In the last months I have been traveling quite a lot. I have been trying to optimize the process of traveling with the airlines as much as possible. Here goes some tips that can be useful, I would try to update this post time to time.
- Do always the on-line check-in. I meant ALWAYS. It is the easiest way to guarantee that you do not suffer overbooking. In addition, it speeds up the process at the airport, lot of airlines have nowadays a dedicated bag drop facilities.
- If you follow the advice of on-line check-in, the next mandatory thing is to use seatguru.com. Basically, the web site offers you the possibility to check any type of plane (per airline), and to see the best seats available (in addition to the first class). Hence, you could find what is the best seat to select in your check-in. Most of the planes have around 6 seats, in which due to the seats distribution you will have extra space for the legs or wider seats.
- Invest in a travel pillow, it is worth of each penny. Although the size of it can be inconvenient, it would fit in your hand luggage.
- If you need to use Internet in the airports, convince your company to use iPass.com. I tried (and fail miserably) different services for WiFi roaming. None of them worked as expected. Nevertheless, iPass works out of the box, just connect and click, nothing else. I would not be doing advertising of a commercial product if it does not work so well. So if you have the chance, convince your employer to use it, you will save tons of extra costs in roaming services.
- Bring your own food. Yes exactly, cook something for the trip. To bring a tupperware or fruit is trivial, and there is not restriction (as far as I know) to bring cooked food with you. The food in the planes sucks, it has been doing it for the last 90 years, and it looks that it will continue in that way.
- Travel points. For a while I did not care at all. But it works. Sing-in in some airline club that has belongs to some big alliance with other airlines. You get points for each fly you take, and at the end those points can be really useful. Most of the time, people ignore this (I did), but the logic is quite simple: you just sign-in once, and every time you came back from a fly, you just need to add your points to your account. Most of the companies offer 3 to 6 months as window period to add the missing points, so no excuse.
- Identify your luggage. Even if it sounds obvious, it is not. Always that I visit the baggage claim area, you can see how 80% of the people looks several times to their suitcases, trying to verify if it is the correct one. In addition, it is not so uncommon to hear about cases in which someone took the wrong suitcase to home. Protip: just use tape. A small band tape will do the job. It is faster & and easier than writing your name in a sticker + it is visible from the distance, so you can be ready to grab your suitcase/s when needed.