Vancuver hotel to airport

[TSUmom]

I asked this in the Alaska boards before I found this board and am thinking I might have a better chance at a reply.  We are staying a few days post cruise at the Blue Horizon hotel.  Our flight is out at 7:15 Wednesday morning and we are looking at suggestions for the best time to leave the hotel.  We plan on just taking a taxi.  

[martincath]

Traffic is mostly inbound, opposite direction from you, and at the time you're talking about very light anyway, so the drive should take 35mins or less. The perfect time to arrive is 5:15am - the big backlog of people who didn't do any research and showed up 3 hours early for flights only to find that CBP do not open until 4:30am will all have been processed, so you should be able to smoothly flow from check-in to bag drop to Security to Preclearance within an hour tops. That means you want a cab about 4:40am at the hotel.

 

If you ALL have Global Entry or NEXUS you can sleep in longer, and arrive just in time to meet your airline's checked bags deadline (usually 60mins preflight, so aim for 6am) as you will get into the short Security queue as well as dedicated GE terminals with virtually no wait time for preclearance. I don't think I've ever spent more than 30mins getting to my gate from the curb at YVR since joining NEXUS, and we always aim for flights in the 6-8am timeframe heading the US so that we can ensure we avoid all those annoying cruisers 😉

 

... even the sensible self-disembarkers can't possibly make it to YVR before 8am though, so as long as you avoid being too early and getting caught up in the CBP backlog you're in the sweet spot with this flight. I would ask the hotel to call you a cab - cab firms treat hotels much more nicely than individuals here, as they are a source of ongoing regular business - to minimise any chance of delays - but worst case if you just walked onto the street and flagged one down it would probably only take a few minutes tops, BH is on Robson and there are a couple of other hotels within a few blocks each way, so cabbies know that there's a good chance for airport fares that time of day on those blocks.

 

[TSUmom]

14 hours ago, martincath said:

Traffic is mostly inbound, opposite direction from you, and at the time you're talking about very light anyway, so the drive should take 35mins or less. The perfect time to arrive is 5:15am - the big backlog of people who didn't do any research and showed up 3 hours early for flights only to find that CBP do not open until 4:30am will all have been processed, so you should be able to smoothly flow from check-in to bag drop to Security to Preclearance within an hour tops. That means you want a cab about 4:40am at the hotel.

 

If you ALL have Global Entry or NEXUS you can sleep in longer, and arrive just in time to meet your airline's checked bags deadline (usually 60mins preflight, so aim for 6am) as you will get into the short Security queue as well as dedicated GE terminals with virtually no wait time for preclearance. I don't think I've ever spent more than 30mins getting to my gate from the curb at YVR since joining NEXUS, and we always aim for flights in the 6-8am timeframe heading the US so that we can ensure we avoid all those annoying cruisers 😉

 

... even the sensible self-disembarkers can't possibly make it to YVR before 8am though, so as long as you avoid being too early and getting caught up in the CBP backlog you're in the sweet spot with this flight. I would ask the hotel to call you a cab - cab firms treat hotels much more nicely than individuals here, as they are a source of ongoing regular business - to minimise any chance of delays - but worst case if you just walked onto the street and flagged one down it would probably only take a few minutes tops, BH is on Robson and there are a couple of other hotels within a few blocks each way, so cabbies know that there's a good chance for airport fares that time of day on those blocks.

 

Thank you so much for all of this information.  We have never been to Vancouver and are excited to visit, it looks absolutely beautiful.