01The four terms

Every pickup time this desk suggests comes from the same arithmetic, worked backwards from the departure.

1. 1. Terminal time. How long you want to be at the airport before the aircraft leaves. Two hours for a domestic flight, three for an international one, and there is no clever way around either.
2. 2. Drive time. Not the optimistic figure. The honest one for that airport at that hour, which the airport pages set out individually.
3. 3. Load time. Ten minutes for two people with two cases. Twenty for a family. Longer for a group with equipment, which is why the crew and equipment page treats it as its own subject.
4. 4. Slack. The part everyone deletes and everyone regrets deleting.

Add the four, subtract from the departure time, and that is the pickup.

02Worked, for a real example

A ten in the morning domestic departure from LaGuardia, two people, two cases, leaving from the west side of Manhattan on a Tuesday.

Ten in the morning minus three hours and ten minutes is a pickup at 6:50 am. It feels early. It is right, and on the two mornings a year when the approach jams, it is the reason you make the flight.

03Why the three airports need different numbers

Distance is the least interesting variable. What actually differs is how badly each run can fail and whether there is a way out when it does.

LaGuardia is nine miles away and the drive is usually 25 to 35 minutes. Its failure mode is sudden: a small number of parkway approaches with no realistic alternative and no rail line onto the airport. When it goes wrong it goes wrong all at once. So the slack matters here more than the drive time does, which is the opposite of what people assume about the closest airport.

JFK is fifteen miles away and 45 to 60 minutes off peak. Its failure mode is slow and predictable: a weekday evening turns a 50 minute run into 90. The airport itself then adds time, because the terminals sit around a one way loop and a wrong terminal is a full circuit rather than a short correction.

Newark is sixteen miles and 40 to 55 minutes, and almost all of its variance sits in one place, which is the Hudson crossing. A tunnel that is behaving adds nothing at all. A tunnel that is not adds half an hour and there is no clever alternative once you are committed.

04The morning and evening tables

For departures, the two hard hours are the weekday morning peak going out of the city and the weekday evening peak going into the airports. Both add roughly 30 minutes to any of the three runs, and the evening one is worse than the morning one at JFK in particular.

For arrivals the picture is different, because what you are waiting for is not the road but the airport. From wheels down to standing at a kerb with your luggage is 20 to 30 minutes with a cabin bag, 35 to 45 with checked bags, and an hour or more on an international arrival at a busy time. Nobody has ever cleared an international arrival with bags in fifteen minutes and it is not worth planning as if they might.

05What we do with your answer

If you tell us the departure time and ask us to work backwards, we will, and we will say which of the four terms we stretched and why. If you tell us the pickup time instead, we take it at face value and we will only say something if the number looks genuinely dangerous.

It is a booking desk, not a nanny. But if you ask for a 7:40 am pickup for a nine in the morning flight out of Newark on a Wednesday, somebody here will mention it before confirming, because the alternative is a telephone call from a tunnel.

06The one rule worth keeping

Slack is not padding. It is the only term in the sum that absorbs the things nobody can forecast: a closed lane, an incident on the approach, a lift out of service in your own building, a case that will not close.

Twenty minutes of it costs nothing at all. Not having it costs a flight roughly once every few years, which is the worst exchange rate in travel.

07Ask the desk to do the sum

Put the departure time in the notes field of the booking form and say you want us to work backwards. You will get a suggested pickup time with the arithmetic shown, along with a free quote. Or call +1 (646) 559-3082 inside hours and somebody will do it out loud. Monday to Friday 6:30 am to 8:30 pm, Saturday 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, Eastern Time.