Logan & airports
Why an international arrival is always an estimate
The aircraft lands at a knowable moment. Everything between that and the arrivals hall is outside anyone's control, including ours.
On a domestic arrival, the gap between landing and kerb is fairly predictable. On an international one it is not, and the variance is large enough that treating it as a fixed number is how pickups go wrong. Immigration queues depend on how many wide-bodies landed in the same half hour, which is not something you can plan around at booking time.
Book the flight, not the time
The single most useful thing you can do is attach the flight number and let the operator work from it, rather than picking a pickup time that looks about right. An estimated time on an international arrival is a guess dressed as a commitment, and it is the assistant who ends up owning that guess.
Longer grace on the ground
Good operators apply a longer free waiting window to international arrivals than to domestic ones, precisely because of this. Ask what yours is before you need it. If the answer is the same for both, the operator has not thought about it, and you will find out at month end.
Global Entry changes the shape of the problem
A traveller with expedited entry can be at the kerb remarkably fast, which creates the opposite failure: the car is not called forward yet because nobody expected him for another forty minutes. Worth noting on the traveller's profile so dispatch positions accordingly.
When a greeter stops being optional
If the arriving passenger does not know the airport, does not have a working local mobile, or is arriving into a language they do not speak, curbside coordination breaks down. A greeter inside the hall is not a luxury in that situation — it is the only reliable way for two people to find each other.
Questions
Commonly asked
Should I pad the booking time to be safe?+
No. Padding creates a car waiting for a passenger who is already out, or a passenger waiting for a car that was told to come later. Give us the flight and let dispatch hold the timing.
What if the traveller has no working phone on landing?+
Tell us at booking. We will send a greeter to the arrivals hall rather than relying on a text that cannot be sent.
Ready when you are
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