I don’t. Now to be clear, your question stated ‘you’ meaning me. So I will answer from that perspective.

When travelling alone on a domestics flight, my objective is to arrive at the gate one or two minutes before I am called to board.

When travelling alone, I don’t check luggage. Travelling with my wife, especially vacation means checking luggage. I lost that battle years ago. She will also wish to randomly stop at shops in the terminal. I know from years of experience that there is no point in dissuading her.

Travelling with my octogenarian mother is a very relaxed ‘let’s take our time’ affair, so we’ll arrive in plenty of time to grab breakfast or a snack at the business class lounge as my status allows for my and a guest’s attendance regardless of seat class, and then wander to the gate at our leisure. Oh, she doesn’t check luggage either, can pack for a two week trip in a small carry-on roller. Impressive.

Traveling alone though.. that’s when we’ll see some high efficiency and speed.

If I have an 8 AM flight, I leave my house at precisely 7 AM. It takes 13 - 15 minutes to drive to YYZ - Pearson Airport Terminal 1. There are three routes that I can take that all are roughly equivalent time and I check with the driving app Waze for the best route as I start my car.

Boom! At the airport by 7:15, park at one of two spots at the airport. Really. Level 7 row D spot 9 or level 8 in a weird spot that doesn’t really look like a spot, but is, and it’s right near the stairs.

Oddly.. if I park on 7 I take the elevator down to the 5th, but if I park on the 8th I take the stairs down to the 5th.

I stay on the gate level from the parking garage and as I approach the lower security area I decide if the priority queue is moving fast enough or if I should race up the stairs and use the departure level security area. At departure level I quickly ascertain if the priority queue or the trusted traveller queue is moving faster. These days the priority queue moves quicker. Time should be about 7:20.

Either way, my target is 10 minutes to clear security and 5 minutes to the gate, but often will stop and get my shoes shined. Some gates are close, but can easily get to gate 45 in 5 minutes.

I never run. But do walk fast.

Although flights are scheduled for a 30 minute boarding time, they rarely ever start that early. Usually 25 minutes before.

The best feeling of efficiency and efficacy is when I hear them call for zone 1 boarding as I walk up to the gate.

Booya!

I like to arrive reasonably early so that I have no hassles with check in and immigration and security. I have metal protheses so I always set off the metal detectors when going through security. When I am driviing a significant distance to the airport and have a rental car to return you can never accurately predict what the traffic will be like or how long it will take to return the car so I tend to assume a relatively worse case scenario and often find it doesn’t take anywhere near as long as expected.

On occasions I am flying domestically then internationally on the same day. If I can I will get an earlier domestic flight so that I don’t miss the flight should there be a problem with my domestic flight. This of course gives a lot of time in the departure airport.

On many flights it doesn’t matter as particularly when I leave Australia I will be in Business Class and I routinely check in as soon as the check in opens and then go straight through security and immigration and to the lounge. In the lounge I will relax, do some work and eat and drink. This allows me more time to rest on the plane and depending on time more time to sleep.

So for international flights I would plan on arriving about three hours before departure. If it is an Australian I would plan on being there about an hour before departure. Traffic etc is more predictable and it is a simple matter of bag drop and then security - neither of which take a long time andpriority will be given to those on flights with a short time before departure.

At my last job, I traveled a lot (75k FF miles last year and never left north America), but I would normally only check in early when I was at home or returning home from a hub airport (where there was a high likelihood of getting where I wanted, even with delays).

Here is the reason why:
I was returning home from a work trip with a co-worker. He checked in online, while I did not. By the mid-day, our airline was experiencing numerous flight delays and there was no way we would be able to get home on the same day. I found this out when I called the airline, so they booked us on a flight with another airline.

When we got to the airport, both of us went to the other airline's check in counter, and my coworker was unable to check in because our original airline had not sent his ticket over because he was still assigned a seat on the plane that wasn't going to make it. What ensued was a 30+ minute ordeal of going back and forth across the entire ticketing floor trying to get it straightened out.

In the end, we ended up having to go with our original airline because they refused to remove my coworker from the delayed flight, because another (much later) flight and connection became available. We ended up getting home 4+ hours later than we would have if we had been able to take the flight with the other airline.

In many airports, check-in timing does not correlate directly with your flight’s actual delay time. In other words, your check-in will close 40 minutes before the scheduled departure time, even if the airplane that is supposed to carry you to your destination is still at the departure airport.

The reasons are mostly about airport operations. Putting it simply, check-in desks need to be available for later flights, handling company’s employees have their own schedules/lunch breaks, and so on. Checking in on time does not imply that your flight is going to depart on time. Being smart by checking the inbound flight in a flight tracker app and coming up to the airport later won’t work either (unless your airline explicitly tells you so).

I don’t know, but until someone who does answers, I will guess:

In many cases the airline might serve the foreign point with only one large aircraft per day. So once a day there are some 300+ people to check in, most with significant luggage, all with various documentation that needs to be checked. Let’s assume it take 3 min/passenger. The last passengers need to be cleared 30 minutes before the departure. So 900 agent minutes or 15 hours. So they hire and train enough agents to have 6 on site for the flight, to allow everyone to be checked in in 2 1/2 hours. They could make the standard 2 hours, but then they would need 10 agents (working less hours, but you have to pay some minimum pay to encourage them to come to work).

Now, could the airline say 3 hours at spoke airports, but 1 1/2 hour at hub airports; or could they tell business class 1 hours, high status frequent fliers 2 hours, and 3 hours for the rest, or even names A-C 1 hours, D-F 1 h 15 min, etc. Sure. But many would get confused.

In fact, you could probably arrive 2 or even 1 hour before the flight (I have arrived when if shows check-in closed with no problem), but if everyone did the flight would leave late or with people stuck in line.

The most common reasons to check in early:

• Many airlines use time of check in as a tie-breaker when it comes to issuing upgrades or clearing stand by lists. Other factors (such as elite status, fare class, inconvenience, etc.) are typically bigger determiners. But all things being equal, the person who checks in first can have an advantage.
• On some airlines, e.g. United, some passengers can select better seats at check in for free.
• On Southwest, time of check in determines your boarding order. If you wait until the last minute you may be last to board and end up in a middle seat between two fat people.
• If you have a boarding pass in hand, as long as you can race through security and make it to the gate before they close the door, you'll probably get on. But if you get to the airport too late without having checked in, you might miss the check in window. In that case, you'll have to argue with someone at the check in desk because kiosk check in will have closed. That alone can take a lot of time with reduced staffing at airports these days.
• If you haven't checked in, you can get bumped from your flight without compensation if your flight is overbooked. Although agents are often relaxed about the check in windows, if the flight is seriously overbooked, it's easiest to bump you. (Plus, it's cheaper because they don't legally owe you anything.)

It gives you time to check your seat preferences rather than to discover when at the airport your travel agent hasn’t actually booked your seats when they say they have. This has happened to me a few times.

I guess it also gives the airline advance knowledge of who is going to be on the flight, vs someone who might be a no-show. I believe airlines always overbook seats due to the assumption that some people won’t show up.

I always check-in online, most of the airlines I use allow up to 48 hours advance online check-in.

And it’s one less thing to do when you’re at the airport. You can just go up to one of the check-in computerised terminals, get your boarding pass printed out - if you didn’t do that at home, and locate the checked baggage desks, or just proceed to departures if you only have hand luggage. These days you can even get your boarding pass saved to your mobile. I don’t trust that though, what if I haven’t got a signal when I get to the gate?I don’t believe the pass is stored locally on the phone, so you probably need a signal so the app can load your pass. It’s not something I’m prepared to risk finding out.

I'm quite surprised no one has mentioned the technical side of this, which is what I assume the asker was asking.

When you check in, the airline's day-of-departure airport control system (which is often related to but separate from the reservations system) performs a validation to make sure that your reservation and your ticket are in sync. If it is in sync, it'll spit out a boarding pass, signifying to the gate agent that you're paid up in full, all is well with the computer systems, and that you're OK to board the plane. If the ticket and the reservation don't match, it won't spit out a boarding pass, and the ticket agent will need to go in and finagle with things (fixing your reservation, reissuing the tickets, etc.) until things match.

It's really a holdover from the days of yore, when a ticket was a piece of paper with intrinsic value. The ticket itself didn't secure space on a flight for you; it simply showed that you had paid. Conversely, to guarantee space on a flight, you (or your travel agent) had to make a reservation, but that reservation was just an "earmark" of a seat on a given flight, and nothing about that reservation indicated that you had paid for the flight.

If you were alive in ancient times (i.e., more than two decades ago, prior to the development of e-ticketing) and booked a ticket for air travel, the procedure was that you would visit your travel agent, who would use their GDS computer terminal to look for space and make a reservation (holding you space on that flight); you would then pay the travel agent and they would issue you a paper ticket on carefully-controlled, very specific IATA-issued paper ticket stock. (The airline would bill the travel agent later, once your ticket was consumed.)

When you showed up at the airport counter, the agent looked up your reservation, compared it to your ticket, made sure it was valid, and then issued your boarding pass. (In even more prehistoric times, the travel agents didn't even have GDS terminals--they had to phone in their reservation requests. Check out the Wikipedia article on the Reservisor for some fun reading.) In those days, you could call to change or cancel your reservation, but that wouldn't do anything to the paper ticket sitting in your file cabinet; you'd have to then visit your travel agent or the airport counter (or for those of us who lived far from airports, there was even ticket-by-mail!) to exchange your ticket (which there was usually a fee for doing if it wasn't a ticket for an unrestricted fare).

So just showing up to the airport with a paper ticket meant nothing, as there could very well be no seat left for you if your reservation was for a different flight or had been canceled. Possession of the boarding pass signified to the gate agent that the ticket counter had verified that everything was in order and you had a matching reservation and ticket. (Also, in the paper ticket days, boarding passes would always indicate "FLIGHT COUPON REQUIRED," and so you'd usually hand both your boarding pass and your paper ticket to the gate agent when boarding. That's how the airline got paid for you flying the flight.)

The thing that most people don't realize is that today's airline processes are largely based on these legacy procedures. E-ticketing now eliminates the need for a paper ticket, but within the airline's computer system, there's still a separate "VCR"--the virtual coupon record storing virtual copies of the flight coupons (tickets)--and that VCR needs to match the PNR--the passenger name record storing the details of the flights you're currently reserved on and holding your seat on the plane from being given away to someone else) for you to fly.

It was set up this way for backward compatibility with the existing electronic-reservation-paper-ticket system in use in the 70s through the 90s, and it was simply unfeasible at the time to completely overhaul everything and go to a more real-time-database-driven system, and due to the massive install base and all of the many tendrils these systems touch (corporate booking portals, tens of thousands of travel agencies around the world, interoperability between the legacy airlines allowing them to rebook distressed passengers on each others' flights, etc.), it continues to be unfeasible to overhaul it in any significant manner, although some carriers have tried.

So, we're left with most legacy airlines having their employees using 1960s-era text-based interfaces with arcane commands (and not even any menus to guide them through! Google "Sabre commands" and you can see how horribly difficult it is to use, though old-hat airline agents who can type really fast swear it's the most efficient way of doing things) and making changes to PNRs and VCRs and all of that. The concept of "checking in" is part and parcel of that.

Other than that, yes, checking in does transmit some information to a few places. The load planners have you on record as flying the flight, so they'll account for your presence for weight and balance purposes, although this isn't typically done more than ~30 minutes before departure anyway, so checking in 23.9 hours or 31 minutes before departure is immaterial to that. At check-in, your Secure Flight information is verified with various DHS databases, and if they think you're on the No-Fly List, then no boarding pass for you.

On your end, checking in online usually allows you to do a few things that the day-of-departure airport operations system can do that the regular reservation system can't, such as perform same-day changes to a different flight, switch to seats that may have been held back for airport assignment, upgrade to a higher class of service for a discounted fee--all things that yesteryear would have had to be handled at the airport counter or departure gate podium. Depending on the airline and how well they've integrated their systems, there are some things that you can do yourself online that the airline's own phone reservation agents can't do, because you have access to the airport control system through on-line check-in and they don't!

Oh, a side note--if you've ever had a last-minute change made to your reservation (perhaps during irregular operations when a flight has been canceled) and tried to check in only to find an error message, that's the check-in system telling you that your PNR and VCR are out of sync. A ticket agent needs to reissue your ticket so that it matches your reservation. Sometimes (increasingly rare these days) that's such a time-consuming and painful process to figure out that the ticket agent will just print the ticket to paper, which will allow the computer to then (without having to make sure everything is in sync) spit out a boarding pass that says "FLIGHT COUPON REQUIRED" (just like in the old days), which lets the agent get on with boarding you on the plane and leaving the accounting department to figure out how to reconcile everything later. This is just a little bit of evidence that the systems really aren't much different than they were a quarter of a century ago. :)

If you want to read a little bit more about this from an airline employee insider, start at this discussion forum post (#15) and read on to the end of the page: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/alaska-airlines-mileage-plan/983077-online-check-problem-delta-ticket.html#post12247184

Happy flying!

PPBM.

Positive passenger bag match.

When you drop your bag on the belt, it goes to a TSA screening area before moving on to the airline’s bag room. The bag room has a belt from which baggage is sorted and loaded onto bag carts. The bag carts are then taken out to the plane and loaded. (Or ULDs are loaded directly on the plane.)

Depending on how busy the TSA checkpoint in the terminal is, its quite possible for your bag to beat you to the plane. Once its at the plane, it gets loaded in whatever random order the ramp agents grabbed it.

If you miss your flight, according to federal law, your bag must be offloaded before the plane can depart. This is done in an effort to curb both terrorism (to stop someone from checking a time bomb) and drug smuggling (by making it such that someone can’t simply drog a suitcase packed with marijuana and ship it.)

The problem is: no one knows exactly where your bag is. We know which cargo bin its in, but not where in that bin- and there can easily be 150 other bags in there. And the bin is frequently packed wall to wall, floor to ceiling. What this means is that we have to unload baggage until we find your bag before reloading everything else. This could easily cause a 30 minute delay.

For a flight to leave at the scheduled departure time, several things must be finalised well beforehand.

These include developing the flight manifest, which details the identification of every passenger, the collection and allocation of checked-in luggage, provision for the time needed for all passengers to have passed through airport security and arrive at the boarding gate as well as the time needed for passengers to board the plane, find their seats and load their carry-on luggage.

Obviously, the airline will need to choose a period well before the departure time in order to make sure that all of these are in place.

This is why the airline publishes and enforces the check-in close time.

Three hours is the norm and if I am travelling economy class then I like toi be at the airport three hours before departure. You have to be prepared to queue at check in, at Immigration, and at security and then at the departure gate. Some of these queues may be as much as an hour long. There is also the time that it takes to get from the check in counter to the departure gate. I recommend against changing money in the airport unless you know that the exchange rate and costs are the same as outside the airport - my only exception is leaving a country when I will exchange money because there are some currencies that cannot be converted outside of the country.

If your travelling Business Class then two hours is usually more than sufficient as there are seldom more than one or two people in front of you all the way to the aircraft and you get priority boarding as well. You have to check that you get Priority at Immigration and Security because if there is no priority you can have problems here. I am happy to be early because you have the opportunity to unwind and wait for a flight in the Business Class lounge. If there has been a significant drive to the airport or if I have a transit stop I will take a shower and freshen up so that when I arrive at my destination I have the feeling of being clean and refreshed.

My record from final arrival in the airport where I checked in bags, was with my suitcase for its security check, and then through Security and Immigration and to the Departure Gate on the plane was set in March 2020 in Bangkok Airport. I was in Business Class, with everything being facilitated by the check in staff who were expecting me , and time from processing to sitting at my seat was just under 25 minutes. It was very stressful.

Please pay attention since this is very complicated.

1. At curbside remove your luggage and place it on a luggage cart.
2. Wheel the cart into the terminal. This is when it gets complicated!
3. Proceed to the line, if there is one, for your airline.
4. Smile and politely greet the airline agent.
5. Present your ticket along with your photo ID. On an international flight present your passport.
6. While the agent calls up your reservation, place your luggage on the scale.
7. Wait patiently while the agent processes your reservation including seat assignment, if necessary, collects any luggage fees, etc.
8. The agent will then issue a boarding pass indicating your seat assignment, your departure gate, your report time, the flight departure time. (Based on this question, the agent may, with a bright highlighter pen, circle your seat number, flight number, gate, and report time. This is a free service for the intellectually challenged.)

Most airlines allow check in to start at 24 hours prior to the flight.

The latest check in time varies by airline, but usually they don’t want you to check in closer than roughly one to three hours prior to departure.

If you have a reserved seat, and do not intend to upgrade, it does not matter when you check in.

If you do not have a reserved seat, or want to upgrade, you should aim to check in as early as possible.

Flying Southwest? YOU SHOULD CHECK IN AT EXACTLY, PRECISELY 24 HOURS BEFORE DEPARTURE. Failure to do so will likely land you in the “C” group, resulting in an undesirable centre seat near the rear of the aircraft. That’s not fun. Set an alarm, tell your family, tell your friends, whatever. For Southwest, this is CRITICAL.

I don't have a great answer for this because to my knowledge, there is no reason currently. It's a legacy from older systems and I expect in the not-too-distant future, the check-in will be gone completely since it has lost all meaning for every airline except Southwest.

Historically, the check-in allowed the airline to be sure you were going to board the plane since you had to be at the airport to do it. Remember airlines used to page people who were checked-in and not present at the right time. They hardly do that anymore since "checked-in" means nothing.

The check-in also also transferred your reservation from central control to "airport control". Once you checked-in, you couldn't make any changes (except a straight cancellation) unless you were at the airport. That still exists today to a certain extent, except that you can now easily "cancel check-in" from your computer or smartphone on most airlines.

In summary: It's legacy, and now that you have such things as the "auto-check-in", where it automatically checks you in and e-mails you the boarding pass 24 hours before your flight -- you can imagine it disappearing altogether. Today, check-in amounts to little more than boarding pass delivery and it will continue to lose importance whether or not we still use the title "check-in".

I started travelling back when you couldn’t check in until you reached the airport. I still wait until I am at the airport to check in. To me it just doesn’t make sense to even have the option to do it before you actually get there.
Staff member at the gate notices they are two passengers short. They look on the computer to see if they have checked in. In the old days that meant the passenger had arrived at the airport and you paged them. Now it doesn’t mean anything at all other than they had internet access at some stage during the last 24 hours, so how long should the airline wait for someone who may not even be at the airport?

Not just with airports but with most such recommendations of arriving early to events and procedures my personal belief is that such recommendations are made for the chronically late peoples for whom 3 hours prior will translate into 2 hours or 90 minutes prior to the relevant event. If the airlines were to say 2 hours, even if that were the time actually necessary, then a number of people would arrive with perhaps an hour to spare and the airline would have to deal with the mess and expense of accommodating this tardiness. I say this as one of the people who pushes the envelope when it comes to showing up to the airport, having been the last person to board a plane almost a dozen times in my life, including needing a manual override to check in to my last international flight.

In the three hours prior to take off, it takes time to

• Check in, usually international flights require a physical rather than a digital boarding pass, plus checking of travel documents and dropping off any baggage.
• Customs, security checks which are increased compared to domestic flights.
• Finding the gate, often after customs and security you'll need to navigate through the duty free shops. You can also exchange currency if you're willing to get screwed by buying at the airport rather than at an outlet or a bank (or even pre-loading a card to make withdrawals at ATMs at the destination country
• Boarding, rather than being between 15–30 minutes prior to flying for domestic flights boarding often commences 45 minutes before the flight in several stages

The basic overall reason is that a lot of things can change prior to departure. The aircraft type can change, passengers can get re-booked, there will be no-shows, etc. Airlines seek to minimize that by limiting the time allowed prior to check-in. Once people start checking in, seat assignments become firm and the airline’s options are reduced. Even so, a lot can still change even just a few hours before a flight. While most casual travelers don’t realize it or even think about it, frequent travelers — particularly business travelers — often change flight plans on the same day of the flight.

Modern automation eliminates most of the problems associated with early check-in, which does allow some airlines to permit check-in several days prior to the flight. However, I generally only check in no sooner than I can be upgraded, if I already have a confirmed seat. The reason is that seat you really want may become available if you wait, if another passenger changes his travel plans.

• Long before the "heightened state of security I always showed up 3 hours early for flights. I only fly internationally so I am going to be 10-24 hrs in flight.
• You have 3 hours to discover you forgot your passport or ticket. 3 hours to get an upgrade or the best seat.Sometimes if you used frequent flier miles for an upgrade the records from central reservations have not made it to your local airport.
• All my tickets are non-refundable upgrades connected to travel deals involving hotels and rental cars. You miss your flight, or if the flight is delayed, you have to inform the hotel and rental car agency. In Rio de Janeiro hotel packages for Carnaval and New Years are non-refundable.You are 2 hours late without notice and $5000 is gone.
• In foreign airports coming home they may not announce the exact departure gate until the last minute. This is true of Heathrow, CDG in Paris and Rome Airport. No plane has ever left Rio on time.

You can’t check in “several days” before a flight. You can only check in 24 hours or less before a flight.

You can check ON your flight as early as you want — several months in advance if you want. Still, no point in doing that except one that I can think of. If the schedule changes such that a flight is canceled or rescheduled, the airline will make alternate arrangements for you. That new schedule may be acceptable to you and it may not. They (or the agent, if you used one) may call you or they may not. Sometimes the only way you’ll know is if you check on it yourself (e.g., on the airline’s/agent’s website or app).

Bag checking takes on average 5–30 minutes. I often check mine before I set foot in the building, utilizing the curb side check-in system.

What can take a fortune’s worth of time is getting through screening. Even with TSA Pre-check, I often have to wait in line for others who have no idea how anything works and ask the same questions that could have been answered with a little research ahead of time. Sometimes the TSA is short-staffed so the perks of “Pre-Check” go right out the window and everyone is made to operate out of the same single lane of traffic, regardless of their status. Hence the need to be quite early because you can miss your flight if your still in the security line, as the airline will not hold your seats nor hold up their departure time waiting for you.

Why can't you check-in after the check-in deadline for a flight, even if the flight will depart 1 hour later?

Who says you cannot check-in after an initial check-in deadline is a flight is delayed?

Although 99.99% of the time this is not an option I have seen check-in delayed when an inbound flight is also delayed. It happens rarely but in times of bad weather for example and lots of diversions there is a chance that check-in for a flight may not open until it’s departure can be confirmed.

Yeah, sure it us unusual, and could cause issues at some airports where, maybe, immigration provide limited services between certain hours and delaying check-in could mean that another essential service is not available. However it used to be common place for check-in not to open when there were flight disruptions.

In more recent times with on line check-in and self service check-in deferring check-in opening may not be an option any more… but the whole concept of “check-in” as in informing the carrier that you are at the airport, has changed and now people can check-in 24 hours in advance - which really means just printing boarding cards.

All that said it is up to the airline to decide when to close check-in and they can choose to be flexible as in the last example I will give.

A normal 11pm departure gets 90% of it’s passengers from inbound flights arriving before 8pm… but due to weather many of the inbound flights are delayed, including the aircraft scheduled to perform the 11pm flight. The airline could decide to defer the 11pm departure until midnight and keep check-in open until 11pm to allow the inbound passenger check in and catch their connection…. so in this situation you may very well be allowed to check-in after the initial check-in deadline has passed.

All this is to the benefit of the airline - but I have seen a delayed departure moved forward so the flight departed 15 minutes later and not the 1 hour delay initially announced. This was because an ATC slot became available.. so had the check-in been allowed to remain open there may have been people missing the flight because of it’s earlier than anticipated departure due to a shortening of the delay.

I have also seen check-in remain open in smaller airports (domestic flights) where they are just waiting for a few of the last passengers to arrive… even if check-in was due to close one hour before departure but it is 2 minutes walk from check-in to the gate, then the operator is not under time pressure but rather pressure to provide the best service to their customers rather than applying strict and unnecessary time rules.

I do think that in normal operations the airlines have to have reasonable time for their customers to pass through the various processes (security, etc.) and get to the gate in sufficient time and it is not unreasonable to close check-in even if the customer thinks that running to the gate with seconds to spare is OK… even if this does happen sometimes.

Booking a flight has never been that easy after the accessibility of internet. People's can book flights anywhere from the world with the access of internet and the flight websites or the agency. Anyone can book their flight 330 days before. But when it comes timely it's always a question of if you can book just before then take off? Yes you can blook a flight before depature there are so many company that are connected to the airways website who can give you the access of booking a flight before departure. You might wonder not only 4 hours but you can book flight at least 2 hours before the departure. Which makes the airways more convenience and exciting to get on time. Specially if you are an timely person or it is an emergency you can easily have a flight if only the flight is not full.

Photo: Times of India

Not only for the passenges but also having flights on time has a great importance because the who wants to fly with a single seat behind. No one. The airways and the airport always look for a packed flight and if this happens at the very last time as 2 hours before than they are also happy. Sometimes the pre booked passenges also withdrawn from the flight or get changed the flight date so that the flight gets emty but that is only for a certain time. And you might get lucky then. You might also think of what if the flight is packed and not getting chance to fly, well there is always a second chance of being fly. Try the very next flight or transit flights maybe. Your destination always ahead after airport.

Photo: Skyscanner

Having a flight just before the departure is life saving and sometimes money savings too. If you get stuck or delay the scheduled flight surely that is more expensive for you to stay at the airport which you might don't even know or not used to. So that is surely a very good initiaves by the airlines that one can book flights 4 hours before the flight departures but you just have to in time.

I think there’s likely no answer that applies to all airlines in all situations. Of the 3 possible answers (better early, better late, makes no difference), I suspect that with most major airlines on most longer flights, it doesn’t matter. Two reasons: 1) the larger airlines pretty well know when Economy is firmly overbooked and seats are going to need to be freed up; and 2) these larger airlines also have fairly well established criteria for who is going to be upgraded (ex., that airline’s frequent fliers in order of club preference). I always check-in early, often as soon as the check-in opens, and have received upgrades later at the gate, sometimes when actually handing over my boarding pass to board! I don’t think I would ever deliberately delay checking in just in hopes of a better shot at an upgrade. In some cases you’re just as likely to be risking your seat entirely if the flight turns out to be not only overbooked in Economy, but fully booked in all classes, in which case you’ll have nobody to thank but yourself as you patiently await the next flight…