British Airways check in: the closing time that changes with your airport

British Airways does not publish one deadline for the whole network. It publishes a rule per route type, with named exceptions on top.

Short haul. The general figure is 45 minutes before departure. A list of named airports moves it to 60 minutes, and departures from Brussels close 90 minutes ahead.

Long-haul international. At least 60 minutes, rising to 90 minutes on some destinations, Ghana among them.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: the deadline you used on your last BA flight may not be the one that applies to this one. Ninety minutes at Brussels on a short hop, forty-five minutes on the same aircraft type elsewhere, is a difference of three quarters of an hour, and it is the kind that costs a flight rather than a queue.

Opening. The window itself is uniform: it lifts 24 hours before departure, everywhere and on every route.

The evening before. Seven airports take your bags the night before, on a booked time slot and depending on when you fly the next day. On an early departure that turns the morning into a walk through security with hand luggage only.

How to find your figure. The deadline that applies to you appears in your booking and on the boarding pass itself. Reading it once, when you check in, costs nothing and settles the question for that flight; assuming the number from a previous trip is what goes wrong.

One consequence for connecting itineraries: each flight carries its own deadline, so a short hop feeding a long-haul departure may close 45 minutes out while the onward flight closes at 90.

On intercontinental flights leaving London Heathrow from terminals 3 and 5, passports and visas are checked before you go through security, not at the gate. You have to present yourself at an Assistance desk first.

This is the step that surprises experienced travellers, because it inverts the usual order. You arrive with a mobile boarding pass, ready to walk straight to security as you would at any other airport, and instead you need a desk visit with your documents in hand.

Plan for it on any long-haul departure from those two terminals, and add it to the online closing time that already applies to your route, whether 60 or 90 minutes. A passenger who allowed for the deadline but not for the desk is the one who reaches security with nothing left to spend.

The check exists because those two terminals handle the bulk of BA's intercontinental departures, and the airline verifies entry requirements itself rather than leaving it to the destination. Have the passport out of the bag and the visa, if you need one, ready to show on the same screen or on paper.

Two routes lead to the same result: Manage My Booking on ba.com, or the British Airways app. Neither is compulsory over the other.

1. Sign in to your Executive Club account, or enter the booking reference with the lead passenger's surname.
2. Match each name to the travel document that will be in your pocket on the day.
3. Add the passport and visa details your route requires.
4. Confirm or choose a seat.
5. Take the boarding pass in the format that suits you, as described below.

Carrying nothing but hand luggage, you head for security, with one exception: a long-haul departure from Heathrow terminal 3 or 5 sends you to the document desk first. A suitcase adds the bag drop, on the day itself or the evening before at one of the seven airports offering it.

Nothing in this sequence carries a fee: the airline publishes no charge for checking in, online or at a desk.

British Airways lets you drop your bags the evening before the flight at London Heathrow terminals 3 and 5, London Gatwick, London City, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Jersey.

The service runs on slots, and the slot depends on the next day's departure time. At Heathrow terminal 3 it opens from 16:00 to 21:30, for a flight leaving before 10:00 the following morning; at terminal 5 it runs from 16:00 to 22:00.

What this is actually for. An early long-haul departure normally means arriving hours ahead with luggage; dropping the bags the night before turns the morning into a walk to security. It is the single largest saving available on this page, and it costs nothing.

What you still have to bring: passport, travel documents and boarding pass — and, if you are dropping the bags of others on the same booking, their passports and documents too. Nobody hands over a family's luggage alone.

And a paid alternative for those not passing by the airport: AirPortr collects bags at home, at the office or at a hotel and checks them in, around Heathrow and Gatwick and also in Geneva, Zurich and Vienna. The airline does not publish its price, so we quote none.

British Airways is unusually flexible here. From Manage My Booking you can print the pass, download it or have it emailed to you, and the app holds it as well.

Three details make a practical difference.

• Return flights are downloadable in advance, so a two-week holiday does not end with a scramble for wifi at the hotel.
• Connections leaving within 24 hours can be loaded too, where the routing allows it.
• Up to eight passengers from one booking fit on a single phone, which suits a family travelling together far better than passing devices around at the gate.

If the pass is lost or forgotten, airport kiosks reprint it. The airline publishes no fee for that, nor for checking in at the airport in the first place.

One caution all the same: a pass loaded on one phone means one phone must reach the gate. On a family booking, that device becomes the single point of failure, so a printed backup for at least one adult is cheap insurance. Kiosks solve the same problem at the airport, but only while they are open, which is to say before the deadline for your route.

British Airways does not publish a price for choosing a seat in the general case; what it does publish is who pays nothing.

• Travelling with an infant. Seat selection is free from the moment of booking, and not only for the adult concerned: the whole party gets it, unless the booking covers more than nine people.
• Passengers who requested assistance. Free as well, provided the request was made in advance. The airline asks for the request to be made in advance rather than on the day.

Outside those cases the price appears during booking rather than on the information pages. If neither applies to you, checking in as soon as the 24 hours window opens remains the cheapest way to influence where you sit.

One more thing worth knowing for a group: the free selection that comes with an infant covers everyone on the booking, which is unusual. It is worth putting the whole family on a single reference rather than splitting it across two. Splitting a family across two references costs the free selection and gains nothing.

There is no published fee for checking in at the airport, and no late penalty either — which does not mean that being late is free. What British Airways describes for a missed deadline is refusal of boarding, not a charge: the consequence is the flight rather than an amount. What there is instead is a deadline that varies, which makes the answer to «am I too late?» depend on where you are standing.

Before your route's deadline. Airport desks and kiosks are open, and neither costs anything. Kiosks also reprint a lost pass.

After it. The flight is closed to you, and what happens to the ticket depends on the fare conditions, not on a check-in charge.

At Heathrow 3 and 5 on a long-haul flight, remember that your personal deadline is effectively earlier, because the document desk sits before security.

The return leg has its own check-in, opening 24 hours before that flight rather than at the same time as the outbound. Loading it into the app before you leave home is the simplest way to avoid needing a connection abroad.

For the sharpest contrast on the same routes, the Ryanair check-in page covers a carrier whose deadline is identical everywhere and whose penalty is a fee. Beyond these two, every carrier we cover has a page of its own; start from our check-in overview.