Originally Posted by
SeeBuyFly
The airline checks docs for its own protection, because it may be fined and/or forced to fly the passenger out at no charge. While it may have a legal obligation to the destination country, it doesn't have any legal obligation to you regarding docs. It's your job to have the correct docs. I can understand that you want to blame someone because you were so severely inconvenienced, but you have no case.
Incidentally, I too noticed that CX did not check for my India visa when boarding at ORD in December.
+1. Personal responsibility. It is not a published service of the airlines to give visa advice. You should always check Timatic via the various public front-ends that are available for example from
Star Alliance,
Delta,
United or
SkyTeam.
Even that can sometimes go wrong but at least you can say you took reasonable steps to check. To be *really* sure you would have to contact all the embassies of the countries you travel to but granted, nobody I know does that. Checking Timatic and printing the results is reasonable though. The situation certainly sucks but it really is not the airline's business to validate you. If you had gone through a TA one could apportion some blame to them..