We made it to Tampa! Soooo glad I did my homework ahead of time. That made all of the difference…. And being really, really lucky.
So how did it all go?
TL;DR We made it through immigration, customs, and security at Dallas Fort Worth airport in 14 min and 11 seconds. With a two hour and 13 minute layover, that should have been plenty of time to make our connection according to the American Airlines agent we talked to on the phone before leaving Mexico, one of the apps we use to facilitate travel (Flighty), and the DFW website.
Shockingly, we arrived at our onward flight gate with less than 30 minutes to spare. This was barely enough time when everything went right. And that almost never happens.
So what did we do that worked to successfully arrive in the US and make it onto a connecting flight in time?
Don’t rely on airport assistance to get you ahead - I just had major surgery 3 weeks ago, so I asked for assistance. If I had waited for a wheelchair and/or a people mover, we would not have made it. I managed to make it through on my own two feet- exhausted, but successful (with Levon doing all of the luggage heavy lifting and pulling our bags across the airport). If you need assistance or have any mobility issues, add at least 30 minutes to your travel plan.
Carry on your luggage if humanly possible - We didn’t check bags. If we had, we would have had to pick them up in DFW and recheck them onto our forward flight. That could easily have taken at least 30 minutes more.
Global Entry for the win- We have Global Entry and there were plenty of available kiosks. We were able to walk right up and get scanned - in and out in less than 2 minutes. The signs shown by the airport were right about Global Entry. But the regular lines were pretty long for immigration. 6 minutes through regular immigration? I don’t think so. The lines looked long enough to add at least 20-30 minutes. (We didn’t notice the MPC lines, unfortunately).
Get Touchless ID if you have access to TSA Precheck - Finally, we needed to recheck-in through security once we made it through immigration and customs. In terminal D, there is a separate entrance for TSA pre-check - which was a good thing since there were probably close to 100 people in the regular security line. There were about 40 people in the TSA Precheck line - the airport estimated it was 14 minutes of in line wait time (this does not include the time it takes to actually go through the metal detectors). But we had signed up for Touchless ID, and it was incredibly fast - maybe a minute of wait time. Without either TSA Precheck or Touchless ID, that would have easily taken at least 30-45 minutes more.
So, could we have made our transfer without all of these tools? I really don’t think so. Even with all of these time savers, it took us over 40 minutes of walking and/or train time to make it from our arrival gate to immigration and then security to our onward flight gate. With the plane starting boarding 30 minutes before our flight took off, that only gave us 28 minutes extra minutes at the gate.
Oh, and what about all of those tools I mentioned in our last post? Well, they were interesting, but honestly, none of them gave us much useful information. In addition to the DFW app and website and Qsensor, I found another app called Flight Queue that I tested out. Here’s what we experienced with these apps:
Qsensor - relies on real time information and user experiences. It was super basic. For international flights, it only covers customs and it’s displayed wait times seemed inaccurate.
FlightQueue - relies primarily on user reports. It doesn’t have fields for Global Entry, Mobile Passport Control, TSA Precheck, or Touchless ID so it’s hard to tell the accuracy of the data feeding their time estimates.
Airport - It’s impossible to know where they were getting their information. Based on our observation, their estimates were somewhere between accurate and wildly optimistic.
Bottom line - if you can’t replicate the tools we used, are landing in a US airport from overseas that is even more chaotic than DFW and you need to make a connecting flight, or have any other issues that might slow you down, make sure you have at least an 2-3 hours more than recommended transfer times between flights.
Good luck and happy flying!
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