JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If you’re taking a flight and want to save money or find better options, you might consider looking to airports beyond Jacksonville International. Some travelers will go to places like Orlando or even Savannah to catch a flight.
But that can become tricky when you factor in the odds of flight cancellations or delays and needing to drive several hours to an airport.
When we started looking between JAX, Savannah, Orlando and other major airports in Florida, we found differences with some having more delays and others having more cancellations.
“I prefer Jacksonville; it’s very convenient. You may have to go through Atlanta or Miami to get to the Caribbean,” said traveler Jolorie Williams.
But others are willing to travel before they travel to save some money, especially when booking tickets for multiple people like a family.
“I’m paying for three other people, so I’m more concerned about that,” said traveler Amanda Hult.
News4JAX analyzed Department of Transportation data from last summer — June, July and August 2022 — looking at these airports and:
- Flight delays
- Cancellations
- The best time of day to fly
Here’s what we found:
For delays, Orlando’s airport fared the worst: 13% of its flights were excessively late — that is, delayed by one hour or more. Jacksonville, Savannah, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa all had 10% excessively late with Fort Myers at 9% last summer.
Use the below interactive to explore delays hour-by-hour at the airports we analyzed for this story:
Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project and a former airline dispatcher, pointed to what’s called the hub and spoke system of airports.
Orlando, for instance, is a hub that feeds smaller airports, while Jacksonville is considered a spoke.
“Orlando being a hub, it’s not surprising that it has more delays because it only takes one or two flights to disrupt a whole bank of flights,” said McGee. “The best way to think of how airlines operate — hub and spoke — is to think about the cargo carriers like UPS and FedEx — and we’re the boxes. They bring all the boxes in, they sort them and they send all the boxes back out. That’s what they’re doing with us.”
For cancellations, we see the opposite trend of what we saw with delays. Orlando only canceled 1.7% of flights last summer while Jacksonville was higher with 3.1% canceled. Miami was slightly higher than that (3.2%) and Savannah had the highest percentage of cancellations of the airports we looked at with 3.9%.
“If you’re in a hub, then there’s always a chance that within a few hours there’s going to be another flight going to your destination. With a spoke operation, it’s much more difficult. They don’t have the resources. Can’t always swap another aircraft,” said McGee.
Use the below interactive to explore cancellations hour-by-hour at the airports we analyzed for this story:
Times of day to fly might be important to take note of. Flying earlier in the day is always better. For instance, look at Jacksonville’s numbers. Only 13% of flights are an hour or more late if you fly from 2 p.m.-3 p.m. That number grows to 20% in the evening.
We see similar jumps across the region. A quarter (25%) of Orlando flights between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. are at least an hour late.
There’s another trend we noticed — that the News4JAX Weather Authority helped explain — that involves flying out of Orlando specifically. Both Jacksonville and Orlando are especially susceptible to afternoon thunderstorms regularly throughout the summer, more so than other Florida airports because of their geography. Orlando had more delays than JAX.
So, if you’re not worried about money or time, you can probably just stay close to home at JAX.
McGee also pointed out that if your flight is canceled and the airline is only offering you a credit for another flight, Department of Transportation rules say you are entitled to a cash refund even if they don’t offer it. He said if you want cash back, you have the right to demand it.
Use the interactive below to compare on-time performance by airline for JAX since January 2021: