Originally Posted by
Often1
This is 100% the fault of some combination of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and IATA (TIMATIC). The entire purpose of TIMATIC is to provide a quick & correct means for agents who are trained solely to operate the database and not as international lawyers, to determine whether an individual has the proper documents.
There is no reason for a DL agent to know that China considers a ticket to originate at NRT when the ticket in fact originates in the USA. Unless TIMATIC specifies that ticket origination is to be considered the immediately preceding station. As the language for TIMATIC is provided by respective government authorities, put into form and then reviewed for accuracy by government officials before it is posted, it falls on either China to have caught the missing language or IATA for not having included what China provided.
Snarky comments about China fining DL are way off base as are the comments about DL agents not knowing Chinese rules. They do, it's what China provided IATA and they see in front of them.
I would hope that DL makes this right for OP as a customer service gesture and also raises it to IATA as the language is incorrect.
Perhaps TIMATIC can be improved, but you seem to be awfully keen to let DL off the hook here. I am not. I find the Chinese rules quite clear, even if the way TIMATIC formats and presents them begs for familiarity.
Delta has been providing USA to China services via Japan since before TWOV was implemented in its various forms. 72-hour TWOV has now been around for over a year at PVG and there simply ISN'T ANY EXCUSE for Delta staff that deal with TPAC flights not to have enough training to know the TWOV rules by now, or at least to be able to have a human, designated DL international expert "on call" 24/7 that individual front-line staff members (or the customer) can refer back to for a ruling if they can't sort out TIMATIC.
No excuse for this to have happened.