Why can't I check in online?
 

I have a flight this afternoon. When I try OLCI, I get a message that I must check in at the airport. Any ideas why?

• I have a seat assignment.
• I'm not elite, so not an upgrade issue.
• It's a simple A-B-A domestic round trip, all with US flight numbers on US metal.
• Ticket purchased with a credit card 4 weeks ago.
• I've flown US and other airlines recently without any special security flagging, and my US freq. flyer number is on the ticket.
• Flight is showing as on time (hasn't been canceled).

So what might have triggered this? And how much extra time to I need to allow?

When that happened to me the one time that it did, it was because I had been randomly flagged SSS (or is it four S's) - at any rate, you may just be flagged for the Secondary Security Screening. Not a biggie - mine was at the gate prior to boarding. A quick look at me and ID - a quick look in my bag - I signed a sheet and was allowed to board.

This is only a guess on my part though. I would allow your normal 1 to 1 1/2 hours for check-in.

Just to follow up, it seems to have been an unexplainable glitch. I got to the airport waited in a holiday weekend line, got to a kiosk, checked in there into my pre-assigned seat with no problem, no human interaction, no extra security.

For the return flight, online check-in worked fine.

Variation on the 'glitch'! My flight is tomorrow, exactly 23 hours away (domestic from JFK) and when I try to check in online, i keep getting the message that online check in is only open 24 hours before till 1 hour before the flight and I should try again later. Any idea what (if anything) can be done and/or if this is a frequent occurrence on US? Thanks!

Here's another glitch variation - you can't check-in (or at least I've never been able to) at a kiosk for an international trip but I've successfully checked in online for those same trips. I usually check-in online, print to PDF and then use the kiosk to reprint boarding passes. That fails and annoys me since I had to go back downstairs to see a human.

There are times when I try to Check in and in the case of Shuttle flights grab an assigned seat and also get the 24hr remark even though I do it inside of the 24hr period. The glitch that I've noticed on these occasions is that I am able to check in at 24hrs but can't get my seat assignments until 24 hrs on the clock in Phoenix.

For example, if I had a 6pm flight out of LGA and tried to check in at 630pm EST I get notice that seats aren't available until within 24hrs of the flight. I would continue to get this until 9:00 pm EST or 6PM Mountain time.

For international flights (such as the time I was returning from Belgium and it was clearly within 24 hrs of checkin) I had to play with the "Today" and "Tomorrow" selection. Using the right combination and the flight number I was able to eventually check in online in Brussels.

Pretty stupid programming. Or maybe that is what you get when you hire the cheapest possible programmers.

New one for me trying to check in for flights tomorrow afternoon. Leg one is a quick hop on a CRJ-700. Leg two is domestic mainline, upgraded on an A321. I have a seat assignment on both, though it's not showing on the upgraded segment. Trying to look at that seatmap throws this error:
-----
We're sorry

This is what happened:
Unable to determined booking counts

How to fix this:
We can't open that seat map. Part or all of your flight may be booked on another airline, it may be too close to the time of departure or our seat maps may be down.

Reference code: BuildSeatmap (99)
Occurred: Tue Jul 06 2010 21:47:38 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
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So far I have totally perplexed two phone agents, but neither sees anything in the reservation to suggest an issue with it. They see the correct seat assignments as well in their systems.

Any bets as to what'll happen when I use a kiosk? It'll probably either be just fine, or a major cluster, but probably nowhere in between.

got the same check in problem

my son is out at 0800 tomorrow, and his OLCI worked fine

i am out at 1630, and i get the error

oh well, guess i may have to go to the airport earlier than usual

Update: checked in with no problems. Chalk it up to more webapp coding issues I guess.