This list comes out of my own departures as much as client trips, including the one where I found out at the curb that a car seat counts as a checked bag on that airline. Airport day goes wrong in predictable places, and almost all of them are cheaper to fix at home than at a counter.
The nine things I settle in advance
- Seats, before check-in opens. Families get seated together by default on some carriers and by lottery on others, and the child-traveler seating rules only apply to children under 15 on flights in one country. Set an alarm for check-in, and if seats are not together, fix it by phone rather than at the gate.
- Bag weights, measured at home. The standard limit is 23 kilograms or 50 pounds per checked bag, and a child's suitcase crosses it faster than an adult's. I weigh every bag with a 30-dollar bathroom scale; the fee at the counter is 60 to 75 dollars, which makes the scale the best money we spend all trip.
- One pouch for documents. Passports, boarding passes, insurance card and two photocopies of each live in the same place and stay there. The failure mode is a family of four at security with three adults digging through three bags while the fourth person holds everyone up.
- The transfer, timed twice. I measure the drive at the hour we would actually leave, add 30 minutes for traffic and 20 minutes for parking-to-gate, then book airport parking or a transfer ahead. Aim for two hours before a domestic flight and three before an international one.
- Food for the first four hours. Security rules allow food through the checkpoint, while liquids are capped at 100 milliliters per item. Snacks beat buying inside the terminal: a family of four eating airside spends 40 to 60 dollars on things they would have eaten at home anyway.
- Screens charged and downloads done. Everything downloaded at home on wifi, every device at 100 percent, plus a power bank and headphones for each child. The delay that hurts is not the two-hour wait, it is the two-hour wait with a dead tablet.
- A decision on the car seat and stroller. Gate-checked strollers come back at the aircraft door and cost nothing; car seats are usually a checked bag or a rental at 12 to 15 dollars a day. Renting beats checking one when you also have luggage, because it removes a bag from the count.
- Medication in the cabin bag. Prescription items, motion sickness doses and anything we cannot replace sit in carry-on, with a printed dose schedule. Motion sickness tablets need time in the system, so the first dose goes in roughly 45 minutes before takeoff rather than after the first queasy minute.
- The miss-the-flight answer. Before we leave I check the next flight on the same airline and what a same-day change costs, 75 to 150 dollars depending on fare. Knowing the answer means we react instead of argue, and the counter queue gets shorter when you already know what you are asking for.
The morning itself, in order
Breakfast happens at home, before anyone touches a bag, and we leave with thirty minutes more than the plan requires. Passports and boarding passes go in one hand, the stroller folds into the other, and anything that has to be dug out of a suitcase at the podium costs us our place in the line.
Inside the terminal, security comes first and nothing else does. If we clear the checkpoint with time spare, the reward is twenty minutes of sitting near the gate rather than a souvenir nobody asked for. I check the gate number and the departure screen twice, because a gate change with a stroller and two children is a ten-minute problem instead of a two-minute one, and the walk between the far gates at some hubs is longer than the coffee run that caused the delay.
The last hour at home
Keys, wallet, one pouch, one bag count against the reservation, and a photo of every passport page on my phone. I also put the hotel address and the first night's confirmation in my pocket rather than in a bag, because that is the piece of paper everyone needs exactly once, at the worst possible moment.
If only two items get done on a tight morning, they are the seat assignments and the bag weights. Seats decide whether the trip starts calmly, and weights decide whether it starts at 60 dollars per bag. Everything else in the list can be recovered at the airport for money or time.