milepig

There's probably a thread for this somewhere, but I couldn't locate one.

This is sort of a "too good to be true" story.

TK First/UA Polaris IST/MXP/ORD Neither TK or UA was able to check us in for the second leg despite many attempts including TK supervisors at IST, trying UA via the UA app, calling, etc. Both airlines said "no can do." TK said UA controlled the MXP-ORD leg and UA said TK did. The connection was tight to begin with a hour, then we were a bit late on arrival then we got a bused gate which slowed us down. No agent to greet us, so we hoofed it as fast as we could and reached the UA gate with 5 minutes to spare and not having checked in!! I thought we're toast. The staff looked up and said "Milepig?" And went on to say they'd called TK who told them we weren't on the flight. Um, how did we get to MXP then? (I suspect they called the TK ground staff at MXP who said they couldn't find us)

Expecting to hear "sorry". 3-4 gate staff worked like mad, while the conversation was in Italian I could hear snatches like "tomorrow" and "Geneva??" and "Frankfurt" and "economy". Finally, the whirr of the BP machine and 4 BPs spit out, they offloaded 2 stamdby PAX, 2 BPs or the pax they unupgraded back to Economy, and finally two for us, in our original seats! They even got our bags on board.

I never expected this to turn out so well, but I'm not complaining!! Still mystified that TK couldn't check us into UA at IST. Moral is never to book a connection that short even though UA sold it as a legal connection.