dog3

Hi everyone,

I am curious about my rights and responsibilities as a passenger when it comes to checking in. I am thinking this is something that ought to have some obvious answers and really is kind of a basic question, but I'm stumped.

The basic question is: when the airline says that a passenger "has to be checked in by 60 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure time" (or similar language), what does that *precisely* mean in terms of the passenger's responsibilities?

Over Christmas, there was, as most of us probably remember, a terrible blizzard throughout the middle of the US. Well, I was at Newark...

My departure was at around 0730, for St Lucia (UVF) from EWR. I took the first train out of Penn Station from Manhattan to Newark. I got to Newark's air train about 2 hours before scheduled departure. So far so good.

This is when I started having problems. It was bitterly cold that morning, in the single digits (Fahrenheit) after a 40-degree drop (55 to 15 F) in a few hours the previous afternoon. A little snow, but not too bad. In any case, it seemed the air train was having technical problems, because it was running at a very reduced schedule. It took about half an hour-+ to get to the check-in area instead of ~10 minutes. Normally I would have had ample time, arriving 1:20 before departure. I am a United 1K and have every conceivable "cut-the-line" pass (Nexus card, CLEAR, and whatnot). Well, not Christmas Eve. There were literally hundreds of people standing in the 1K/Polaris line, alone. I have no idea what it looked like in Economy check-in...

I spoke to one of the staff doing "triage" at the velvet rope, although to be honest that day it wasn't so much triage as "oh you're screwed"... but got myself sent to the check-in machine, maybe 1:15 before departure.

Great! I key in my info, scan my passport or whatever it needed, get my seat assigned, and key that I have 1 luggage. This takes a few seconds.

A uniformed gentleman appears to help me with my bags---at this point the normal procedure is, they check your ID, apply the baggage tags with the little "priority" sticker, and send you on your way.

Well not this Christmas Eve. There is some sort of check-in exception. No one really explained what. It's international travel and my documents were flagged for an extra check, maybe? Or some other exception? Who knows.

Nothing grave, I think. The problem was: there was only ONE person working for United who appeared to have the power to clear whatever the situation was---it was somehow above the pay grade of the person who had stepped up to help me, and above the pay grade of everyone else who was working there, except the one lady with a line of a dozen people.

I try to interject that hey I am missing my flight and those folks already have missed their flights, if you help me you will have one fewer to deal with later. To no avail.

My flight to St. Lucia was maybe one of the very few flights that actually left on time that day. Without me, of course!

This is really the end of the story as far as I my original question goes, but I will fill in a little bit more in case someone thinks it might be relevant. I am given a boarding pass for a flight from EWR to Fort Lauderdale (FLL) later that day and from Miami (MIA) to UVF on American the next morning. I am left to figure out how to get myself from FLL to MIA (Lyft) myself and a hotel room (in MIA) myself. I am not offered any assistance with any of this on the spot.

It gets worse. UA has (I think) four flights to FLL that day. Mine was the one that was cancelled. It was cancelled at 0200 the next morning. I sleep at EWR and am on the first flight out of EWR Christmas morning and get to FLL too late to catch my flight to UVF that day. I get rebooked on American for Boxing Day and get another night's hotel. Of course I miss out on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as planned in St. Lucia... And yes my Christmas night hotel was forfeited because I didn't arrive to check in (being stuck at EWR). In total I guess my direct additional costs came to ~$600.

United told me that they would not reimburse the costs because it was "weather related". I don't see how their lack of staffing is due to "weather"? But I wonder whether they are being "nice" to me, because it is after all my responsibility to be checked in an hour before the flight's departure, and I wasn't. (They subsequently gave me $150 travel credits and 10K miles, because well, I whined a few times, and I am a 1K + 1MM... I think?)

I think they really dropped the ball on the flight I had to FLL, since they could have put me on an earlier flight, even had me go standby, even fairly late in the day, but there was an almost total breakdown at United that day (not as bad as Southwest of course...). I did call them several times that day---the 1K line had waits of 1-2 hours so I spent multiple hours just listening to hold music, but they didn't really do anything except advise me to take my booked flight. So yes while this action or lack of action really made a bad situation worse, I can't really blame anyone for it given how chaotic the day was.

What I am really wanting to ask the forum is this... does anybody know what my responsibility as passenger is with respect to check-in?

I have to be checked in by 60 minutes in advance of departure. But I am standing at the check-in machine, with all my details keyed in, frantically waving my passport around, 75 minutes before check-in, and United simply refuses to complete the check-in. Is that not on them? But if it *is* on them, just how far away from being checked in can I be? What if I say I was in the building 61 minutes before departure? Or in its general vicinity? Or just somewhere in New Jersey? That makes no sense either? But does it make sense that the airline can refuse to check someone in and say you should have been there earlier, even though you're actually "done" on time?

Surely this comes up fairly often? When you arrive at the airport and miss your flight because the check-in line is extremely long, you have a variant of my problem. Is there a concept of a reasonable handling time in the check-in lobby?

By the way what made this such a mess is really that United only has a single flight a week from EWR to UVF. "waiting for the next flight" would have meant flying on New Year's Eve.