Christine Chung has a few rules when it comes to flying.
She never checks a bag, traveling exclusively with a carry-on. She flies as early in the day as possible, to avoid crowds and long security lines. And perhaps her most controversial take: She never arrives at an airport more than an hour and a half before her departure time, no matter where she’s flying.
“Growing up, my dad would always insist on us being at the airport four hours early,” she said in an interview. “It was always a stressful experience, and I remember thinking, even then, that air travel was so complicated. Now I probably don’t leave myself enough time.”
Ms. Chung, who covers airlines and consumer travel for The New York Times, joined the Travel section in March 2023 from the Express desk, where she reported breaking news. Her beat involves untangling the confusing rules and regulations of aviation, like passengers’ rights to refunds and what the grounding of Boeing Max 9 planes means for travelers.
In a recent conversation, she shared how she arrived at the travel beat and the questions she most often receives from readers. This interview has been edited.
Were you always interested in travel journalism?
I love traveling, but I’m not someone who, say, reads about the different types of planes or loves to plane-spot. I joined the Express desk in late 2021, and was looking for an opportunity to strengthen my feature writing skills. Reporting breaking news is super dynamic and fun, but I wanted to have time to delve more deeply into topics that interested me. On Express, you often write a story in a day. On Travel, you might have a couple of days or a week to work on a feature story. It’s a huge luxury to work with talented editors and have time to develop story ideas.
Do you travel often for your reporting?
I do. I recently went to Seattle to observe a flight attendant safety training with Alaska Airlines. On the Express desk, all of my reporting was by phone, which is an effective and fast way to interview sources. But one of the best parts of my job now is getting to visit places and conduct interviews in person.
How has your beat surprised you?
We have so many reporters at The Times whose beats also touch aviation, so there’s a lot of interesting collaboration. There’s a Washington angle on the recent Boeing news, which Mark Walker covers. He has written about what the Federal Aviation Administration is doing, the ongoing investigation and the lawsuits filed by passengers. The Business desk also covers travel, including air traffic control and airline finances. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how we all work together to cover this beat effectively, and more thoroughly than one person ever could.
What’s your biggest challenge?
There is so much daily news about airlines that it can be overwhelming. The questions I try to ask myself when determining whether to cover a story are: What are passengers focusing on right now? What are people complaining about? In the past year, I’ve become better at noticing a trend early, seeing the bigger, underlying narrative and distilling that into a story.
What travel trends are you following?
I’m interested in all the moving parts that we don’t think about. For example, I’m really interested in baggage handling. Many bags are lost, though the baggage loss rate in the United States has been decreasing year to year. It’s a miracle how bag handlers and airlines achieve this. I would like to better understand air traffic control and all the levers that keep the aviation system moving nearly three million passengers a day in the United States. It’s a hugely complicated system.
I’m also interested in the broader, growing stratification of travel. Travel is becoming ever more luxurious for some people; it kind of mirrors the divisions in society.
What’s the most common question you receive from readers?
The Travel desk gets a lot of questions about things that went wrong for travelers, like “My flight’s been disrupted. What can I do about that? What are my rights?” I think the most confusing part of air travel for a lot of people is knowing their rights. It can be hard to get your money back from an airline when you don’t know what caused a flight delay or cancellation. It’s easy to feel disempowered.
You’ve written about upgraded airport lounges with amenities like caviar service and nap pods. I have to ask: Do you have a favorite airport?
I think we’re really lucky in New York. We are pretty well served by all the local airports. La Guardia Airport is stunning. It’s pretty amazing how that airport has gone from the bottom to one of the best. It’s home to some fantastic new lounges. I did travel through Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey recently. It has a new terminal and was such a breeze to get through security. It was delightful, which is a word I never thought I would use when talking about an airport.
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