What time should you leave Megeve for a flight from Geneva?

It is the question I am asked most often, and the one where I see the most mistakes. Most people open their phone the night before, read “1 h 15”, and decide that leaving two hours ahead gives them a comfortable margin. On a Sunday in February, they lose that margin between Megeve and Sallanches.

Here is how I work it out, after twenty years on this road.

Start from the flight, then work backwards

I never reason the other way round. The fixed point is take-off. Everything else hangs from it.

First: what time do you need to be at the airport?
Allow two hours before departure for a European flight, three for a long-haul. This is not excessive caution: at Geneva, on a Saturday morning in the school holidays, check-in and security can swallow a good hour between them.

Second: how long will the drive actually take that day?
This is where it is decided, and I come back to it below.

Third: the margin.
I always add fifteen to twenty minutes. Not for the road — for everything else. A suitcase that has gone missing, a child to dress again, a frozen chalet gate. Those twenty minutes are mine, not yours, and they cost you nothing.

How long the Megeve – Geneva Airport drive really takes

On paper it is 75 kilometres and one hour fifteen, via Sallanches and the Autoroute Blanche. That is the figure I use for a Tuesday in November at ten in the morning. The rest of the year it moves.

On Saturdays, the valley changes tenants. Chalets and apartments empty in the morning and fill in the afternoon, and everyone uses the same road at the same time. Between December and April I allow one hour forty-five, sometimes two hours.

On Sunday afternoons, it is the Swiss going home. They leave the resorts together. From four o’clock I build in a margin as a matter of course; by five the main road is saturated and I switch to a bypass route I would rather keep to myself.

During school holidays, French and Swiss alike, add thirty minutes to all of the above. The changeover weekends are visible a long way off once you know the calendar.

In snow, the issue is not speed but consistency. A snow-covered road between Megeve and Sallanches does not cost you thirty minutes; the traffic stuttering behind a poorly equipped vehicle does.

Three worked examples

You will notice that the same two o’clock flight is prepared quite differently depending on the day of the week. That is the whole point.

What a GPS will not tell you

An app gives you the driving time now. It does not tell you what the road will be like in two hours, which is precisely what you want to know when you check the night before.

It also knows nothing of three things I do: the school holiday calendar on both sides of the border, the hour at which a resort empties, and the real state of the road this morning — not the state it was in forty minutes ago.

That is why I never give a departure time off the cuff. When you send me your flight number, I work the calculation backwards using the season, the day and the weather. The figure I give you has been weighed.

One last point: which side of Geneva Airport?

Geneva Airport has two exits, one French and one Swiss, and they lead in opposite directions. For our destinations in Haute-Savoie you leave on the Swiss side — that is where the road towards the Autoroute Blanche begins.

It matters more than people expect, and I have written about it separately: French sector or Swiss sector, and which exit you actually need.