Travel & Leisure

Travel Special: Conquer Stress

Sign up for e-mail alerts. Many airlines offer this service, as do Travelocity and Expedia. Or you can go to flightstats.com, a free service that tracks flights and alerts you when things are going wrong. To have text messages sent to your cell phone alerting you to flight delays, sign up at flightstats.com. You can also find updates at fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp.

Leave at dawn. Get on the first available flight, preferably on a plane that spent the night at your airport. The biggest factor controlling delays is not where your plane is going, but where the aircraft assigned to your flight is coming from. Always call the airline before you leave for the airport and ask the agent to tell you the aircraft number of the plane assigned for your flight, and then ask for the status of that aircraft tail number. If you're heading to Los Angeles from Miami in two hours but the aircraft assigned to your flight is in Caracas…you're not going. To find out how to talk to a real live agent for any given airline, go to gethuman.com.

Get creative. If, despite using these strategies, you find yourself imprisoned for hours in an aluminum tube on the tarmac, you may have to resort to extreme measures. First, passengers who claim to be sick can be removed from the plane. I'm not advocating fraud here, but I could make a case that "sick and tired of being stuck on the runway" is a recognized medical malady, and I can't imagine any judge failing to sympathize. If you're more inclined to be a citizen journalist than an amateur actor, you can whip out a video camera. It gets the crewmembers' attention (they know they're likely to end up on YouTube, if not CNN), and you're not doing anything illegal. It worked for David Ollila one night in June, after his Comair flight from New York to Detroit was stuck on the ground for nearly four hours. Ollila interviewed the pilot on camera, and the pilot threatened to call the police. "That's an excellent idea," the cameraman responded. Sure enough, the cops came, everyone was let off the plane, and Ollila was cleared of any wrongdoing. Third, there's the lawyer approach: Claim false imprisonment and demand to be released. After being stranded for nearly nine hours on a Northwest flight in 1999, passengers sued and Northwest settled for $7 million. Ever since, airlines have taken the words false imprisonment very seriously.

Take 'em to court. In what could be the beginning of a trend, a woman named Jane Waun sued Spirit Airlines in small-claims court after the airline canceled her flight out of Detroit, stranding her family. In July, she won a $1,350.75 judgment, which reimbursed her for hotel and meal costs, a lost night at her destination, and the tickets she had to purchase on a different airline.

Take the train. The surefire way to avoid flight delays: Don't fly. On short-haul routes (e.g., Los Angeles to San Diego, or New York to Boston), don't even think of get­ting on a plane. Go with Amtrak. I recently raced a friend from downtown Manhattan to Washington, D.C. Our destination: 17th and K streets in D.C. We both left at the same time. He went to LaGuardia for the Delta shuttle. I headed for Penn Station and Amtrak's Acela. I beat him by 48 minutes. My fare on Acela: $172. His fare on the shuttle: $276.

Ship your bags. Always ship your bags. Send them via FedEx, UPS, or DHL. Even in the best-case scenario, checking your bags means you'll have to wait 20 to 40 minutes for them to appear on the carousel. Then you'll wait in line for a cab with everyone else who checked a bag. Worst-case scenario: Your checked bags go to Vegas while you go to Portland. And you know what happens to things that go on to Vegas.

Avoid major hubs. Use alternate airports. If you can fly into or out of these secondary airports, you'll reduce your chances of being delayed: Dallas Love Field, instead of Dallas/Fort Worth; Oakland or San José, instead of San Francisco; Houston's Hobby Airport, instead of Bush Intercontinental; and New York's Long Island MacArthur, instead of LaGuardia or Kennedy.