Disclaimer: I realize that some of you are frequent flyers and probably know this, but I'll post it for people that don't know.
EDIT: A note to the mods... when I was posting this, I got to thinking, would it be worth adding a "travel tips" section for people to share travel tips for travel in general or through specific cities? Would anyone find that useful?
Originally posted by mysteryflyer
I quite often find my company doesnt book through tickets due to price. So for example I am bmi from London then LH to somewhere else. Separately its cheap, but if they try to book them all through its expensive. Even though its the so called Star Alliance. I hate it when they do this as my bags dont get through checked and presumably if I miss it im stuck with no hotel. company pays if this happens but it still seems like bonkers behaviour to me....
I see this quite a bit, however I will offer those unfamiliar with the problem a tad of advice. If you want your bags to be checked... normally they will do this manually for you as long as the connecting airline has a baggage agreement with the originating airline (which they will if you're connecting to another STAR airline). In fact, most major carriers have baggage agreements with other majors even if they're not in the same alliance. For example, we through-check with VS, BA, LH, AZ and many more that are not SkyTeam.
The Delta policy on it is that as long as you have proof of your onward travel, ie: printed company/airline itn, we can manually enter your connecting flight numbers and cities into the computer and check your bag through manually, even if the flights don't show in your record.
The only trick is that when you get to the transfer city, you want to let the next airline know that you've checked X number of bags with XX carrier and here arevyour tag numbers, so they can make sure they are in the next computer system.
That said, sometimes if you're at risk of missing a flight sometimes it's better to not through check them, so that when you end up stranded you still have your bags. Manually checking, at least with our system, also doesn't recognize short connections. A DL tag will have **HOT** printed on it if a connection is under 30 minutes, however the computer doesn't compare mannually entered connections.
IMO the only time manually checking is really useful is if you're doing something like SYR-CVG-LGW, then you have an 8 hour layover to go to FRA or somewhere... normally you'd have to claim/recheck in LGW due to connection time, but we can overwrite that and forward it to LH for you.
Oh for you UK folk I should add that per US regulation you do still have to claim bags on your first entrance point into the US, even if you have had them manually checked. However once you drop them off with TSA again you don't need to touch them until you reach your final destination.
Paul--I'm astonished that AA connected your bag but you didn't make the flight. Despite the fact that they didn't treat you well, hat's off to AA baggage service! That's rare that a bag makes it and the passenger doesn't! Heck, I think ATL asks for 40 minute connections for bag transfer purposes!
