The most common reasons travellers miss their flight are traffic, oversleeping and getting their flight time wrong.
Underestimating traffic/roadworks, oversleeping and not knowing the correct flight time costs the UK more than £223,000,000 a year in missed flights.
The team at Jetcost.co.uk undertook the research as part of an ongoing study into travel habits. 2,318 holidaymakers aged 18 and over, all of whom stated that they had flown at least once in the past year, were quizzed about their travelling habits.
Firstly, all respondents were asked ‘Have you missed any of your flights in the past 12 months?’ to which one in eleven respondents (9 per cent) stated ‘yes’. When asked what sort of trip they’d been attending at the time they’d missed their flight, the top responses were ‘a holiday abroad, minimum of 7 days’ (39 per cent), ‘a short break’ (33 per cent) and ‘a business trip’ (21 per cent).
All respondents who confessed to missing a flight were asked what had been the cause. When provided with a varied list of reasons why and asked to state all those that had affected them, the top five reasons for missed flights were revealed as follows:
Traffic/roadworks – 31 per cent
Oversleeping – 22 per cent
Getting the departure time wrong – 14 per cent
Struggled to find the correct gate – 13 per cent
Held up at customs/security – 7 per cent
All those who had missed a flight in the past 12 months were then asked to state roughly how much the missed flight had cost them, with the average being revealed as £87.
With ABTA stating that 56 per cent of hoildaymakers travelled abroad in 2016, and the Office Of National Statistics stating that there are 50,909,098 holidaymakers over the age of 18 living in the UK, that equates to 2,565,818 travellers having missed a flight, based on the findings of the study. At a cost of £87 per head, that’s a collective annual wastage of £223,226,166.
Of those who missed a flight, 51 per cent were able to fly out on a different flight the very same day, whereas 41 per cent had to wait for a flight until the following day. Just 8 per cent were unable to travel out on another flight and therefore had to cancel their trip.
