responsible because they advised you to allow 3 hours or so.
--
Lansbury
Angela Gilham
Steve Rainbird <steve.r...@nospam.mssint.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, The reason I ask is that many many times I have been
> advised that I should check-in 3 hours before departure,
> Never ever has this actually been necessary.
Ah. Somebody who's never travelled transatlantic with Virgin
from LHR on a Saturday ;-)
> I just wanted to know if the 3.5 hours was an exaggeration
> or whether it was actually going to take that long.
If El Al still do all the extra stuff like searching the
baggage by hand, and it's a fairly popular flight, no. My
one experience of that kind of security (Air India a few
years after the explosion that caused the crash in the
Atlantic) ended up with the plane leaving LHR late as
they struggled to get everybody screened and seated . . .
mind you this was midsummer and Air India were the only
people offering flights to JFK at under #300.
Angela
Lansbury
(Angela Gilham) wrote:
>Ah. Somebody who's never travelled transatlantic with Virgin
>from LHR on a Saturday ;-)
why are Saturdays normally better than the other 6 days :-)
--
Lansbury