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TLDR: A little bit of luck due to the current situation
We’ve all seen how bad Manchester Airport is at the moment, and that’s a polite way of saying it.
Post-pandemic staffing issues and ongoing coronavirus-related sick leave mean both airports and flight operators are severely understaffed. This results in a lot of queues and it is recommended that you arrive 3 hours early.
TUI seems to be one of the culprits in long queues when it comes to checking bags. There were reports of people queuing in the street.
Most airlines only open bag drop 3 hours before a flight, which seems crazy considering the current issue. I don’t know why other operators haven’t launched a Twilight check-in service similar to Jet2.
Some believe the constant media attention fuels the problem, as does all panic buying. There were reports of people arriving at the airport eight hours early, making security for early flights even busier.
Feeling the problem is not slack either. This has been going on since mid-March and we are past the Easter and May Bank holidays. However, the problem persisted throughout Tuesday 3rd May.
Manchester reports that staffing issues will take months to resolve due to lengthy security checks on new staff. I don’t think it’s very attractive to apply for jobs there at the moment.
I was supposed to go on vacation, and like most people, this whole situation made me very anxious. We initially paid for our checked bags, but have now skipped one of the biggest problems in the airport by deciding to go as light as possible and carry them with us.
I’ve also been obsessively checking Twitter to see what’s going on on different days.
One possible solution to keep you aware of busy hours is the Google Trending Hours feature.
How to Check Google Trending Times
There are several ways to access Google Trending Hour.
- When you search for a place (such as Manchester Airport) on your phone or desktop, you’ll see a Google Rich Card for that business. If you scroll down, there will be a small graph showing your popular times.
- In Google Maps, you can do the same. On mobile, you need to scroll down a bit and it’s below the comments, and on desktop it’s above the photos and comments.
You can then view real-time data or data based on past trends. You can select the date, and if you access the popular time from a normal web search, you should be able to click on the time. Then this will say:
- usually as busy as possible
- Usually a little busy
- Usually not too busy
Unfortunately, this has some problems. Real-time data may not correspond accurately to past trends, and I don’t think Google regularly updates this graph.
The graph itself only goes up to “usually as busy as possible”, I’ve been looking at real-time data for early morning flights and the graph doesn’t seem to have any spikes above past trends. According to recent reports, this would be inaccurate.
You also can’t get real-time data from the terminal. T3 just opened and Ryanair took off from there, but most people seem to be talking about T1 and T2. Surprisingly, I didn’t see a lot of people complaining about Ryanair on Twitter and that made a change.
Manchester Airport popular time trend and real-time data
The historical popularity time trend for most days is relative to your expectations.
All days seem to follow a similar trend:
- 3am to 4am – not too busy.
- From 5am it rises rapidly until 7am when it is at its busiest.
- It stayed that way until around 2pm, until reaching the end of the day low at 12am.
- Slightly off trend Saturday and Sunday, they get busy earlier, the graph doesn’t peak that early, but seems to be busier throughout the morning and early afternoon until 3pm.
busiest day
Again, I had hoped that I could use this data to ease my mid-week flight. My assumption is that due to the weekend off, Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday will be the busiest, especially the bucks/hens etc.
- This seems accurate. The graph shows that Thursday was the busiest day at Manchester Airport. It’s been busy from 6am to 4pm.
- Friday seems to be the next busiest.
- Then Saturday and Sunday don’t look as busy as Thursday/Friday, but the graph shows it’s been busy, with Sunday seeming to peak around 2/3pm.
real time date
Annoyingly, real-time data doesn’t consistently track past trends. i just randomly checked it but on tuesday 3rdreal-time data differs significantly from trends.
- At 4pm, it indicated that it was busier than the normal busiest time.
- Still busy at 7pm.
This basically ruined some of the useful information I had hoped for when planning when to arrive at the airport.
On the plus side, at the time of writing, the real-time data is actually below past trends. Perhaps Wednesday will be the quietest day at Manchester Airport.
Check past flights for delays
Again, not super accurate, but the flight number is usually unique to the route, not a single flight. So you can search for your flight number and see if it’s delayed.
Of course, this won’t help you out if the airport itself is busy, but it can help indicate if there is an ongoing problem with that flight.
Flightradar24 displays scheduled and actual takeoff times and scheduled/actual landing times.
So, for example, a Jet2 flight is randomly selected to Lanzarote [LS891], it looks like Jet2 has been doing well. Only one of the last seven flights was delayed by 17 minutes. Almost everyone was late, but only a few minutes or so. Nowhere near as bad as the more than 1 hour delay I’ve heard on Twitter.
TUI is a bit hard, they use weird flight numbers that start with TOM, but tracking sites use flight numbers that start with BY. There isn’t much historical data on them either.
overall
Google Pop Era isn’t as useful as I’d like it to be. Before you go, you can use current real-time data to try and predict if the airport is busier than usual, but there’s no guarantee it won’t be very busy when you get there.
There is no data on individual terminal times.
Wednesday looks like it will be the least busy day, then the airport is the least busy in the late afternoon.
Thursday looks to be the busiest day, followed by Friday, so you should prepare for the worst these days. Again, Saturday and Sunday are busy all day.
Using your flight number for a previous flight time may give you an idea of ongoing issues with that particular flight and the operator itself.
