That 28-minute connection you just booked—gate change, terminal hop, boarding already underway—used to be exactly what airlines wanted to sell. For years, shaving minutes off itineraries helped flights float to the top of old-school search displays, where “fastest” often meant “first page” and “first page” meant sales.
Now the ranking game is different, and so is the customer. American Airlines network planning chief Brian Znotins says he has stopped obsessing over one- and two-minute schedule wins, because modern platforms surface “best” tradeoffs instead of simply the shortest elapsed time—and American’s own data suggests travelers are increasingly choosing longer connections on purpose.
Airlines no longer have to be ‘on the first page of the display of flight choices’ in the same way any longer. It used to be that the shortest total travel time options would appear first, and longer connections could get pushed to a second page that nobody would see. But modern systems (like Google) have their own algorithms for what’s best and what comes first.
And passengers often no longer want the fastest total travel time. Some customers don’t notice and wind up surprised, stressed (trying to make a connection) and inconvenienced (when they don’t, or when their bags don’t). But others purposely avoid 25 minute connections that involve a change of concourse in Phoenix, knowing that their next flight is already boarding when their inbound lands – if it’s even on time.
The excellent Brian Sumers in his (worthwhile) paid newsletter interviews American Airlines network planning head Brian Znotins about the airline’s reconfiguration of its schedules at Dallas-Fort Worth with a bet that they’ll make more money with a more reliable operation and Znotins actually shares data around customers preferring longer connections than they used to.
“Twenty years years ago, I would have been a zealot about elapsed time and display on GDSs,“ Znotins said. “I would have been like, [it’s] true [that] nobody buys a ticket because one’s six hours and two minutes and the other one is six hours. But if I fall off that first page on the GDS, that was a really big deal.”
Sure, GDS placement still matters. But most modern search platforms employ proprietary algorithms to rank flights. Google Flights, my preferred search site, shows me the “best” options, not the fastest one. “By default, Google shows you the flights that offer the best trade-offs between price, convenience, and ease of booking,” Google explains.
American’s website does something similar. “It comes up with nonstop and fare and time of day — and not elapsed time,” Znotins said. “Everywhere I look, elapsed time doesn’t seem to be the second-most important thing anymore. It’s somewhere in the mix. And so I’m not as hyper-focused on squeezing those one- or two-minute improvements out of my itineraries than I was before.”
Customers may also prefer longer connections. I’ve heard anecdotes about people who book long layovers on purpose, fearing lost bags and misconnections, but Znotins put some data to it, using predictions from American’s model, which looks at the last two decades of passenger data to predict what people will book.
That model calculates that American should have about 9,000 passengers who book a 40-54 minute connection at DFW on an average day. “In reality, when we look at the actual demand we got for our flying versus what the model thought we were going to get, it was 4 percent lower than that, in that window,” Znotins said.
The model also predicted that about 19,000 passengers would book connections between 55 and 84 minutes. That number is 8 percent higher. “So what it says is, when people are buying their tickets, something else is helping to make their decision, not just elapsed time.”
Airlines used to design schedules to win the first page of flight search by minimizing elapsed time. American Airlines data suggests travelers now choose longer connections for reliability—and the Dallas-Fort Worth schedule rebuild is enabled by that shift.
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