A traveller sipping wine in a London pub learned the hard way that the UK and US don't switch to daylight saving on the same weekend — New York had sprung forward weeks earlier. It's a small mix-up with real consequences: missed flights, missed dinners and lost sleep. A recent piece from The Points Guy rounds up the time traps most likely to derail a trip, and a few of them are genuinely surprising.
Start with the big one: roughly two-thirds of the world doesn't observe daylight saving at all, and the countries that do can't agree on dates. Most of Europe changes clocks on the last Sunday in March and October, while the US runs from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. Egypt rejoined the clock-changing club in 2023 — the only country in Africa to do so — shifting on a Friday in April and a Thursday in October. Even within countries it gets messy: Arizona and Hawaii skip it entirely, which matters when you're driving or flying through Arizona and its neighbours run on different clocks. Canada has similar holes (most of Saskatchewan and the Yukon stay on standard time), and in Australia, New South Wales and Victoria spring forward while Queensland and Western Australia don't.
Then there are the places that invent their own time. Some private island resorts in the Maldives — officially a single UTC+5 zone — run an hour ahead of the national clock to give guests more evening light. The St. Regis Vommuli calls it "Island Time" and assigns butlers to make sure nobody misses a airport transfer because of it. Worth checking before you book, not after you land.
Odd offsets add another layer. Newfoundland sits a stubborn 90 minutes ahead of Eastern Time, and India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran and parts of Australia run 30 minutes off UTC. Nepal goes further with a 45-minute offset. One editor accepted a 7:30pm dinner invite while in Newfoundland, only to realise back home the meeting actually started at 6pm — a reminder that calendar apps don't always translate invite times correctly.
That's the final trap: adding events to your digital calendar while abroad can silently default to the local time zone, so the appointment reads wrong once you're home. The fix is to manually switch back to your home zone before saving, or use Outlook's option to display up to three time zones side by side. Cruise passengers face their own version — transoceanic sailings can shift clocks daily, and crossing the international date line, as on an Alaska-to-Tokyo sailing, costs you an entire day.
The takeaway is simple: before a spring or autumn trip, check whether your destination changes clocks, and when. Check whether your resort keeps its own time. And never trust a calendar invite blindly while travelling. Five minutes of checking beats a missed flight.
Story via The Points Guy.
