Help with time change math, please

Yes, you are correct - between November 1 and November 6, when (most of) the US changes its clocks back to standard time, the UK will be only 7 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time.

The airlines have that all figured out. Just pick flight times you want to fly out and arrive. The conversion is already done.

Re: the previous post, I don't think the OP is buying flights; rather it sounds like something where they want to buy tickets for something as soon as they go on sale at a certain time in the UK.

My favorite site to do this is World Time Buddy, which allows you to select your cities and specific dates (not just times, but dates so it accounts for DST/summer time changes). It confirms that 01:00 on Tuesday 1 November 2022 in the UK = 18:00 on Monday 31 October 2022 in Seattle.

The clock function on my smartphone does this automatically, without an additional app. Just add a city in the destination time zone (i.e., London) and you can always swipe to the clock to see the current time there.

Thanks everyone. To clarify, I am buying flight tickets—award seats using miles, on a popular route which needs to be booked pretty much the minute the seats are released for purchase if I want to be sure off getting them on our desired travel date. But I was wrong about the release time—-it looks like 1 am UK time to me, but the airline actually uses midnight GMT, which won’t change with the switch from Daylight toStandard time in the UK. So the time for me to book the flight will be the same next week after the UK time change: 5 pm PDT which is 7 hours from GMT.

But the day I will be booking the flight home on a later date, we will have gone back to Pacific Standard Time (clock change date for us is Nov. 6). Then we will be 8 hours from GMT, so I need to be ready to book at 4 pm instead of 5.

I am glad I went through this exercise and maybe it will be helpful to others who are looking to book other popular tickets right at the time of release.

Good luck. I did this very same thing for the Colosseum and Eiffel Tower tickets. I succeeded.

The clock function on my smartphone does this automatically, without
an additional app. Just add a city in the destination time zone (i.e.,
London) and you can always swipe to the clock to see the current time
there.

To be a little pedantic, the whole reason this post exists is that this method doesn't work if you happen to be looking at some dates in March or October/November -- as exactly identified in OP in their original question -- because the UK and the US do not change back and forth between summer/DST and winter/standard time on the same dates. So the time zone difference this week is not necessarily the time zone difference next week if you are looking at these specific times of year.

In 2022 for example:

• 1 January-13 March -- London is +5h NYC, +8h Seattle
• 13 March-27 March -- London is +4h NYC, +7h Seattle
• 27 March-30 October -- London is +5h NYC, +8h Seattle
• 30 October-6 November -- London is +4h NYC, +7h Seattle
• 7 November-31 December -- London is +5h NYC, +8h Seattle

If you look at your phone today (25 Oct) London will be 5h ahead of NYC, but it's only 4h next week because of the differing DST/summer time changes. Hence the question.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter-classic.html

This may help

Lola, how do you find out exactly when FF miles are being released by an airline?

Tammy—-I asked the question (for British Airways) on the FlyerTalk Airlines and Miles Programs forum.

Are you thinking of using Alaska miles? It may be midnight Seattle time, though I have never confirmed that by staying up that late.. The release date is 330 days in advance of the flight date. You could test it if you want to stay up till midnight PDT—-isn’t that 11 pm in Alaska? If you try tonight, look for Sept. 22 2023. They just released 21 September (saw options this morning) so that date is next.

So I was curious about Alaska Airlines and decided to figure it out myself, since I am often up in the middle of the night with a cough. I checked shortly after midnight, then 2 am and 4 am—-no Sept. 22 yet. But 5 am the Sept. award seats appeared on the Alaska website for miles awards on British Airways, Icelandic, Aer Lingus, and Condor.

Now I wonder if that will change when we go back to Standard time on Nov. 6.