Sunday, March 14, 2010

Tight Connections

You know you are old when you feel exhausted in your bones.

Either I'm old.. or I was crazy to travel like that.

On Thursday, I left for Shanghai for Beijing. I had 2 meetings in Shanghai on Friday.

My plan was to leave the office at 4:30pm.. to catch a 7pm flight back to Beijing. Then arrive in Beijing airport at 9pm, have my dinner and then check in for my midnight flight back to Singapore at 10pm.

The plan was simple enough.. but I was a little worried the entire day in Shanghai. You see, in my experience, the evening flights from Shanghai to Beijing (and vice versus) tend to be late. This is because the airline does this to-and-fro thing between the two cities with the same aircraft. Any delays during the day gets "carried over" and the later flights just end up more and more delayed.

Fortunately, my flight from Shanghai that day was just delayed by about an hour. (I was lucky - the weather in the 2 cities were perfect that day..) So I still made it comfortably for my midnight flight.

The point of this post?

Make sure you leave enough time for delays when making connections, especially if you are flying between Shanghai and Beijing later in the day.

The Beijing T3 at 11pm at night. Nice, quiet and HUGE

2 comments:

Blur Ting said...

I do agree. Having tight connections makes one anxious. Then again, having too much time in between connection can mean having nothing to do especially in airports which have nothing much to offer for entertainment or shopping.

Open Kitchen Concept said...

Precisely! Although the BJ T3 does have some nice places to hang around - like Starbucks and Haagen Daz.. but they are closed at like 10pm so I was only left with McDonalds.. Heheh