The Board Says "No Flights Scheduled"
Why a working screen shows an empty flight list, and how to find the cause in the order that resolves it fastest.
The Board Says "No Flights Scheduled"
This article is for the case where the screen itself is fine — it loads, it shows your branding, the clock is running — but the flight list is empty. If the screen does not load at all, read Fix a Display That Won't Load instead.
What you are actually looking at
The empty board shows exactly one message: No flights scheduled, with Check back later for updates underneath it. That is the only empty state the flight list has. There is no "no departures in the next hours" and no "flight data temporarily unavailable" — if you remember seeing wording like that, it came from an older version of this guide, not from the product.
One other full-screen message exists and means something entirely different. Configuration Error with Unable to load display configuration and a Retry button means the screen never received its settings, so it never got as far as asking for flights. That is a loading problem, not an empty-flights problem.
It matters just as much to know what an empty board does *not* mean. When the flight data provider is down, times out, or rejects the request, LobbyFlight does not blank the board — it falls back to cached data and then to demo flights, and the board keeps showing a full list of plausible-looking flights that are not real. So a provider outage looks like *wrong* flights, never like *no* flights. If the flights on your board look generic or never change, go to Display Shows Demo Data Instead of Real Flights.
Start here: is the display switched off?
This is by far the most common cause, and it takes ten seconds to rule out.
Open Displays → [your screen]. At the top of the editor there is an Active/Inactive switch. When a display is set to inactive, the flight endpoint deliberately answers with an empty list to avoid spending your API quota on a screen nobody is watching. The screen still loads, still shows your logo and colours, and still says No flights scheduled — it just never receives any flights. The editor's Preview & URL tab is disabled in this state and tells you the same thing: "Activate this display to see the live preview. Inactive displays do not make API calls to save your quota."
Switch the display to Active, and flights return on the next refresh.
Is an airport actually set?
Airports are their own section in the main navigation: Portal → Airports. There is no Settings page any more, so nothing about airports lives under one.
Every plan comes with one Included Airport. On top of that, Pro and Premium can book additional airports as paid monthly add-ons. If the Included Airport slot is empty, the Airports page says so directly — "Displays have no flights to show until one is set" — and that is precisely what you are seeing on the screen.
Take the warning on the remove button seriously before you go rearranging things: removing the included airport asks you to confirm "Remove your included airport? Every display falls back to no flights until you choose a new one." Changing it, rather than removing it, is the safe move — displays that were on the old airport are moved to the new one automatically. And removing an add-on airport stops its monthly charge with a pro-rata refund, so this is a billing decision as well as a configuration one. See Airport Selection and Management for the full picture.
Which airport a particular screen uses is chosen in Displays → [your screen] → General, in the Airport section. You can only pick from airports your organisation has: the included one plus any add-ons.
Give the refresh interval time to catch up
If you just fixed the airport or activated the display and the board is still empty, the most likely answer is that nothing is wrong and you are looking at cached data.
Flight data is cached on the server, and how long it is held depends on your plan: 60 minutes on Basic, 30 minutes on Pro, 5 minutes on Premium. The screen re-fetches on the same schedule. On Basic, a change you make now can take up to an hour to appear on the screen. There is also a 60-second cache in front of the API, so even on Premium a change is not instantaneous.
Your own interval is shown in the portal under Help → Your setup → Flights refresh, as "every X min". That is the number to plan around, and it is also the reason a browser refresh on the display device does not help — reloading the page re-reads the same server-side cache. Nothing you do in the browser clears it.
Codes are 3 or 4 characters, and searching beats typing
The recommended way to pick an airport is the search field in Airports → Add Airport, which matches on airport name, city, or code. Typing a code by hand still works ("Or enter a custom IATA code"), but it is the exception, and it is where mistakes happen.
If you do type one, note that the field accepts 3 to 4 characters — three for an IATA code such as VIE, four for an ICAO code such as LOWW. A code that exists nowhere produces no error message on the screen; the request simply comes back with stale or demo data, which is another reason an unfamiliar-looking flight list is worth a second look at the airport code.
Legitimate reasons the list can be genuinely empty
Recently departed flights are dropped quickly. Flights are fetched in a wide window — up to 24 hours ahead — but a filter runs on every response, including cached ones, and removes anything that is already past. Departures are kept for 15 minutes after their scheduled time; arrivals are kept for 30 minutes, to cover baggage claim. Late in the evening, when everything remaining is more than 24 hours out and everything recent has aged past its grace period, the board can empty out even though the airport's own monitor still lists the day's flights.
Cargo and private traffic is filtered out on purpose. LobbyFlight removes flights that have no airline IATA code or no flight IATA code, flight numbers longer than four characters, and known cargo carriers including FedEx (FX), UPS (5X), European Air Transport/DHL (QY), and Kalitta Air (K4) — along with airlines whose names contain words such as private, charter, executive, or cargo. At a small field, or at a freight-heavy one, this can remove almost everything. The airport's own website will show those movements; a guest-facing board is not meant to.
A column can be empty while the board is not. In dual or triple column layouts, when several columns show the same flight type, the flight list is split chronologically across them. If there are few flights, the later columns get nothing and look broken while the first column is fine.
An active search filters the list down. In Touch and Website modes, the search function lets guests look up a flight number. A search with no matches produces the same No flights scheduled message. Clear the search field, or check that a guest has not left a query on the screen.
Two things that are not the cause
The device timezone. Flight times are rendered in the airport's timezone by default — the Use Airport Timezone switch in Displays → [your screen] → General is on unless you turned it off, and the timezone itself is derived on the server from the airport code. The device's clock setting affects neither which flights are selected nor the times shown next to them. If the times themselves look wrong, that is a different article: Incorrect Flight Times or Wrong Timezone.
The browser cache. Hard reloads and clearing browsing data do not touch the server-side cache, which is where the flight data is actually held. If you are waiting on a change, you are waiting on the refresh interval described above, not on the browser.
If it is still empty
Open Portal → Help. The Your setup card there shows your plan, your flight refresh interval, how many screens you have, and which airports are configured — the same facts support would otherwise ask you for. Ask support about this sends that context along with your message, so you do not have to collect hotel IDs or screenshots by hand. Support answers within one working day, Monday to Friday, 09:00–17:00 CET.
The one thing worth adding in your own words is when the board went empty and whether anything changed shortly before — an airport swap, a plan change, or a display being switched off.