Your plane has landed on the tarmac and taxied to the terminal building. You breathe a sigh of relief, as you’re almost at your destination – right?
Depending on the airport, and the business destination transfer times, you might have a bit longer to wait before you finally get to your accommodation. It only takes, on average, 15 minutes to get from aircraft to airport exit at Flughafen München Airport. However, travellers face a 120 minute wait to get to the airport exit at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. Then, add in airport transfer times to city centre accommodation, and the total extra travel time is 47 minutes and 159 minutes respectively – a rather significant difference!
To help you find out whether you’re in for a long wait or will breeze through the airport to your accommodation, we’ve pulled together the data on average transfer times for the top 20 business travel destinations and uncovered some interesting finds.
Average airport transfer times
It takes, on average, 80 minutes to get from aircraft to city centre accommodation in the top 20 business travel destinations. This breaks down as an average 46 minutes to get from aircraft to airport exit and 34 minutes to travel into the city centre.
Knowing whether your next business travel destination falls above (or below) this average could be the difference between having to run to make your meeting or finding yourself with a lot of unexpected free time.
Airports to allow extra time for transfers
When combining aircraft to airport exit times and airport to city centre transfer times, Guangzhou comes out at a lengthy 159 minutes – a staggering 79 minutes above average. For unprepared business travellers, this above average transfer could easily mean arriving very late at your appointment.
Guangzhou isn’t alone. Los Angeles (113 minutes), London (100 minutes), Moscow (100 minutes) and Paris (93 minutes) all have long transfer times. This means plans for a quick one-day fly-in, fly-out meeting have to turn into an overnight stay to make sure you get everything done.
Want a quicker transfer? These are the speediest airports
As business travellers, we need to go where work takes us. But, sometimes, this can mean travelling to an airport with much faster transfer times.
In Singapore, for example, you can be off the plane and in your hotel room in an average 46 minutes. And Munich isn’t far behind, at 47 minutes. Bangkok, Madrid and Berlin all also take under one hour to transfer. In theory, you could transfer 2.5 times at these airports in the time it takes to make one transfer at Guangzhou.
*Transit times represent average times only and may in reality be more or less depending on a variety of circumstances including aircraft gate, international versus domestic arrivals and time of day. Data sourced from airport websites or online airport consumer forums.