Originally Posted by
guv1976
Where protection is offered, it is the responsibility of the late-delivering carrier to protect the passenger. So if MSN-ORD were cancelled or substantially delayed, causing a misconnection at ORD, it would be AA's -- not BA's -- responsibility to get the passenger to LHR.
The more interesting question is what happens in the reverse situation, where a delayed BA flight into ORD causes a misconnection to the ORD-MSN flight. AA policy says that the carrier causing the misconnection shall rebook the passenger. But AA policy cannot bind another carrier. In such a situation, I suspect that AA would either rebook the passenger on its own, or would liaise with BA to get the passenger rebooked.
A relevant data point. Several years ago, when the AA policy was to protect between separate tickets (the same as it has now reverted back to) we were delayed on an AA award ticket booked using AA miles, connecting in DFW to a separate BA award flight booked using Avios. Separate tickets. We were delayed 8 hours on the AA flight into DFW due to mechanical breakdown causing us to misconnect onto the BA flight. BA flat out refused any help (because separate tickets) even though we called them several hours before the BA departure and explained the situation. Told us we would be a no show and would lose the entire ticket including the return flight. AA on the other hand rebooked us onto the BA flight departing the following day on a revenue ticket at their cost. We even got miles for that flight. They also had BA reinstate the return flight which had indeed been cancelled by BA. It was not easy though. We had to go through several agents mentioning the protection policy. The first two or three agents dismissed us, finally we had one exceptional agent who got in touch with the One World Liasion Desk and fixed everything. Took 3 hours on the single call that eventually fixed it.
The lesson we learned is to ask the agent to contact the One World Liasion desk, you cannot talk to them yourself, and most agents have either not heard of it or are extremely reluctant to contact them for whatever reason. So it won’t be easy, or at least it wasn’t back then.