Aer Lingus at LAX....FYI

But when you buy a ticket, the terminal where you are departing from is always listed.

LAX is one of my least favorite airports.

Lots of people working in airports may be even more clueless than passengers who just plopped down there. Look for signage or get a second opinion before setting out for 30 minute hike across the airport.

By the way, the abbreviation for Aer Lingus is "EI", not "AL". (AL would be Malta Airlines.)

Or, and I realize this is too late for the OP, check out the airport's website ahead of time and see if they have a handy map like this one...

https://www.flylax.com/-/media/flylax/pdfs/getting-around-lax/lax-airline-location-map.ashx?la=en&hash=C98EA280C851B316BC0A4A65E1C264A836F43BDF

I do have empathy for the OP. On one of my first trips, when I had no idea about how flights worked, a travel agent had arranged our flights and told us we were departing LAX on a Lufthansa flight, so we went to TBIT. We were told there that there was no Lufthansa flight leaving at the time our flight was scheduled to depart, and none of the agents seemed to know where our flight was actually departing from (and, no, there was no terminal number on our ticket, just a Lufthansa flight number, destination, and departure/arrival times.) Finally found an American Airlines agent who kindly found a United flight going to our destination, departing at the time shown on our ticket. Of course, as I know now, this was a codeshare flight, but I didn't have a clue then. We hiked down to Terminal 7 and made our flight, but that vacation started with a wee bit of stress.

Was not allowed to print Aer Lingus boarding passes prior to leaving PDX. Had to get them from gate agent at Terminal 2. We were in sterile area at Tom Bradley and wanted to remain so.

It's unfortunate that you flew all the way to LAX to fly to Dublin. Was that your final destination?
Aer Lingus also flies out of SeaTac and San Francisco to Dublin.

Yep that’s LAX. Been poorly managed for years and now that the curbside ban of taxis, Uber and Lyft have gone into effect it’s even worst.

Welcome to LA....

Which terminal did the Aer Lingus app instruct you to go?

If the gate had not been assigned yet, which terminal did the app say that flight departed from LAX to DUB the previous day?

The app typically has info you need.

This is also where having a smart phone helps - you can download apps like Flightaware and they can give you that info on your phone.

I have never had an airline ticket that specified the terminal. Maybe I fly the wrong airlines.

Though in the case of some airports like Atlanta, the terminal information is useless and confusing if you're just connecting there on a single ticket. You'll miss your flight there if you spend too much time trying to find your gate at the North/South/International Terminal, which only designates landside check-in areas for airlines and has absolutely zero to do with the common airside concourse and gate locations.

Gate information is another reason why it's so very useful to have a smart phone, even if you only use it on local free wifi on the trip. The airport's own web site will have a full arrivals and departures location listing that typically lists more flights than the overhead A&D screens that can be hard to find in many airports now.

Could the confusion have been because passengers on flights to the US from Ireland (like Canada as well) typically clear US passport control in Ireland before boarding and not in the US upon arrival? The person at LAX who gave the OP the wrong information might not have been aware of this anomaly.

No because Aer Lingus departs from Terminal 2 at LAX but arrives at Tom Bradley International or Terminal B

Post from user ghasedak24 above reported to webmaster.

I flew into LAX a couple of weeks ago (American) transitioning from DFW to Hong Kong. Terminal changed about 24 hours before my connection from Tom Bradley to Terminal 4. The app kept up for me - very useful.

I have never had an airline ticket that specified the terminal. Maybe I fly the wrong airlines.

I haven't either, and I don't think that claim (that terminal is always specified on ticket purchase) is true at all. I mean, at airports with only one terminal or at airports where airlines only operate out of one terminal, it's trivial.

But for example at JFK (my home airport) Delta operates out of terminals 2 and 4. Most of the time long-haul international flights depart out of terminal 4, but they can depart out of terminal 2 as well; I was myself on a JFK-TXL (Berlin) flight in October that had departed out of terminal 4 every day the previous week, but left out of terminal 2 the day I flew it. The terminal was 100% not specified when I bought the ticket.

Not to be pedantic (well, maybe a little), but language and terminology matters (especially when people are confused), so it might be helpful if folks were a little more precise with the words they use.

In this thread there are multiple people referring to departure gate information being printed (or not being printed) on their ticket. I'm wiling to bet my next mortgage payment that none of these folks ever saw or touched their ticket. Most travelers these days have probably never even seen or touched an airline ticket. References to "tickets" here are almost certainly boarding passes.

A ticket is the contract you agree to when you purchase the right to fly somewhere.

For those new to airline travel, tickets typically are (or were) those multiple-sheet, carbonless forms (with a slight, odd, almost greasy feel to the touch), with lots of red print (on the carbonless copies), some of which eventually would wear off and transfer to one of your belongings to give it a faint pinkish tinge by the time you reached your destination, and seemingly pages and pages of 4-point print filled with endless legalese, references to the ICAO and the "Warsaw Convention for the for the Unification of certain rules relating to international carriage by air", fer cryinoutloud. Usually run through an old-fashioned hand-powered gizmo that pressed the details through all six layers of the form (pushed sharply, hard right then back left, like a credit card press but with more noise and drama), often annotated by hand (in hard-to-read scrawls) with incomprehensible details. Ah, the romance of travel - just thinking about it, I still can almost smell a whiff of those old ticket forms (the paper used had a slight but distinct odor).

Anyway, that's what you used to be handed when you bought a ticket. Despite getting 6 pages of nearly microscopic print, there would never, ever be any gate information in there, because there was no way to determine what your gate would be.

Contrast that with what I'm sure folks are talking about here: a boarding pass.

The boarding pass may be one you printed out yourself at home or elsewhere off-airport (your hotel, etc.). Or it might be an electronic version on your phone or in an app. Or it might be one printed for you, on a slightly-thick piece of paper (in a size/shape that echoes the old carbonless tickets!) at the check-in counter (this was the standard practice before current technology enabled other options). Or it might be printed for you at a self-serve check-in kiosk or at the gate.

Contrary to assertions upthread, on boarding passes, your departure gate is printed on your boarding pass...as long as it is known at the time it's printed (your seat, too).

When it's printed hours before your departure, the gate may be a guess or completely unknown. Here's the important fact to understand: gate assignments change all the time, sometimes right up until minutes before the flight pulls in. If your boarding pass was printed long before your flight departs, there's a good chance the gate indicated is wrong. In particular, consider this scenario: you check in for your long journey home at some airport in Europe. You have one stop at a US hub airport, then a hop to your home airport. As a helpful courtesy, you are checked in all the way, so they hand you two boarding passes: one for the first, long trans-atlantic flight, then a second one for your connecting flight home. That last flight may be 10+ hours ahead, and any guess they may have made at what gate your flight would use has little value (often they just leave the gate blank on a boarding pass...they're actually doing you a favor in this case).

So whenever you head for your plane, take a look at the departures board posted in the airport, and see what gate your flight will really be departing from.

Hope that helps.