Did another separate ticket transit in Narita arriving on UA and departing on QR. On my first leg from GUM, there were 8 (out of 107) passengers connecting to QR and only my companion and I were hand carry only!!! Even without a policy in place to through check to QR, it seems they’re allowing it due to COVID and the inability for most people to enter Japan. We were escorted by a UA agent from our gate in T1 all the way to the T2 transit counter. Each passenger took roughly 20-30 minutes to verify documents and check in, so altogether 2.5 hours. Was probably the most thorough document check I’ve ever experienced BY FAR, felt so bad for the agent. They even had to verify if my hotel was on the Maldives Official Lodging list. They had an older hard copy list with 152 properties, and what do you know, my property was #153, so had to find the updated list online.

I had a back up routing to SF just in case we were denied boarding and the UA agent escorting was well aware of this. But because it took so long to get us processed we couldn’t even use that. Agent said if we were IDB’d we would need to overnight airside which I didn’t even know was possible. Contradicts policy but due to COVID there’s really no other alternative as all the US bound flights departed. I’m otherwise eligible for entry into Japan but my PCR tests for the Maldives was a few hours invalid for Japan.