Originally Posted by jsloan

Curious to hear how this turned out. According to the LH app, the LYS flight was delayed and departed 50 minutes after your arrival at MUC. The MRS flight was also delayed, and left about half an hour after that. So, while I think you probably would have made your LYS flight if you’d stood pat, it also seems that there should have been enough time to get your luggage onto the MRS flight if, in fact, they were able to go and grab it from the baggage room. 🤞

Originally Posted by jsloan

No, of course it’s not true. That doesn’t even begin to make sense. UA owns both the ticket and the delay; they can definitely rebook you to an alternate airport.

However, UA wasn’t going to make that change based upon a presumptive misconnect. The old saw about “making up time in the air” is rarely true, but the flight schedules always have an estimate in them to cover ground operations (e.g., taxi on arrival), and they’re based on wind estimates — so a 58 minute departure delay doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll miss your connection. Also, UA wasn’t going to know, 12+ hours ahead of time, if LH would be on time or not; if the LH flight is delayed by 25 minutes, you may make your connection after all. (Also, if this delay happened after pushback, it was way too late to do what you’re trying to do on the phone).

If there isn’t enough time to get this fixed at MUC — meaning that the MUC-MRS flight is too soon after the MUC-LYS flight to get a (UA, not LH) representative to reissue the ticket, then it’s not going to happen. You won’t get anyone at UA to do anything until you actually misconnect. The only way you’re going to get UA to help you prior to landing is if the computer has given up and rebooked you automatically. And, even then, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to get a phone rep to reroute you while you’re in the air with checked baggage.


You’re putting way too much faith in UA’s baggage handling system. The reason that they require one hour’s notice before making an SDC with checked baggage is that they have to have time for someone to find and re-tag your bag. So while you might be able to convince someone to do rebook the tickets in this fashion — not that it should be necessary, mind you, but for the sake of argument — I’d wager high odds that the bags don’t make it to MRS on the same flight that you’d be on.


Does your business have 90K employees of various levels of competence?

I wouldn’t have suggested HUCA for the same reasons that I’ve made clear in my (now outdated, but left for posterity) post. But when one of your employees is stating things that are, prima facie, patently untrue — yes, your customers are going to try to find someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Yes, people sometimes HUCA to try to get an exception to a rule that probably shouldn’t occur. But most times people HUCA, it’s because there are some agents who are better at their jobs than others.


So, here’s the thing. You’ve now quite likely been set up to fail. I have no idea how you can “collect the luggage in Munich and recheck.” You stated that you didn’t think there’d be enough time on the ground to handle this — what’s changed? The LYS flight is scheduled to depart at 10:35. The MRS flight is scheduled to depart at 11:25. You’re currently estimated to arrive at 10:23. The baggage won’t be delivered to the belt in MUC unless (maybe) if she re-routed it to MUC herself; it’s either going to make it onto the LYS flight, get redirected onto the MRS flight, or get left in the baggage room until someone goes and gets it. And I don’t see how you would physically have time to collect your luggage and recheck it anyway.

It sounds like you’re planning to do the only thing that makes sense, which is asking at the transfer desk if they can have someone locate and reroute your bag. But there’s a nonzero chance that you’re going to arrive at MRS and your bag is going to arrive at LYS.