Is my friend BU to ask me to pick her up from the airport at 2am ?

[Eggsandpickles]

She clearly wants to save money by not getting a taxi. There are no buses to our village at that time. A taxi would probably cost her around £85.
Thoughts ?

To be fair, I don't think the OP has said anything about her friend having a car and being able to drive.

But those saying it's not friendly to refuse to do this, it's also not friendly to put someone in an awkward position by asking them to lose a night's sleep.

She should have booked a flight at a better time, booked a hotel at the airport or prepared herself to sit and wait until public transport is running, which could be as early as 4 am if its a major airport.

I don't think she is unreasonable but you would also not be unreasonable tosay no if you don't want to.

I've happily done this sort of thing for family and close friends but then my family have always been the types to help each other out so i suppose it depends what you grew up with.
I doubt she'll be offended if you say 'sorry, doesn't work for me'.

Ok, chill! 🙄

This has really made me laugh. So you didn't want to get into a taxi with one guy, but you got on a plane with hundreds of people?

I'm an early riser, so I might offer to pick up at, say, 6am, if she doesn't mind hanging around to save money, but I wouldn't go out in the middle of the night to pick someone up unless it was an emergency or one of my dcs. Certainly not to save somene money.

I disagree with those saying it's not unreasonable to ask. Of course it is! "It's not unreasonable, despite being able to afford to pay for a cab yourself, to ask someone to leave their house at half past midnight, drive two and a half hours round trip, spend probably 45 minutes hanging around an airport, and get back to their house at 4am if they're lucky, all just for petrol money and vague gratitude"

I wouldn't even ask someone to do that at a more sociable hour unless they were exceptionally close to me, and I would only ask if I fully intended to reciprocate with a similar favor.

Middle of the night flight planning should definitely factor in the cost of a cab.

As your friend is not even coming to stay with you and is more than capable of paying then it’s an absolute no from me. And the more I think of it the more CF I think she is being. She’s got you where she wants you seems more than likely in this friendship.

You and your cohort keep avoiding the issue. Do you think it’s reasonable to lose a nights sleep to save someone £20-30?

Interested to know what you all drive that it costs £60 for a 2.5 hour journey.

Factoring in parking too. Flights are often delayed.

The friend has said she will pay for OP's airport parking as well as fuel.

It is so unbelievably rude to ask someone to pick you up at 2 or 3 in the morning. It is what bullies do.
A good friend will offer if she is able to help.

That’s not the point. The point is OP losing a night’s sleep to save some tight sod a few quid. She will probably spend more that on a night out on holiday.

Easy enough to time it write and go to pick up for around £5 or meet nearby and pay nothing

Flight delays and baggage drop delays are a depressingly common reality.

I wouldn’t lose a night’s sleep based on a hope that I could time everything right.

Surely, it would have been her responsibility to ensure that any flight that was booked had an arrival time coinciding with availablity of public transportation.

Seems to me she was planning on calling you for a lift anyway. She could have had least had the courtesy to plan a flight that made it easier on your for a pick up? Having said that, you have been good friends with her - and your daughters - so it's one of those situations I think I would just suck up. (reluctantly).

Not worth the aggro of saying no- but I would ask her if she could have got an earlier flight when planning the trip.

‘Tight sods’ alright - won’t even fork out for a taxi to save dragging their friends out for hours on end in the small hours of the morning.

Really interesting to observe that the cheeky fuckers are also the utter tight arses who won’t pay for a taxi for themselves.

What a surprise. Not.

And I help people out all the time. What I don’t do, is go around asking them to help me out all the time.

I wouldn't offer & I wouldn't say yes.
Let us know how it goes, OP, what you decide to do.

How can you live and thrive in the circle of life without ever sharing and truly connecting with anyone? How can you not ask or do anything for anybody else?

So your friend or person you’re dating (I’ve had to google BU) has asked you to pick up her and her 15 year old daughter at 2am, from the airport? To me she’s asked somebody she loves and probably feels safe with.

I have a friend who comes and picks me up for stuff and I never would have asked before and had to work through a bit of resistance when it started. And because she does, we are starting to get closer and dissolve some of our “other woman” and “mother wounds” and now I feel like I have a woman in my life I can actually go on holiday with and feel close to. There is only love between us. It’s usually me who keeps offering my love and friendship to people and for once I am glad that she was the one offering to me and I moved past the discomfort and said yes.

do you want connection and to thrive in the circle and be an “interdependent” accepting member of a loving community in your life? Or do you want to stay isolated and “independent” defensive and judgy? This is an opportunity and I’d recommend you look in the mirror and reevaluate your life. Are you happy? Do you feel deeply loved and supported by life? Do you actively choose love and interconnectedness? We are all one.

God bless.

What a bizarre post.

Glad you're not my friend! I wouldn't think twice about doing this for a friend and I'm sure that they'd do the same for me.

The threads I read about friendships on here make me SO grateful for the people I have in my life, we'd just never think of each other so negatively. It's actually really sad.

Well, quite.

I was not suggesting OP do it, I was answering assertions that if she did it she would not be saving the amount suggested for her friend, versus the friend coughing up on a cab fare. If the friend pays for OP's parking and fuel, she is saving herself maybe half the cab fare - in exchange for OP's night without sleep.

This seems a classic case of "askers" versus "guessers". Askers try their luck ("if you don't ask, you don't get!") and aren't necessarily offended if you decline; whereas guessers try to imagine what the response might be and if it might be a no, they don't ask, to avoid putting the other person in a socially awkward position (like this one). When an asker meets a guesser, stress results. Fuller explanation below. This concept has been helpful for me (a guesser) declining the outrageous requests of a dear asker friend.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/change-life-asker-guesser

My money is on AI.

Almost no-one on this thread is saying they'd never do a favour for anyone. What people are quite reasonably saying is that it's a hell of an ask to do the trip in the middle of the night.

If there was a level of mutual give and take in the friendship generally and the trip required the to set off at 10 am on a day when she wasn't doing anything much, I'm sure the OP would be happy to pick her friend up from the airport, if costs were covered, as would most people.

The person being tight is the person who happily paid out for a holiday but is too tight to pay around £85 for a taxi to get her home. The taxi cost is just part of the cost of the holiday. It's not an emergency and there several options available to the holiday maker.