How the planner finds it
- A table of about eighty airports carries the realistic way into town: mode, journey time and a dollar band. Beauvais is a 75–90 minute coach at $18–$22, Luton is the DART plus Thameslink at $15–$26, Heathrow is the Elizabeth line at $8–$17, Bergamo is a 50-minute bus at $10–$13.
- Both ends of every flight leg get one; connections are excluded, because you do not leave the airport on a connection.
- The midpoint of the two bands is added to that itinerary's effective price inside the optimizer. That is what makes an out-of-town airport compete fairly, instead of winning on a headline it does not deserve.
- The trip total is reported as both money and time: a dollar range plus the hours you will spend in transfers.
- Airports missing from the table are listed by name rather than silently counted as free.
Worked example
Airport transfers on the example plan
from the example plan- Transfers, both ends, every flight leg
- +$79 to +$229 per person
- Time spent getting to and from airports
- 8h 20m across the trip
- Airports with no transfer data
- None on this plan
- As a share of the $1,214 fare
- 7% to 19%
Up to $229 and a working day, on a trip whose entire airfare is $1,214. That is the argument for letting the optimizer see it: an airport ninety minutes from town is not the cheap option it looks like on a fare grid.
When it does not work
- Public-transport bands assume public transport. Four people with luggage at 6am are taking a taxi, and the taxi is not in the band.
- About eighty airports are covered. Anything else adds nothing and is listed as unknown rather than assumed free.
- Transfer times are typical, not worst case. Engineering works, strikes and overnight gaps in service are not modelled.
- It is a per-person cost that does not scale like one — a taxi split four ways behaves very differently from four train tickets.
- The hours matter as much as the dollars, and only you can price your own time.
Risk
No risk
One booking, normal rules. Nothing here can be taken away from you.