orbitmic

Well, I have upon your suggestion, and while you may not like the substance of my advice, I can assure you that there was no condescendence intended but just a very genuine warning.

To continue related questions on existing threads and to conduct a search to check that your questions have not already been answered are just two of the main FT rules. I actually tried to say it nicely because if you browse around, you'll see that on many fora, people just say "you are not allowed to open a new thread etc" and stop the conversation there and I find this harsh especially on a relatively new poster, so I just tried to inform you about the rules in question and move on to answering your question.

The question of linking PNRs again, my answer is a statement of fact. That too is one of the most frequent questions asked on FT because it would be extremely useful to be able to do this in so many cases, but it is simply not possible to do more than cross-references, regardless of tickets and airlines and it never has any practical impact.

As for the throwaway, I'm sure that you thought it was a good way of experiencing the P lounge without the need to change your ticket (I'm very surprised by the change cost of $7000 btw, it is very unusual for a P ticket as connecting sectors book into full flex J anyway so you must have had a great deal and I assume the cost is due to some expensive fare recalculation), and I know that this is an idea that many fora float around for lounge purposes, but without going into normative questions which are not what I was discussing here, I simply answered you about the practicalities.

My first point, and I'll restate it again, is that once you enter the international section of most European airports, including CDG 2E, you cannot leave except by plane. There are plenty of reasons for that, including the fact that if you fly ATL-CDG-LHR, you will remain airside during your connection having bypassed the place where you can exit to immigration without ever entering Schengen territory. Once you want to leave the 2E departure area, you are therefore asking to enter the Schengen territory (in this case France) from a place which has no inbound passport control set up. This is both technically impossible and something that typically (and I'm not saying it is right or wrong, just that it is the case) attracts great suspicion on the part of immigration authorities because, just as though you were trying to cross a border away from border stations after passing one and ignoring it to continue your way, they will suspect the worst before considering more innocent explanations. In some airports, like LHR T5, there are hourly escorts for anyone who has entered the terminal by mistake but no such thing at CDG so quite literally, what staff have to do is call the police to escort people through doors that are not open to the public back to a place where they can be immigration cleared. It is neither convenient (it may take a while before people are available to escort you and they will not look at this with sympathy) nor easy (you are not in control), and it can even result in a more thorough immigration check than what a - presumably - US citizen just entering France for a holiday (let alone to merely take another flight from ORY!) could expect. For comparison purposes, there are very few cases where people can transit in the US without going through immigration (the LHR-AKL NZ flight via LAX being one) and I let you imagine how the US CBP react when someone follows that route with a continuing BP to AKL and then once onboard are saying that they want to enter the US instead. There have been a few examples reported on FT (typically people who found a great promotional deal on that flight to NZ or beyond which was in fact cheaper than just flying to/from LAX) and they are genuine horror stories.

My second point was about the awkwardness of the situation, and again, I appreciate that you might not like the substance of what I said, but I was trying to attract your attention to the fact that the P lounge is not a normal lounge and that the situation would, in my view, prove very embarrassing as a result. Again, regardless of the normative merits of your plans, in a normal lounge, there are quite literally hundreds of people. If you did this, for instance, to enter the normal AF J lounge, you'd then go to a lounge agent who wouldn't even know who you are because they have checked in dozens of other people so however unpleasant the exit because of the points above, it would at least be fairly anonymous. The P lounge is entirely different. Much of the time it is entirely empty and the lounge staff are precisely paid to know exactly who to expect, where they come from and where they are going. The maximum occupancy I have personally seen was 4 people including myself and my partner. I heard that it sometimes goes up to 10 at busy times but never really more than that (in fact, the lounge is relatively small). So someone from the P lounge will be coming to fetch you at the aircraft, and tell you that as you are flying from ORY they will take you to immigration and to the AF coach to ORY or would you like to use the arrivals lounge first. Are you going to tell them that you won't take the ORY flight but will take a CDG-LHR flight instead then at the risk of your return ticket being cancelled? Or are you letting them take you to immigration and the coach as planned, and then just turn back, go to check in, security, back to the P lounge where you might very well face the same person who took you to the coach, and if not someone who will tell you that you are not allowed in this lounge with your CDG-LHR ticket, at which point you will have to explain that you are coming on your arrival in P, at which point the agent will look up your reservation, based on its details ask what the deal is with your ORY-LCY flight in a few hours and whether his/her colleague did not come to fetch you at from your previous flight as they were supposed to etc. A few hours later, you will go back to the same person, telling them that you are not going to LHR after all but will instead take the ORY-LCY you were also booked on and which you just said you would not take a short while before? The typical P lounge experience is that one person takes care of you from beginning to end, almost a bit like a mix between a PA and a butler. It is one thing to try and do what you want in a normal, anonymous lounge situation, but it is another to have to tell inconsistent stories to the same person, who is actually attentive and knowledgeable about your reservation details from the start, and as I said even if you do not like it, who will very quickly understand the "real" story when you ask to leave the lounge after all.

So feel free to think of me as the bad condescending guy, I do not mind, but unfortunately, if you press ahead with your plan, I have little doubt that on the day, you will realise exactly what I actually meant and why I warned you about it the way I did.