I'm heading to Washington in December for a conference. The flight that I am looking at has an hour between the inbound and outbound fligts. Is this possible at JFK? The first flight is inbound on Delta and outbound on American. The return flights are both Delta. I will only have carry-on luggage.

I definitely wouldn't try the inbound. You have to change terminals from Delta to American (3 to 8 I believe). Plus JFK is notoriously bad for delays (as are all the NY airports). Lastly in December, bad weather risks too.

I was watching some travel writer on the Today show this morning he said something like you should never book a connecting flight with less than 1h45m time between the two these days.

Thanks Kim - that was helpful!

Now can anyone tell me why it is more expensive to fly to Washington than it is to fly to San Diego?

Who knows??

You can fly from Orlando to Oakland cheaper than Orlando to San Francisco. It's the other side of the bay for crying out loud and that's on the SAME airline!!!!??? BTW, via BART, it's the same time to downtown SF.

With that logic, you should have your answer!!

Jerry,

Where did you look for flights? I was curious about your fare comparison as well as having to change at JFK. So - for the heck of it, I just went to kayak.com, made up some dates, and found several non-stop flights from Toronto Intl. to Baltimore/Washington (BWI) at a little over $500 (US). I believe most of them were on United, though Air Canada seemed to have some also. Fares to San Diego were several hundred dollars more.

Ann

Ann - the flights to BMI were far less expensive but it would be almost $ 300 to rent a car or $ 128 one way for a cab/shuttle to the convention site (the conference is in Maryland outside of DC). I ended up with flights from Buffalo into DCA on Delta for $ 370. The flights connect through JFK, I took Kim's good advice and made sure I had at least 2 hours.

Jerry, it's crazy - and I was just thinking about this yesterday. One of the issues with the airline industry is the different price structures. I mean, it should cost, x dollars to fly a plane from Newark to West Palm Beach. You figure out your profit margin (whatever that may be 10 to 50 percent), tack that on to "x" then divide by the number of seats on the plane and come up with a price for everyone, all the time. My cost of a bus ride to NYC doesn't change based upon month or day of week (though there is a discount on the train for off-peak travel times), so why should plane prices vary so much? Yet, I've paid anywhere from $180 to $350 to fly to Florida within the last five years (and could have paid as much as $500) and oddly enough, the $180 was the most recent. I've also flown to San Diego for half the price of what it would have cost me to fly to Savannah.

Now that said, Chris tells me that a plane uses most of it's fuel during take off and landing, so not sure how much of a role distance plays in actual cost but still ... could you imagine how much easier this would all be if an airline just charged the same amount for each seat (barring first class)?

Jerry, BWI is one of our better connected airports for ground transportation. It has a rail station that makes it easy to get to DC and other parts of the metro area.

National (okay, Regan National) has the metro, which goes pretty far out into Maryland. Is your conference location near a metro station?

I don't know Ellen - it is at the huge Gaylord conference centre. I shall have to look into that further.

Ah, I know where that is. I always assume Maryland means north of DC but that's not always the case.

You can get there by mass transit but it means taking the metro from the airport for a few stops (three or four, I think), then switching to another metro line for several stops, then switching to a bus to the resort. At that point even I, an avowed mass transit user, will go for a cab, especially if it goes on an expense account.