To start things off with the highest chances regardless of the airline you’re using, you must take care of some important things on your own first. Of course if you do make a promising selection on your airline, you make your task a bit easier. For example, if you select the recently founded airline company with the moto “Take a chance with us” you’re probably odds-on.

But if you follow the checklist below, you should have a very good chance anyway…

1. Schedule
   First things first, make sure you select the worst possible time for your journey. This might depend partly on the transportation links in your area but you cannot go wrong with something like 5.30 in the morning (unless you actually live inside the airport -like Tom Hanks…)
   
2. Airport
   
   Now this looks easy…
   
   Try to pick the less commutable airport relating to your starting point. Long distance is not enough sometimes, so you may have to go for many changes as well: bus, underground, coach, train, hand-cart, donkey etc…
   A good example is the Transport for London Itinerary (see photo) for going to London Heathrow from Greenwhich/Cutty Shark.
   
3. Luggage
   A very old, large suitcase, with broken wheels, weighting at about 35 Kg is enough in this case.
   
4. Money
   This is a tricky one as it requires a bit of help from above, plus a certain lack of organization and preemptiveness on your side. Being short on money, you have to select an ATM that looks likely to “eat” your -only one by the way- credit card. Of course the question “how the hell do you determine that an ATM is possible to eat your card” is going to arise here -this is where the help from above gets into the picture…
   Alternatively, you could just mistype your pin number three times in a row.
   

I think this should do the trick, although if you have any more suggestions, please post them here so that we make this a complete guide!

Next time we’ll look at a successful use case example: my (never to happen) trip to Sofia, Bulgaria for a conference…