You’ve got your spring break beach picked out, your friends are in, and your flights are arranged. Sweet! But what if airline delays prevent you from a whole day of luxuriating on the sand and an entire night of celebration? And let alone delays...sometimes flights get outright canceled, and then you’re stuck scrambling for an alternate route or even destination while spring break week ticks away. We don’t want that to happen to anyone! So here is a helpful list, compiled by aGamble.com, that lets you know which airports are most at risk for flight delays or cancellations. The company studied flight departure data for the nation’s 50 largest airports during spring break in March and April last year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, three Florida airports are in the top six of this list, since Florida’s a key destination for college students seeking warmer weather on their break. The company jokes that we should think of Florida “more as a pair of dice than a paradise.” Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport experiences the highest volume of flight delays and cancellations for spring break travel, followed by Orlando International Airport in third place and Miami International in sixth.
The second most delayed and canceled flights affect Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International (but if it’s your outbound flight, no problem. There are plenty of slot machines in the airport to keep you occupied).
In fourth place is Baltimore International, and then Chicago Midway International is fifth.
The last four destinations on this list are not necessarily warm weather treasures but perhaps represent the cold weather hubs students are trying to depart from, exchanging snow and cold breezes for aqua waves and a light breeze to ripple the beach umbrella. Those are Newark Liberty International, Dallas/Forth Worth International, Denver International, and New York’s JFK, in seventh through tenth place, respectively.
For comparison purposes, at Fort Lauderdale, the top airport on the list, there were 771 canceled flights last year during spring break months and 5,802 delayed flights, while at Boston's Logan International, #25 on the list, there were only 472 canceled flights and 5,199 delayed ones.