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!
