App relieving holiday airport stress

Quarter after the hour now as many of us prepare for air travel to see family, friends and loved ones for the holidays running into traffic and crowds while trying to get to the airport. A common holiday nightmare, but there's now an app that can help calculate when to leave for the airport during the holiday rush. The app creator, Ethan Garr, is here now to show us how this works here. Ethan, thanks for joining us this morning. My pleasure. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. So, Ethan, what's the common issue that many travelers face during the holidays when traveling to the airport? Well, if you think about this Thanksgiving, 82 million people are going to be traveling more than 50 miles. 18 million of them are going to get on airplanes. That opens up a lot of traffic jams, crowds, and stress for your audience. So what I've tried to do is just made some free, simple calculator tools that'll help you know when to leave. Because at the end of the day, knowing what time you need to be there is great. And knowing kind of like what buffer you need, like, hey, I should get to the airport two hours earlier. But That doesn't really help you know when you need to leave your driveway. So that's the problem I've really been trying to solve is what time should I leave my house so I can get to my grandmother's house across the city on time or across the country on time? Yeah, that's always my issue is what's going to be the traffic to get to the airport at that time. So can you tell us, your app calculates how long it will take to get from your driveway to the airport? What does it all take into consideration here? Yeah, so the OnTimer app has a time to fly feature, which tells you exactly what time you need to leave for the airport to be on time. And that's going to take into account everything from traffic and security lines, how long the airport or airline is telling you you want to be ahead of schedule, whether you have TSA pre or not, whether you're checking a bag or not. It's going to take all of those things into account. And on the website. Where you are, on timer.app, and there's a link for your KTVU visitors. What you can do is you can actually just put your information into this very simply, like there's no account or login. You just say, hey, I'm leaving from this address. I'm going to San Francisco International Airport. Here's my parameters, my personal parameters. I'm dropping a bag off. I'm getting dropped off or I'm parking. I've got to go across the Bay Bridge. It's going to calculate all, put all those things into the calculation. And when you hit that blue bar. It's going to say, hey, this is what time you need to leave. So if you slide up, you should probably see what time to leave right now. Mm-hmm. So basically, yeah, it's taking into all these factors so that you can be there on time. But how does it, I mean, so I guess you have real-time traffic updates for the driving part to the airport. But what about, you know, the lines if you have to check a bag at the airport at a certain airline? Yeah, what you just saw, the ontime.app calculator, that actually has the TSA security times built into it. So it's going to actually say, hey, right now it's 35 minutes at security, so you need to leave a little bit earlier. All right, can you demonstrate a little bit for us? Sure. So unfortunately, I can't see it as well as you can right now, but if you just refresh that to the start of it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so if you put in any local address, or you can just put in Oakland, California, if you start typing that, it should fill it out. And I think our producer's doing it back there. And what airport is that? Yeah. Oh, yeah, San Francisco International Airport. So you hit the calculate button, and it will kind of run you through traffic times, TSA times. What about wait times when you go to drop off your bag? Does it account for that? Because sometimes those lines can be long. Yeah, it accounts for it. Exactly. It gives you the ability to adjust for carry-on or checking bags, and that's going to add quite a bit of time. If you're checking bags, we're going to suggest that you add at least 20, 25 minutes to your time. Right, because of that. So is this kind of the idea from door to door? And when I mean door to door, I mean out of your door to the door of the boarding gate of the plane? Yeah, what I'm trying to do is help people get to the flight without having to rush to the gate. I think there's nothing worse than having, you know, your family of four running to catch their flight. And especially around Thanksgiving, the stakes are so high because if you miss your flight, even though you'll get checked onto the next available flight, that might be after your Thanksgiving dinner. And San Francisco, as an example, is one of the busiest and most challenging airports. 3.1 million people traveled over the Sunday last year of Thanksgiving. And Unfortunately, San Francisco's November on time percentage is really low compared to other airports. And I think that's just a combination of things with three bridges, lots of traffic, lots of people. So those crowds become really, really a challenge. And I think this is going to hopefully help your audience get there on time. Is the cost anything right now? No, what you just saw on the website is completely free. The app is free to connect one calendar and to get alarms for all your events. So OnTimer is there to get you to your Zoom meeting or your appointments on time. But that time to fly feature is actually built into the free version. And then there's some upgrades available where you can choose your own alarm sounds and things like that. But, yeah, we've tried to make it free and available for people. Ethan Gar. Thank you so much for that update on this app. Hopefully, it'll get people to the airport on time to catch their flight and a little bit less of a hassle when they're traveling during the holidays. We appreciate your time. Thank you. All right. A man locally known that always tries to keep us on time.