Ways to make life easier at the airport during Labor Day weekend

Over the weekend, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported a mysterious IT outage that forced it to isolate critical systems, causing congestion at the airport. With another travel season approaching for Labor Day Weekend, how should travelers best prepare themselves?

AAA Travel senior vice president Paula Twidale joins Wealth! to break down how travelers can avoid a headache at the airport this Labor Day weekend.

To travelers, Twidale offers: "First of all, always have the app for your airline and also look at FlightAware and track your flights and get there early...Hopefully folks have purchased travel insurance. Protect your investment. It's a nominal item to protect, and you know you're going to have some trip interruptions. So if you're delayed and your flight gets canceled for some reason beyond your control, you're going to incur extra expenses and have to overnight."

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

You know, it's really interesting, especially coming off of the news of just yesterday with what was taking place at Seattle Tacoma Airport.

Should people as they are even getting ahead of some of that Labor Day travel and trying to make sure that they get somewhere early or they just get to the airport early, get through TS A if you do run into uh a speed bump or an an outage or any type of issue along that way, what do you need to be remembering about what your rights as a passenger as a traveler are and where you can also continue to have communication with everything from the airport all the way into who your airline operator is as well.

Well, yeah, yeah, you make great points.

Now, first of all, always have the app uh for your airline and also look at flight aware and track your flights and get there early and there's some things should be beyond your control.

We hope to think with all the advice that we've been giving all year long in travel to.

Hopefully folks have uh purchased travel insurance, protect your investment.

It's a nominal item to protect and you know, you're gonna have some trip interruptions.

So if you're delayed and your flight gets canceled for some reason beyond your control, you're gonna incur extra expenses and have to overnight.

We hope that those people going in and out of Seattle that they didn't have a cruise that was disrupted.

But some of the things become, if it's weather or something beyond your control for an airline, it becomes force majeure and you can't, you can't have control over that and you as a consumer are going to be liable for those expenses.

So travel insurances, there's cancel for any reason.

Insurance.

There's a lot of different elements of travel insurance that we encourage people to have.

But more importantly, if you're in the situation now, plan ahead, get there early, keep track of your flight, track the inbound flight, keep in touch with the airline through the airline app to, to know that um if some, some flight is late, so you wanna get in line and have access maybe to an 800 number as well as online access to make changes accordingly that you may need.

All right, Paula Thad, who is the AAA Travel Senior Vice President, Paula.

Thanks so much for these very actionable tips and tricks for all of those who are gonna be traveling this weekend.

Appreciate it.