Flight Times or the Clock Show the Wrong Time Zone
Why a board can be shifted by a fixed number of hours, and how the per-display "Times shown in" setting decides which time zone everything is rendered in.
Flight Times or the Clock Show the Wrong Time Zone
This article explains why every time on a board can be shifted by a fixed number of hours, and how to bring it back in line with the airport. It covers the one setting that controls time zones in LobbyFlight, the two situations that most often produce a shift you did not expect, and the cases where the shift you are seeing is actually correct.
One setting decides the time zone for the whole board
Each display has a setting called Times shown in. It has two states: the airport's time, which is the default for every new display, and the hotel's time. The interface describes when it matters: "Matters when the airport is in another zone than the hotel."
That single switch governs the entire board, not just the flight rows. When it is set to the airport's time, LobbyFlight looks up the IANA time zone of the airport and formats everything with it: the scheduled, estimated and actual times in the flight table, the clock in the header, and the "Last Updated" stamp in the footer. All three come from the same value, so they can never disagree with each other. If the flight rows look shifted, the header clock is shifted by exactly the same amount.
When the switch is set to the hotel's time, no time zone is passed to the board at all, and the board falls back to the time zone of the device that renders it — the media player, TV browser or tablet the display URL is open on. In practice that means: with the default setting the board is independent of the device, and with the second setting the device's own clock settings decide what guests see.
Where to find the setting
Open Portal → Displays, select the display you want to change, and stay on the General tab. Times shown in sits directly below the time format. Changing it applies to that display only, so two screens in the same lobby can legitimately show two different times.
Because the setting is per display, checking it is the first thing worth doing when one screen looks wrong and another looks right.
Cause 1: the airport is not in the lookup table, so the board runs in UTC
LobbyFlight resolves an IATA code to a time zone through a built-in lookup table. When a code is not in that table, the lookup returns UTC, and the board renders every time in UTC without any error or warning.
This is the most common reason for a board that is uniformly off. In Central Europe it produces a shift of exactly one hour in winter and exactly two hours in summer, which is easy to mistake for a daylight saving problem. It is not: the offset comes from the airport code, not from the date.
The tell is that the shift affects everything at once — flight rows, header clock and "Last Updated" — and that it does not go away when you reload the board or fix the device clock. If you see this on a smaller or recently added airport, report the IATA code to support so the mapping can be added.
Cause 2: a display with several airports uses the first one's time zone
A display can show flights from more than one airport, but the time zone is derived from the first airport in the list only. Flights from a second airport in a different zone are still rendered in the first airport's zone, which makes them look shifted while the rest of the board looks fine.
If your board mixes airports across time zones, the practical options are to reorder the list so the airport your guests care about most comes first, or to split the airports across separate displays so each one gets its own zone. Airport Selection and Management explains how the airport list is edited.
Cause 3: the airport really is in another time zone than the hotel
If your hotel is in Berlin and the board shows departures from London Heathrow, the times will be one hour behind your lobby clock. That is correct. Heathrow departures are scheduled in London time, and that is the time on the guest's boarding pass.
Leaving Times shown in on the airport's time is the right choice here, because it matches every other source the guest will check. If your guests are confusing the board with the lobby clock, say so on the board itself rather than changing the setting — a slide or a header line naming the airport removes the ambiguity without making the times disagree with the airline.
When it is the format, not the time zone
Not every complaint about "wrong time" is a time zone problem. The Time format setting on the same General tab switches a display between 24-hour and 12-hour notation, so 14:30 and 2:30 PM are the same moment shown two ways. The time is also localised in the board's language, which changes separators and numerals but never the underlying value.
Before investigating time zones, confirm that the reported time is actually a different moment and not the same moment written differently.
"Last Updated" looks old
The footer stamp is formatted with the same time zone as everything else, so it cannot be shifted on its own. What it can be is genuinely old, because how often a board refetches flight data depends on the plan: 60 minutes on Basic, 30 minutes on Pro, and 5 minutes on Premium.
On Basic, a "Last Updated" stamp from 50 minutes ago is normal and not a fault. If you need the board to track changes more closely, the refresh interval is what a plan upgrade buys you — see Understanding Feature Limits and Choosing a plan and what it costs.
The hotel time zone under Concierge is a different setting
There is a hotel time zone stored on your account. It is determined automatically from your address when you save it, and you can correct it under Portal → Concierge → Settings. It exists for the concierge and shuttle features, so that a 06:00 pickup means 06:00 at the hotel across daylight saving changes.
It has no effect on the flight board. Changing it will not move the times on a display, and a display that renders in UTC will keep rendering in UTC no matter what is stored there. If you have already adjusted this field hoping to fix a board, go back to Times shown in on the display instead.
Daylight saving changes need no action
You do not have to reload a display after a clock change. The header clock ticks every second and is re-formatted on every render from the airport's IANA zone, which resolves daylight saving automatically, and flight data is refetched on the plan's own interval. A board left running through the night of a changeover will be correct in the morning.
What to send support if it is still wrong
If the board is still shifted after you have checked the setting, send the IATA code of the first airport on the display, the state of Times shown in for that display, one flight number together with the time LobbyFlight shows and the time the airline shows, and a photo or screenshot of the board that includes the header clock. The clock is the useful part: if it is shifted by the same amount as the flight rows, the cause is the airport's time zone; if only the rows look wrong, the cause is in the flight data rather than the time zone.