3 ms·

As a general guide you should aim to arrive: Long-haul and El Al: three hours before scheduled departure European flights: two hours before scheduled departure

• jdavis703 11y ago
  I usually arrive two hours early for long-haul international flights, and an hour early for domestic (or short-haul). Based on arrivials to the gate, I'm pretty sure others have lot smaller margins.
• Someone 11y ago
  If they say they need you 3 hours before, that means that they need a bit less time to process everybody, say 2.5 hours. Now, the only thing they need is that the queue doesn't run dry during those 2.5 hours. That means half the passengers can arrive 1 hour 15 minutes later, one in five about 2 hours later. If you are one of them, you help those coming early in the sense that they are less likely to have to waste time waiting in the check-in queues than in the slightly less annoying areas behind it (and of course, the early-comers help you to spend that hour in even less annoying circumstances) And of course, assuming they have the capacity to process all passengers leaving every day, large airports could parallelize processing over multiple check-in queues, get processing time down to 30 minutes or so (using 6 check-in queues and a smart way to distribute load across them), and ask you to be there 60 minutes before departure. I do not really see why they do not do that. There used to be a problem getting luggage on board the right plane, but with modern luggage processing, all bags end up on the same conveyer belt, anyways.