Originally Posted by
tacommuter
Do any of you have experience transferring at Beijing from Dragonair (apparently a Cathy Pacific subidiary) to Continental?
After a harrowing experience dealing with Air China and the whole Chinese immigration system today in Beijing today, I am now very worried about a trip I must take next week.
I am scheduled out of PEK on a CO "first" class ticket. I am inbound into PEK in steerage on a flight from Hong Kong which is booked as Air China (my more familiar Star Alliance turf) but turns out to be operated by Dragonair. There is a legal amount of connecting time between flights (100 minutes) but not a lot of margin.
The bigger question is, though, whether there is going to be a problem - for me or for my bag - to make the change of planes as an international transfer without going through immigration (me) or customer (the bag). This is critical because I wouldn't have time (from what I saw today of HOW long it takes) to pick up the bag and recheck it, and more critically, I had a single-entry visa for China, so once I depart China (tonight) I don't believe I can reenter.
SO, is it possible to get from a Dragonair flight directly to the Continental Newark flight without "landing" myself?
Thanks for your help.
David
Serious words of warning for your transfer: You will arrive in T3 on KA (even if it turns out it's Air China, you still will arrive T3), but CO departs out of the old T2. In most airports this isn't a big deal....but T3 and T2 are considerably far apart from one another, and PEK is not an ideal transfer airport. Let me put this bluntly: the turnoff on the airport highway for T3 is 7 kilometers before you reach T1 and T2. Granted they're only across a runway from each other in reality, but since the center runway is in-between them I'm not sure if there is convenient shuttle access between the two outside of actually exiting T3, which is one of the largest buildings in the world.
Embarrassingly I have never done such a transfer, but honestly I don't think many people have. The protocol for deplaning in T3 is exit the plane, walk usually between 1-7 minutes, and then clear immigration. At immigration they do have a "transfers" desk you can use instead of clearing immigration, but it often appears unstaffed. At that point I'm not sure if a shuttle exists to take you between the two terminals...if not then there is no way you'll make it, since you would have to clear immigration, then take the following train back to the front of T3 and catch some shuttle to T2 from there. T3 is just so enormous, and if you do have to exit it is not a quick shuttle over to T2. Even if there is a shuttle, however, I don't think convenience is a big Beijing thing yet. If possible I highly recommend you switch your flight to Air China PEK-JFK instead of the CO to EWR flight. New J on Air China is superior to that businessfirst thing on CO anyway, you at least can lay flat.