dominicd

Hi,

My parents bought an Air France ticket to Barranquilla, Colombia to come visit me. However, plans have changed and I bought them a new domestic flight Bogotá - Cartagena (with Avianca) instead of the original Bogotá - Barranquilla (also Avianca).
=> Final destination will be Cartagena i/o Barranquilla.

Will they be able check their luggage to final destination on the new ticket?

Thanks a lot,
D.

aBroadAbroad

Welcome to FlyerTalk… your post has been moved to the dedicated Air France forum for better feedback.

Good luck.

~Moderator, Information Desk

orbitmic

Welcome to Flyertalk. Assuming that you booked the original itinerary as one ticket, absolutely not I'm afraid! The best that your parents can hope for if they intend to travel with checked baggage is that the check in agent is incompetent enough not to know how to check their bag through to Baranquilla so that they can pick it up at Bogota and recheck. If not, the agent will insist on checking the bag through the ticket's original destination.

It is also essential to realise that I hope that this is not the first part of their trip with a return to follow: otherwise, if your parents do not fly ALL the segments booked in the order they were booked, the rest of their ticket will be cancelled and they will lose it entirely. So if this is an outbound and there is a return, the bottom line is don't do it! You need to change their tickets to the itinerary that they want to fly, or alternatively they need to fly the itinerary as it was booked and make their way separately from Barranquilla to Cartagena or risk being stuck in Colombia and having to buy new last minute one way tickets back to Europe at outrageous prices.

irishguy28

I am assuming here that the ticket purchased from Air France does not end in Bogota, but includes the Bogota-Barranquilla flight (operated by Avianca). If this is not the case, then please advise.

No, they will not!

Furthermore, if your parents do not take the Bogota-Barranquilla flight that was booked as part of their Air France ticket, all remaining flights on their Air France ticket will be cancelled without refund; they will have to buy a brand-new one-way ticket to get back home after their trip to see you.

You should either:

a) contact the agent that sold you the Air France ticket (Air France themselves, if bought directly from AF) and enquire about changing the existing ticket so that they can fly Bogota-Cartagena INSTEAD OF the booked Bogota-Barranquilla; this, however, is likely to be prohibitively expensive

b) maintain the AF ticket exactly as it is; cancel your Avianca Bogota-Cartagena flight; and either collect your parents as originally planned in Barranquilla, or arrange a new, separate means of transferring your parents from Barranquilla to Cartagena [note that, if you buy any additional flight(s) to get your parents from Barranquilla to Cartagena, Air France will NOT interline their bags onto this separate ticket; you would therefore have to allow SUFFICIENT TIME, ie at least several hours, for your parents to arrive, including a sufficient buffer for any delays on their journey, and allow them sufficient time to clear any customs/immigration on the way, to reclaim their baggage at Barranquilla, and then to check that luggage back in with the next airline before check-in for their onward flight closes. However, given how relatively close the two cities are and the lack of direct flights between the two, I would expect that a surface transfer is preferable to arranging additional flying which would require at least 2 more short sectors).

NickB

There are only circa 130kms from BAQ to CTG and no direct flight. It would not make sense to fly between those cities, as it would involve considerable backtracking to BOG (a bit like attempting to fly from LHR to BHX or MRS to MPL). Bus or taxi would make more sense.

irishguy28

...which is what I wrote!

NickB

Apologies, irishguy28. You did indeed point out that going onward by air might not be the best solution (although I think that I might have been inclined to put a little stronger than stating that a surface transfer may be "prefererable" )

I missed the last sentence and just saw the very detailed instructions on what to do to connect by air, which felt to me rather peculiar, a bit like telling somebody that , if they plan to connect onward by air from LHR to BHX, they need to provide enough padding between flights and bear in mind the absence of baggage interlining. I would have thought that it would be more natural to say that air connections between LHR and BHX do not really make sense. Ditto for CTG-BAQ. But presumably the OP will anyway be more familiar than either of us with traveling between BAQ and CTG.