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Should I take care about the transit time when booking a flight ticket with same airlines.Or Not!

I am already booking with the same airline, and they should know that xx minutes are enough for the passenger to transfer from one gate to the other and for luggage transportation between two airplanes. if the xx minutes are not enough then they would not make it an available ticket!! sometimes I find just 40 minutes transit in huges airports like Amsterdam or Heathrow with same airlines. is it really enough for my luggage to be transfered to the other airplane!

To be more specific with my question; Should I be worried when booking these type of tickets? or it is safe because its with the sane airlines?

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    I do my very best to avoid connections with less than an hour between them. If your connection is 40 minutes, and you takeoff 30 minutes late on your first flight, then you're almost certainly going to miss your connection. And, even if you do make that connection, there is almost no way your bags will get from one plane to the other in under 10 minutes.
    – Matthew Herbst
    Jul 24, 2015 at 21:16
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    My philosophy is, it's air travel: you will get disruption. You can pad your connections by one hour or three hours or 12 hours, at some point in the year you will be sitting in an airport hotel somewhere no matter how you plan it. Therefore, I take the risk of losing time later, rather than pay the premium in time now. Most of the time, either I make the original connection or I am put on the next flight (that a more cautious person would have chosen) anyway. I don't take checked luggage usually.
    – Calchas
    Jul 24, 2015 at 23:29
  • It's "safe" in the sense they'll put you on a later plane--but this is on a space-available basis.
    – Loren Pechtel
    Jul 25, 2015 at 23:17

2 Answers 2

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It's worth considering. There is no such thing as perfectly "safe" in this regard, only varying levels of risk.

Typically the airline will allow enough time that the transfer can be made, including luggage, etc, if the first flight arrives on time and everything goes as planned. But it's not a guarantee. If the first flight is delayed for any reason (which is entirely possible) then you may very well miss the connection. The airline is not promising to hold the second flight for you, or anything like that. They do promise to put you on their next available flight to your destination. But if those flights are infrequent, or if they are all full, you may wait for quite a while; you will not have priority over passengers originally ticketed on those flights.

Depending on the cause of the delay and the local laws governing your airports or airlines, you may receive compensation money, or reimbursement for your meals and lodging during the delay; or you may not.

So it's up to you to weigh the risks and benefits. How important is it to arrive at your destination with the shortest possible layover (in the best case)? How much cheaper is this itinerary, compared to others with longer layovers? How much of an inconvenience would it be if you missed the connection? How late in the day is your connection, and how many more flights are there to your destination? How often is the first flight late? (Usually this statistic is published somewhere.)

Consider all these factors, and then decide if a short connection is an acceptable risk for you. That's the only meaningful sense of the word "safe".

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  • There are also other possible reasons for delay outside of the airline's control which may or may not oblige them to honor their itinerary. Half the customs agents may be home sick with the flu, or three 767-400s worth of passengers from other airlines may have been delayed in arriving, so now all of them, and you, are trying to get through immigration/security/whatever at the same time, etc.
    – Flimzy
    Jul 25, 2015 at 15:09
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There is no absolute answer to this question. In theory, the airline does not like missed connections because they have to find some way to re-accommodate you to your final destination, so they have every incentive not to schedule connections that are too tight to make. In practice, there are lots of missed connections every day, especially when the first flight is late.

Personally I try to only book these tight connections if I know there are additional flights later in the day that I could be switched onto if the first flight is late.

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