What World Cup travelers should know about airline delays, connections and planning

Game Plan is a Q&A series highlighting how KU School of Business research connects to the challenges and opportunities of hosting a global event. As the Kansas City and Lawrence areas welcome World Cup visitors, these conversations explore topics that affect travel, business operations, consumer behavior, and daily life across the region.

Mazhar Arikan is an associate professor and Anderson Family Fellow whose research focuses on airline operations, scheduling, and transportation logistics. With World Cup travel ramping up, he explains why delays, missed connections, and limited backup options can matter more to passengers than whether a single flight arrives on time.

When a global event like the World Cup brings a surge of travelers into a region, what are the biggest pressure points in the airline system that passengers tend to feel most? How is this affecting airports in and adjacent to the Kansas City area? 

When a global event like the World Cup hits a region, travelers usually feel the pressure in a few ways: higher fares, longer lines, and fewer good backup options when something goes wrong. In the Kansas City area, the biggest pressure point is Kansas City International Airport. KCI expects record traffic in June and July. It is estimated that MCI will handle 1.3 million passengers in both months, or roughly 200,000 more than the prior year. This is a major increase for an airport that handled about 11.5 million passengers over the course of 2025.  

Another important constraint is international access. Kansas City has limited long-haul international service, so many visitors will have to connect through larger U.S. hubs before reaching KCI. That adds time and increases the risk of baggage problems and missed connections. Some of that spillover may go to nearby airports, especially St. Louis, which has more airlines and transatlantic service. 

Many travelers judge flights by whether they’re “on time.” Based on your research, why doesn’t that always reflect the real passenger experience, especially during major events? What specific challenges will international travelers face with both the air and ground transportation network in our region? 

The Department of Transportation defines an on-time arrival as landing within 15 minutes of the schedule. That is useful, but it does not tell us whether the traveler actually had a good trip. Passengers experience the full trip, not just one flight. What matters to them is total travel time, missed connections, long delays, and whether the whole journey holds together. 

For international travelers coming to Kansas City, the challenge often starts before they even reach the region. Many will first enter the United States through a large hub airport and then connect to Kansas City. That means they often have to clear customs and immigration at the hub, collect and recheck their bags, clear security again, and catch a second flight. Each step creates another point where the trip can break down. So even if the final flight to Kansas City is technically on time, the passenger may still have had a very stressful trip. Once they land, the challenge shifts from the air network to the ground network. For many visitors, the hardest part may be putting together the full chain: customs, a domestic connection, the airport transfer, the regional shuttle, and the last leg to the stadium. 

Your research looks at travel from the passenger’s point of view rather than just individual flights. Why does that distinction matter when thousands of fans are trying to arrive on tight schedules? How do layover and connecting flights factor into this data collection, and do they mask potential passenger level problems? 

That distinction matters because passengers do not experience travel one flight at a time. They experience it as one trip. A flight can look fine in the data and still produce a bad outcome for the traveler. 

In our research, we show that public flight-level data do not fully capture passenger experience, especially for connecting travelers. If a passenger’s first flight is delayed enough to cause a missed connection, the second flight may still leave on time and look fine in the statistics. But for the traveler, the whole trip is delayed, sometimes by several hours. So, when thousands of fans are traveling on tight schedules, looking only at individual flight performance can understate the real disruption people feel. 

Layovers are central to both the data and the problem. In our study, passenger-level data let us see how route decisions affect total travel time and the risk of long delays, not just whether a single flight arrived on schedule. That is important because resilience depends on things like connection buffers and the frequency of backup flights. A tight layover may look efficient on paper, but it can make the whole trip fragile. That is why connecting flights can hide real passenger problems if we only look at flights one by one. 

About half of airline passengers have a connection. What should World Cup travelers understand about layovers and connection times when planning their trips? 

The main thing World Cup travelers should understand is that a layover is not just waiting time. It is where a trip can become fragile. During a major event like the World Cup, flights are fuller and the network has less slack. One small delay can easily turn into a missed connection and a much longer trip.  

Airlines publish minimum connection times, which are typically 45 to 90 minutes domestically, longer for international, and booking systems will sell trips that meet those minimums. But those minimums are based on normal conditions assuming normal passenger loads, standard TSA throughput, expected gate proximity. During the World Cup, none of those conditions will hold and major hub airports will be much busier than usual. So, my advice is not to optimize only for the cheapest fare or the shortest scheduled itinerary. 

Travelers should pay close attention to connection time, especially on the day they absolutely need to arrive. A slightly longer layover can act like insurance. It also helps to connect through airports with more backup flight options if something goes wrong. For international visitors, the first U.S. airport matters even more because that is usually where they clear customs, reclaim bags, and recheck them before the domestic connecting flight. 

I would also strongly advise against arriving on match day just to save a hotel night. If anything goes wrong along the way, there is very little room to recover. 

How do small delays early in a trip tend to ripple through a traveler’s entire journey during peak travel periods like the World Cup? 

Small delays early in a trip matter because passengers experience the whole journey, not isolated flights. A delay on the first flight may seem minor in airline statistics, but if it causes a missed connection, the traveler may arrive hours later than planned. 

This gets worse during peak travel periods like the World Cup because major hub airports are handling elevated traffic from many directions at the same time. Under normal conditions, a missed connection may be fairly easy to fix because typically there are later flights on that route with available seats. During the World Cup, those later flights are already heavily booked, many by other fans with the same destination and the same hard deadline. A passenger misconnecting in Chicago on a peak World Cup travel day may find that the next flight to KCI has one seat, or none, or isn’t until the following morning. So, a small delay early in the trip can become a much bigger disruption by the end. 

Airlines often try to run as efficiently as possible. During high‑demand events like the World Cup, why can that make the system feel more fragile for passengers? How does load factor calculate into this fragility and how do airlines approach this challenge? 

Airlines are under constant pressure to run efficiently, and one part of that is keeping planes as full as possible. In industry terms, that is load factor: the share of seats that are occupied. High load factors can be good for efficiency, but from the passenger’s point of view they also mean there is less slack in the system. When flights are very full, there are fewer empty seats available if people need to be rebooked.  

That is why high-demand events like the World Cup can make the system feel more fragile. A network may look efficient on paper but still be harder to recover when something goes wrong. If a delay causes a missed connection, the bigger issue may be that the next few flights are also full, so the passenger has fewer recovery options. 

I would not say airlines should stop pursuing efficiency. The real point is that efficiency and resilience can be in tension. While efficiency systematically eliminates buffers, resilience requires spare capacity that can absorb unexpected shocks without propagating them through the system. Airlines try to manage that tension in several ways. They may add flights where possible, use larger aircraft on key routes, build a little more time into schedules, or create more buffer at hub airports during busy periods. 

Your work suggests efficiency and reliability don’t have to be a tradeoff. What does that mean in practical terms for travelers? How can airlines help passengers avoid selecting risky flights or changing staffing to reduce the risk of select flights? 

What our research suggests is that airlines do not always have to choose between being efficient and being reliable. In practical terms, that means small, targeted changes can make trips more resilient without redesigning the whole network or giving up much efficiency.  

In our recent work, we show that modestly reallocating some connecting passengers with very short buffers to alternative itineraries can generate meaningful resilience gains with little loss in efficiency. So, for travelers, that means the “best” flight is not always the shortest or cheapest one. A slightly safer itinerary can be the better choice, especially when the trip is tied to a fixed event.   

Airlines can help in two ways. First, they can make connection risk more visible when people book, instead of showing only price and travel time. If a trip has a very tight layover or very few backup options, that is useful information for the traveler. Second, airlines can target staffing and operational support to the flights and airports where delays are most likely to spread and disrupt many passengers. The goal is not to change every trip. It is to identify the smaller set of trips where a modest adjustment can prevent a much larger downstream problem. 

Based on your research, what are some smart ways travelers can reduce their risk of major disruptions when flying to or from the region during the World Cup? 

The smartest thing travelers can do is avoid building a fragile trip in the first place. I would be cautious about choosing the absolute cheapest fare or the shortest itinerary if it depends on a very tight connection. A slightly longer layover, an earlier arrival, or an itinerary with better backup options can be much more resilient, especially when the trip is tied to a specific event date.  

I would also avoid arriving on the same day as a match. If possible, arrive at least one day early. I would also try to book single-carrier itinerary, or at least one ticket on airline partners in the same reservation. If the first flight is delayed and causes a missed connection, the airline is then responsible for rebooking you at no extra cost. 

Finally, I would recommend booking a morning flight if possible. Morning departures are usually less exposed to the delays that build up later in the day as aircraft and crews fall behind schedule. 

If there’s one thing World Cup visitors should understand about airline travel planning as they head to the Kansas City area, what is it? 

If there is one thing World Cup visitors should understand, it is this: Plan the whole trip, not just the flight. Travelers often focus on getting the cheapest fare or the shortest itinerary, but our research shows that passenger experience depends on whether the full journey holds together.  

So, my advice is simple: Buy resilience, not just a seat. For a World Cup trip, that usually means giving yourself more connection time, arriving earlier than you think you need to, and having a realistic ground transportation plan as well as a flight plan.