How much time do you really need between flights?

Airlines are still grappling with staff shortages, with delayed flights and slow baggage handling between connecting flights among the consequences. If your journey involves a connecting flight, how much time should you allow?

That’s the minimum connecting time (MCT), the least time required to get from your arriving flight to your next flight at the transfer point, and for your airline to do the same with your checked luggage.

As a rule of thumb, the MCT is 60 minutes between domestic flights, 90 minutes between international flights, but it’s not the same at all airports. If you’re transferring between international and domestic flights at Sydney Airport for example, in addition to the 10-minute journey time between terminals, you might have to wait up to 30 minutes for the T-Bus service.

That’s on top of the time it takes to collect your baggage, pass through immigration and customs in the international terminal then get through security in the domestic terminal. Even 90 minutes might be cutting it fine, especially if your incoming international flight is late. An MCT of 2½ hours is more realistic.

However at Melbourne Airport, once you’ve collected your luggage and cleared immigration and customs, transferring between international and domestic flights requires only a short walk. In that case, an MCT of two hours is sufficient.

When you take a journey that involves a connecting flight, you’re usually travelling on a single ticket with the same Passenger Name Record (PNR) for the entire journey. Your airline or travel agent is responsible for ensuring your MCT is adequate.

If you’re travelling on a split ticket, with two separate bookings you’ve made yourself, it gets complicated if you’re travelling on international flights. In that case you need to retrieve your baggage off one flight, pass through immigration and customs and check in for your connecting flight.

Exactly how long to allow for your MCT depends on several variables – the queues at immigration, how long it takes for your checked luggage to arrive, the time it takes to check back in and security processing times, but anything less than three hours could mean missing your connecting flight.