Let’s be honest here, flying nonstop is just way better than flying anywhere with
stops. There are a few major reasons. Time – generally stops take more time –
not only do you have to take two planes you also have to wait in a different
airport for your next plane. Waiting is not fun.
The other big issue
is risk. When you take a nonstop flight you risk missing the plane once, and
you risk weather, mechanical issues, etc only once. When you have a stop you
have at least double the risk. Your second plane has all the risk of a normal
nonstop flight – but if your first plane has a problem, even a small delay, and
you miss your connection now you are in a host of trouble.
The problem of course is that in general nonstop flights can
be more expensive than stops – sometimes which doesn’t make a ton of sense
given often you’ll fly further for less money – supply demand at work. So how
do you quantify if the extra money or miles spend on a non-stop flight is worth
it?
Quantifying Vacation Time
There are a couple of nerdy ways to figure this out. One
would be – what is your vacation time worth?
Let’s say you work full time and get 15 vacation days per
year. The 360 hours of paid vacation time you get are worth a lot because
you’re working the majority of the rest of the time. The first question you can
ask yourself is how much you would pay for one more vacation day? If you know
the answer to that, all you have to do is divide that number by 12 (I’m
assuming a stopover adds about 2 hours of travel time on average) and you're done
– but let’s try and value your vacation days.
Work Hours Framing
Let’s assume the average traveler who is having this debate
works 5 days per week all year round. There are about 10 holidays that most
people get off, and then three weeks of vacation. That leaves about 47 weeks of
full work, or 235 days. If you work 10 hours per day, and make $100k per year –
you actually are looking at around $42 per hour (we’re ignoring taxes here,
forgive me) over that time period. It seems true, that if you could work for
the extra amount of time the stop over takes, you would at least pay $84 for
the nonstop flight, again assuming a 2hour average time addition (don’t forget
about all the extra risk!) Naturally if you make 50k, you can cut this number
in half, or 200k you can double this number. Time is money after all.
Some companies even let you store your vacation time or
redeem it at your salary level, so the equation becomes even more clear cut if
you have more vacation than you can use and want to redeem the rest.
Vacation Cost Framing
What about looking at the value in terms of the cost of the
vacation? Let’s say you book tickets somewhere that cost $500 round trip, and
you are staying for a 3-day weekend. The hotel you are at costs $250 per night.
The trip fixed costs are around $1250 for flights and hotel. During that time
you have 72 hours. On vacation, I like to sleep a lot – but let’s assume you
only sleep 8 hours per night, that leaves you with 48 hours of non-sleeping vacation
time. You’re basically paying $26 per hour for that time (between the flights and
the hotel, $1250/48= ~$26,) so you’d definitely be willing to pay $52 to avoid
two hours of extra travel time!
