How we source, verify and refuse figures

Where a figure is allowed to come from

Every number on the site is tagged with one of eight kinds of authority. The tag is not decoration: a figure that cannot be given one does not ship.

Regulation

quoted from the regulation that sets it

Carrier contract

the carrier's own filed Contract of Carriage

Carrier plan

the customer service plan the carrier is required to publish

Carrier published

a policy page the carrier publishes itself

Airport operator

published by the airport itself

Federal dataset

a federal statistical release

Platform published

the platform's own help or pricing page

Our allowance

our own estimate — nobody publishes this figure, and we say so

The last one matters most. Where we have had to supply a figure ourselves — a walking allowance inside a terminal, for instance — it is labelled as ours and kept separate from the airport’s own published time. Our estimate is never folded into somebody else’s number to make it look sourced.

Two different claims, never mixed

“Verified” is doing two unrelated jobs on most websites, so we split it.

Carrier policy pages get the first and not the second, because several carriers refuse automated requests outright. Claiming an automated check we cannot perform would be the more comfortable option and the false one.

The federal delay data

Delay and cancellation figures come from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which carriers file under 14 CFR part 234. The window currently published here is May 2026. BTS releases about two months in arrears, which is why the most recent weeks are never shown.

• Nothing is published off fewer than 300 flights. Below that the figure is withheld, not rounded to zero.
• Scope is domestic US scheduled service. Mexican and other international carriers do not file here, so they are absent rather than shown as perfect.
• Delay causes are reported as the carriers file them, and we separate the share the airline caused itself from weather and air-traffic control.
• Each month is stored as its own file, so when BTS revises history the change is visible in our own record rather than silently overwriting it.

Why some airports show transfer times and most do not

Transfer minutes appear for 4 airports, because those operators publish the minutes themselves and we can point at the page. Another 37 airports have coverage with no transfer figures at all.

For those, the connection calculator starts empty and asks you how long the transfer takes. Your answer is used for the arithmetic and recorded as yours. The alternative — quietly pre-filling a plausible number — would turn our guess into something that looks like a published fact the moment somebody screenshots it.

What we refuse to calculate

This is the part of a methodology worth reading. Anyone can list their sources; the useful question is what happens when the sources run out.

What happens when the law changes

The statutory dollar amounts move with inflation, and a site quoting last year’s cap is worse than one quoting none. A job runs daily against the live text of the regulations and fails if a figure we publish is no longer there. It currently watches the denied-boarding caps of $1,075 and $2,150, and the baggage liability floor of $4,700.

Carrier documents cannot be watched that way, so they get calendar review instead: contract extracts every 90 days, service-plan commitments every six months. Mexican amounts are pegged to the UMA, which is reset each February.

Where a figure we published turns out to have been wrong, the correction is shown on the page it affected rather than quietly edited out.

A worked example

The delayed-bag fee refund is a good illustration, because almost every summary of it online is wrong in the same way.

• The clock is 12 hours on a domestic itinerary, 15 hours on a shorter international one and 30 hours on a longer one. It is the itinerary that decides, not the leg the bag went missing on (14 CFR § 260.2).
• It starts when you got the chance to step off the aircraft at your final destination — not the scheduled arrival — and stops when the bag reaches you or an address you agreed to (14 CFR § 260.5(a)).
• Nothing is owed automatically until a mishandled baggage report is filed (14 CFR § 260.5(b)). Most write-ups omit this, and it is the step that actually decides the outcome.
• The refund is the fee you paid. We do not state an amount, because we do not have your receipt.

All four of those are enforced by tests, so the page and the calculator cannot drift apart from each other or from this description. The clock itself is here.

Who we are, and how we are paid

We are an independent travel assistance service. We are not an airline, not an online travel agency, and not a claims company: we take no percentage of anything you recover, and every tool here is free and needs no account.

Where our agents help with rebooking, that is a paid service and it is a separate decision from reading your rights. The rights content does not change based on whether you call.