Originally Posted by
shimps1
My wife and I have ORD<>SEZ awards on QR booked in Feb. We are based in DSM, so we need to get to and from ORD on a separate ticket. AA has plenty of flights, but I am curious as to the buffer I should leave between arrival to ORD, and then departure from ORD, and vice versa.
ORD>DOH leaves 6:10PM and DOH>ORD arrives 1:30PM. I am thinking of booking AA4092 arriving ORD 1:27PM, and then AA3495 leaving ORD 8:40PM. This leaves me a little under 5 hrs for the departure and over 6 hrs for the return. Would anyone be more cautious than that? We will need to exit security, collect our bags, and re-check in both situation since they are on separate bookings.
Does QR business class offer lounge access in ORD for both departure and arrival? If everything goes smoothly we will have quite a bit of time to kill.
I did something similar, but AA AUS-ORD then separate ticket on CX ORD-HKG. I had booked the first (8am) AUS-ORD flight, which I think was supposed to arrive around 10:45. Only that was canceled, and I was put on AUS-DFW-ORD, and arrived around 12:30. The CX flight left from the international terminal around 3:30pm.
If you don't check bags, there's a bus that you can take between T3 and T5, but check the schedule ahead of time (I ended up not visiting the Flagship lounge going out for fear of missing the bus).
Otherwise, like you said, if you check bags, you'll need to exit security, claim bags, cart them to T5, re-check, and re-clear security. I don't think the bus will take you back to T3, so you'd be stuck at T5.
There is a BA lounge that you should have access to, but it is quite small. I found the staff very helpful and the food decent, considering that I was about to eat on my flight anyway.
On the return, the CX flight had arrived late, I think around 2:15-2:30pm. I checked at the AA baggage desk in T5, it was about 2:45pm at that point. They told me that the earlier ORD-AUS flight did have seats, but it was on-time, scheduled to leave at 3:15. I went to the Flagship lounge, showered, ate....and ended up being there quite a while due to storms, crew issues, and mechanical stuff. My flight was scheduled to leave at 8:15pm, but it was about 10:30 when we finally left.
Some people had mixed results getting access to the Flagship lounge on separate tickets. I just presented both boarding passes and asked, "Is this where the Flagship lounge is?" (I think there are 2 lounges at ORD?) The gal scanned them both, then gave me a card and told me to take the elevator to the 2nd floor. There is someone standing outside those elevators who takes that card.
Overall, I though the Flagship lounge was nice, but not anything like The Pier at HKG, and I didn't think it was quite as nice as the Flagship lounge at JFK.