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What is the earliest flight you would book out of George Bush Intl. Airport?


cruiser1956
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Hi! We are sailing out of Galveston on Royal Caribbean. We can take advantage of priority departure from the ship. What would be the earliest flight you would book out of George Bush Intl. Airport? I see an 11:35 flight, and a 2:30 flight. My SO hates the stress of trying to cut the time short to make a flight, however, I don't want to sit in an airport for 4 or 5 hours either. Any thoughts?

Thanks!!!

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Given those two choices, I would choose 2:30.

 

In answer to your question, the earliest flight I would book with the cruise line's shuttle bus would be noon and hope for the best. If you arranged for other transportation, you could leave a lot sooner. The cruise lines always wait until the buses are full before leaving, so even if you exit the ship early you will still have to wait for the bus to fill up.

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We will be using private transportation, so does that change things?

 

Private transport helps, but I don't think I'd even want to try for the 11:30. Gmaps right at this moment (2:45 on a Saturday afternoon) lists the travel time from Port of Galveston to Bush Intercontinental at 1 hour & 9 minutes to 1 hour & 15, depending on your route.

 

So for the 11:30 flight, assuming you need to check bags, you need to be at the airport by 10 to be safe. Back-time from there by and hour and a half and you're needing to leave the ship at 8:30. That's pretty tight for a port that can sometimes have fog problems, and a city that has notoriously bad traffic problems.

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Here's the deal. I-45 has almost all the construction done heading down to Galveston. The past few weeks we've had little slow downs headed to the island. Return traffic has been sluggish after noon, but you'd be off by then.

 

If your transportation uses the tollway system or avoids the downtown area where one lane is closed through 2017 then you'd make the earlier flight. We carried friends from Galveston to IAH in less than 90 minutes.

 

Your problem lies at the airport. Sunday is a big travel day and IAH has been slow. I'm TSA Pre-Check and even that line has been long all summer.

 

I'd take the later flight and have a good lunch at the airport.

 

.

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We are flying into Bush on June 30 for our July 2nd cruise and our return flight is at 2:38. I chose the later flight because we will have a car to turn into Dollar Car Rental on July 9th. For us I checked flights to Hobby but coming from Palm springs, we got better connections to Bush plus we will be meeting friends on June 30th off the I 69 S/US 59 S for a few hours before arriving at our Hotel by NASA where we are staying until the morning of July 2 then drive to the EZ lot and leave the car.

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