Originally Posted by
stephem
For all the travel bloggers do to supposedly get inside info from airline reps they are well connected to and then leverage that to hawk credit cards to us, it boggles my mind that one of them hasn’t used a couple of chits to push ‘Merican and Dultah in particular to understand they have numerous front line agents who have been misinterpreting how China interprets “transit” in TWOV. It is crazy that you have to use a nonUS carrier or have a visa to have a high certainty you wont be denied boarding, even at an airport where you might have successfully boarded with an identical itinerary and availed to TWOV in the past.
While it is fun to mock the names of other carriers, it does not help others trying to get to a decision. Particularly when you are so wrong.
There are multiple reports of non-US carriers denying TWOV boarding under the same circumstances as people are experiencing on DL and AA and originating at locations across the world.
None of this makes the failure correct, but the reasoning by both the non-US and US carriers is roughly the same.
My best advice to the group planner is to speak with the group desk at AA (the folks you are working with on this trip and see if you cannot nail this down and have an entry made in the PNR notes of each passenger.