In the USA Today article, Strategize to leap over summer travel bumps, the author highlights key strategies to avoid travel mishaps, given an increase of travelers during the summer months:
U.S. airlines expect to carry an average of 2.2 million travelers a day through August, according to the trade group Airlines for America. During last year’s busiest month, July, U.S. and foreign airlines carried 76.9 million passengers to and from U.S. airports on scheduled flights about – 22 million more than in February…
How do federal employees, especially federal frequent flyers, handle the stresses and challenges of air and final destination travel in these busy months? Are there any tips to avoid airport hassles? How often does the flyer travel – days out of the week, weeks out of the year – and where is the most common destination?
If you have any issues with flying, or have any suggestions of how to beat the airport rush, please email me at opawlyk@gannettgov.com or feel free to post in the comment section below.
1 Comment
My solution is simple: If I have a TDY whose destination can be reached in a single-day drive, I rent a car locally (providing car tax revenue for my own community) and drive. 99% of the time, a rental car is needed at the TDY location, so this saves money overall, and given how poor airline service and reliability has become, it has on more than one occasion proved to save time as well.
TDY locations that are beyond a one day drive, but within a two day drive require a bit more cost comparison, but more often than not, it is still more cost effective to rent a car locally and drive, especially if one or more of the travel days falls on a weekend. (I don’t bother with travel comp time).
This covers 90% of my TDYs. The rest still require air travel but that now drops to 3 or 4 per year and with the efforts to cut travel expenses further, will hopefully drop even more.