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Over the last couple of decades, the number of passengers boarding short-haul flights has been on a steep, steady decline in the U.S. Now why might that be? The Dallas Morning-News reported that the number of passengers flying Southwest between Dallas and Houston has dropped by one-third in the last two decades. Nationwide, short-haul flights account for a much smaller percentage of passengers than they used to: In 1990, people flying on short-haul routes, 400 miles or less, made up nearly 34 percent of domestic passengers on U.S. airlines. In 2009, the last year for which full numbers are available, the percentage had dropped to 26.6 percent. The reasons for the decline seem pretty obvious: The costs of these shorter flights have increased, as have the hassles of flying pretty much anywhere. This will come as no surprise to the many readers who said they were absolutely less likely to fly in 2011. The kind of flight travelers are most likely to skip nowadays is the short-haul variety. Why is that? Because there are readily available alternatives with fewer headaches -- namely driving, or hopping a train or bus (especially a nice one like BoltBus). What with two-hour advance check-in requirements and long checkpoint waits (not to mention security procedures many travelers deem demeaning), flying no longer has the time-saving advantage it once boasted unless the traveler needs to go a long distance. This is why almost no one today is bothering to fly on once-popular short-haul routes such as Albany-LaGuardia or Boston-Bangor. Increasingly, when travelers feel like there's an alternative to flying, they're taking it. This goes even for short-haul flights between some of the country's biggest cities. Using government data, the Morning-News story shows that the number of passengers flying routes such as LAX-Phoenix, Boston-LaGuardia, and St. Louis-Kansas City have dropped by more than 40 percent since 1990. There's no reason to think that passenger numbers on such routes will increase anytime soon. It's getting to the point that we may have to redefine a "short-haul" flight as anything under 750 miles each way. And a flight that's under 250 miles? Well, that's almost unthinkable. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL: Are you less likely to fly in 2011? More airports consider ditching TSA It's a new day for flier's rights: We're human beings, not just cargo!

As winter weather snarls more and more travel plans, passengers separate into a few camps: Those who proactively rebook before a flight is officially cancelled, those who rebook as soon as a flight is called off, and those who roll the dice, waiting for other cancellations to open up a short-notice seat. When my mom was stranded in New York during last month's blizzard, she opted for the latter strategy, which worked for her in that particular instance. Her original flight was for Tuesday morning, and when it was cancelled, the airline rep quoted a Thursday-night departure as her earliest rebooking option. With a strong college-football-playoff-related reason to hustle home, she rode the phones, hoping to get lucky, and scored a seat on a Wednesday afternoon flight. But things could have easily gone another way—and not everyone wants to spend hours on hold waiting for customer service to pick up. We want to know your tried-and-true snowy-travel strategies (or lessons learned the hard way)—post them in the comments below, and check out our guide to your rights to cancellation compensation.

I'm normally an enthusiastic advocate of smart phone technology as an aid to travelers, but a recent glitch in iPhone software is giving me pause. Countless iPhone alarm clocks failed to go off on Sunday and Monday mornings, thwarting travelers' plans, as reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. According to the Times: "Erick Piller, a student who uses his iPhone as a primary alarm, said in an e-mail that he missed a scheduled flight [Monday] morning after Apple assured the media that the alarm would begin work again on Monday morning. 'I set a nonrepeating alarm for 3:30 a.m. Monday, but when I woke up by chance at 4 a.m., it hadn't gone off," Mr. Piller said. "I ended up missing a flight by 15 minutes." I, myself was a victim of snoozefest2011, and almost missed an early morning flight out of Palm Springs on Sunday morning. My husband had diligently set two iPhone alarms for 4:30am (a 3G and a 3GS), neither of which went off. (We randomly woke up at 5am, thanks to our toddler, and just barely made our flight.) I rushed to blame my poor husband, but the blame lies with Apple, which experienced a similar problem with iPhone 4 during Daylight Savings Time. Apparently, Apple is on the case, but bloggers around the globe were quick to devise workarounds. One quick solution, shared via Twitter (check the hashtag #iphonealarm), was to set a recurring alarm, as opposed to a one-off, non-repeating alert. That fix seemed to work for many—and as of this morning, reports are showing that alarms are again ringing—but for this particular technophile, I'm leaning toward regressing to old-school technology from now on: a trusty, old-school, properly ringing clock. Blackberry vs. Iphone: Budget Travel puts two smart phones to the test Readers' favorite apps What worries you when you travel? Help us identify the coolest small town in America! Vote now!

In the past week, thousands of flights were canceled at European airports because of uncommonly icy weather. In Germany, there is a word for what happened next: "Winterchaos." I witnessed some of the melodrama when I attempted to fly from England to the United States earlier this week. On Sunday at 5:30 in the morning, I arrived at Heathrow's airport. Officials were preventing passengers from entering the airport unless they were booked on a flight still scheduled to depart. Travelers on canceled flights—including some families with young children who hadn't dressed for this situation—had to stand in the dark and cold outside of the airport's entrances for at least an hour. Eventually, I flew to Dusseldorf and, from there, took a train to Frankfurt. The scene that greeted me at Frankfurt Airport was surreal. Lines of passengers stretched up and down the airport. A TV news crew followed one Lufthansa official as she talked to passengers standing in a particularly long line. She said it would take about six hours for these passengers to get to the front of the line and rebook their flights. She and an assistant then handed out free buttered pretzels, sandwiches, and bottles of water. Here are some lessons, which could be helpful in other airport crises: If your flight is canceled while you're at the airport, you should call the airline while standing in line waiting to be rebooked. Otherwise, you may have to wait for hours to reach the agents at the counter rebooking a whole plane. A telephone rep may instead be able to help you sooner. Cell phones overseas can't call U.S. toll free numbers for the airlines. Tip number one is to print out Budget Travel's wallet card with airline phone numbers (opens as a PDF). This includes local numbers, not just toll-free numbers, and you can dial these local numbers from overseas. If you've misplaced that card, what to do? A few years ago, to call an 800 number from abroad, you could replace the 800 with 880. But that's no longer allowed. Today, the best way to call domestic U.S. 800 numbers from abroad is to use AT&T; USADirect Service. Go to that website, pick the country you're visiting, and you'll see the phone number you need to dial. You must pay for the call because the 800 number is toll-free only in the U.S. Bill your credit card. Don't depend on the phone, though. In a crisis, many airline phone centers can't handle the number of calls from upset passengers. Last Monday, for instance, wait times for Continental Airlines's toll-free number surpassed half an hour. But many airlines and airports were getting out the word about cancelations and closings via Twitter. Wait! Keep reading! You don't have to use Twitter. Without signing up for the free service, you can still see relevant updates that have been posted online through it. For example, you could go to www.twitter.com/heathrowairport or www.twitter.com/lufthansa _USA to see the latest alerts. How do you find out the relevant information? Go to Google and search on "Twitter" and the name of your airline. Example: Twitter Delta gets you or www.twitter.com/deltaairlines. Airlines prioritize their long-haul flights, and you can use that fact to strategize. During a winter storm, you may be rebooked on a flight that is doomed to being canceled, too. One way to figure out the odds of whether one flight is more likely to be canceled than another is to check if it is a long-haul flight (across the ocean) or a short-haul flight (between Seattle and Denver). Long-haul flights are more likely to fly. Airlines would rather get their large, profitable planes in the air than their smaller planes, which carry fewer passengers, obviously. If an airport tells an airline, "We've only de-iced one of our runways, so you have to choose which of your two planes you want to fly out," the airline will pick its biggest plane flying the greatest distance—more often than not. So when a gate agent offers you a choice of rebooking options, you're usually better off picking the bigger plane going the farthest distance to an airline's hub airport. (There are exceptions, of course.) No planes flying out for days to your destination? Ask if you could fly to an alternate airport. If flights to your home airport are unavailable for days, you may be able to fly sooner to a different airport and then drive to your home. Let a gate agent know if you are flexible. In my case, a London to New York City ticket became a London to Dusseldorf to Frankfurt to Washington, D.C., to New York City journey. This route was knottier and tiring, but it spared me from being stranded at an airport overseas during Christmas. Flights to Washington, D.C., happened to be in less demand than flights to New York City, and once I was in the U.S. I could find a way to get to my family's house. Using weather.com, I quickly found out that conditions were better at D.C., than Newark—which was being buffeted with high winds. Some airlines will even convert your plane ticket into a train ticket: Lufthansa, for instance, converted my plane ticket between Dusseldorf to Frankfurt into a train ticket, and I made it in time. I was offered the same choice between D.C. and N.Y.C. Luggage can ruin your day. I faced a dilemma about what to do with my bags. It was the morning, and I was at Frankfurt Airport. Nearly every flight to the U.S. scheduled to fly before noon had been canceled. A gate agent offered to book me on a 1 o'clock flight. What were the chances that the 1 o'clock flight would also be canceled? If I checked my bags, and then the flight was canceled, I would have to stand in line to reclaim my bags before I could be rebooked onto another flight, which would make it even less likely I would make it home in time for Christmas. But the odds were awful on the other side of the bet, too. I kept my bags, and then waited until two hours before the flight, when it seemed likely that the plane would truly take off. But I had waited too long. The line for checking bags was at least three hours' long, with about 400 people in it. There was no way I would board the plane in time. Luckily, I did some sleuthing and found a shorter, less-well-known line for checking bags—back outside of the Frankfurt Airport, "curbside," at the adjacent train station—and managed to make it back through security and to the gate in the nick of time. MORE FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Trips gone bad: What to do Airline phone numbers wallet card Why airlines cancel some flights and not others Vote now: Help us identify the coolest small town in America!