Hughdal

I've got a confirmed return KLM Accra - AMS - Aberdeen for late May. What I want to do is Accra - Amsterdam and then fly to San Francisco on award miles. Can I do this (given I can get an award flight). Just wondering about baggage (to AMS for sure), do I need to exit the AMS terminal and re-enter. Should I tell KLM transfer I won't be on the Aberdeen flight (or should I just book to AMS when I check in at Accra. Can I present Accra - AMS - SFO tickets when I check in Accra. Many questions, no answers.

Hughdal

orbitmic

If your AMS-ABZ is on the same day your flight arrives from Accra, then there is a very strong chance that KLM will refused to check your bag to Amsterdam only, and if you tell them you want to only fly to Amsterdam and not to Aberdeen, they may very well recalculate your fare and ask you to pay for the difference, which could be very significant unless your original ticket was already very expensive. You have three 'safe' options:

(1) Tell KLM you want to only fly back to AMS and accept the fare difference (you might want to check if the price different would be big or not before doing that!)

(2) change your paid booking in such a way that your AMS-ABZ would leave the next day; then KLM won't refuse to check in your bag to Amsterdam again as you'll say you need your things for the night;

(3) travel with hand luggage only.

The fact that your next flight is to the US doesn't really help. You should try and check in online but admittedly flights to the US are more likely than others to be scrutinised for security reason so let us just hope that your rather unusual itinerary doesn't attract suspicion.

Finally, you should plan plenty of time between your flights and ensure that you do NOT book a promo award: bear in mind that as you will be on two separate itineraries, if your flight from Accra is delayed and you miss your flight to San Francisco, you are on your own! If your award is a promo award you will lose everything, if it is a regular, changeable award, you should also be on your own as a no show but can hope for more understanding as the ticket will have been changeable in principle hoping KLM doesn't look into your other ticket too much.

irishguy28

There is lots of information relevant to your proposal in these threads: you should read through them (and realise that not all scenarios are direclty applicable to your case)


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/klm-f...ggage-fee.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/flyin...g-booking.html

It should now be clear to you that, if you intend travelling with checked luggage, this is not a straightforward thing to do and you may end up having to pay several hundred Euros. (If you are travelling only with hand luggage - which would be strange on such an itinerary! - then it should be possible, but subject to the fact that travelling on separate tickets always carries an element of risk, as a delay in one ticket will cause you to miss your next ticket, for which you will receive no further help or assistance).

In Accra, no way will they label your bags to San Francisco. They MUST be labelled to your final destination - Aberdeen - and can only be labelled to Amsterdam if you have a greater-than-12-hour layover, or an overnight stop. To get them to do anything else will most likely require you to pay to change your ticket, which can be very expensive.

You might be lucky, and meet a check-in agent who will do what you ask, but what you're asking is against the terms of your ticket and should therefore not be done for free. That's a big risk and I would not assume that you will get what you want without additional payment.

If your ticket is flexible, perhaps you can now already change it so that you have either an overnight stay in Amsterdam (i.e. ACC-AMS on Day 1, AMS-ABZ moved to the following day) or at least move the AMS-ABZ to a time that is more than 12 hours from scheduled arrival in AMS.


My advice to you would be: Complete your currently-booked travel as planned. Go home, water your plants, pick up your mail. Start your Award Travel to the US from Aberdeen on the day after you arrive.

Hughdal

Boy am I glad I posted my question here on FlyerTalk before I made any decisions. I had NO idea the implications of what I was thinking. Full cudo's to FlyerTalk, IrishGuy and Orbitmic for the information. That's why this forum is so indespensible.

On to some more facts.

ACC-AMS-ABZ is employer bought ticket so it will be the cheapest with more restrictions than a new fancy ladder.

Will have to check bags in Accra, no way I can make this trip without supplies.

If I go back to UK I jeapordize my non residency with the tax man and my plants are plastic.

I think I'm sunk.

Hughdal

irishguy28

The cheapest intercontinental fares are said to be non-changeable (but probably could be, if you threw a lot of money at them).

Has your employer booked your ticket already? Could you request an ABZ-AMS-ACC-AMS ticket? (That's probably expensive). Or more likely, could you request a separate ABZ-AMS-ABZ ticket (and book the AMS-ABZ for a date further in the future that you can use it - perhaps to get home from your SFO trip) and a separate AMS-ACC-AMS ticket? Of course, this gives rise to other issues (such as a delay in one causing problems with another) but, if you allow a few hours in Amsterdam to connect, you should still be able to have your bags checked all the way through on the outbound, and on the return, you can just have your bags checked to AMS.

As long as the agent in ACC sees that you are travelling only as far as AMS on such a ticket, it should also be possible for them to label your bag through to SFO if you show them your separate award ticket. (But again, you are running a big risk here booking onward travel on a separate ticket. If your flight from ACC is delayed or went tech, you could miss your SFO flight, and will be stranded in AMS)

However, if it's now too late to play with your employer's ticket, the only other suggestion - and I don't know how crazy or expensive this would be - would be to ship your bags home separately from ACC [if you can find a reputable company/courier] which would allow you to travel on your booked KLM ticket with just hand luggage, and to therefore break your journey in AMS.

If your employer has a corporate travel agent, get them involved - they may be able to work some magic on what is nominally an inflexible ticket.

orbitmic

In your case, it might be cheapest to travel with hand luggage only and send your suitcase as cargo to San Francisco. This is typically a reasonable/ish cost and if the alternative is losing your non-resident status it will probably be a no brainer despite the mild inconvenience (you'll need to drop the suitcase at the cargo area in Accra and go pick it up at San Francisco airport where it may or may not arrive on the same flights as you).

erik123

If you have a friend on the same flight flying to AMS ask them to check the bag.

Hughdal

I've got a month to work something out. I think my best shot is to ask my employer to issue a ticket ACC - AMS only. That's got to be cheaper with one less leg (but probably not). All, the other suggestions are workable but scarey.

Which begs the question who's the customer here. I'm the guy travelling, I'm the guy buying the ticket (ok not in this instance). I'm the one who needs to be somewhere. If you hopped off a bus in Podonk Arkansas in-route to New York and jumped on a bus going to LA who would care, nobody that's who.

GHRRR!

hughdal

orbitmic

See the threads linked by irishguy28 to see why this is not quite that straightforward.

If your ACC-ABZ is a single then probably expensive and thus probably won't make a big difference to replace by ACC-AMS. However you said it was a return so it all becomes a question of ticket conditions about an open jaw. Worth trying anyway. The other solutions don't need to be scary but again the really scary thing is the risk that you could lose your second flight if you miss your connection because of a delay, even one you have no responsibility for. I would say that anything under 3-4 hour connecting time would be risky. In that sense asking your employer to change the flight sounds indeed like the best solution. Good luck!

irishguy28

I wouldn't have thought it was cheaper - but in fact, it turns out to be cheaper than I expected!

For random dates in May (16, back 26) an ABZ-AMS-ACC/ACC-AMS-ABZ works out at 568 quid, while an ABZ-AMS-ACC/ACC-AMS ticket works out at 571 quid. (A simple AMS-ACC-AMS on the same date, on KL, works out at 610 quid)

This is what you should ask your employer to buy.

Buses are perhaps not the best comparison - prices there are more likely to be more closely aligned to distance travelled.

(Just to let you know - British rail operators have famously penalised passengers for getting off of trains one stop before their ticketed destination).

There are several well-known Airline Booking Ploys that airlines look out for. What you're proposing to do falls under the headline "throwaway ticketing". As I've shown you, it's cheaper to fly from Aberdeen to Accra on KLM than it is to fly from Amsterdam to Accra - even though you're on the same long haul flights, and the Aberdeen ticket requires you to take additional sectors. Therefore, some Amsterdam-based fliers will start travel from a different location (perhaps not Aberdeen, Brussels or Antwerp would be typically more convenient!) in order to benefit from a cheaper ticket price - and they would then not intend to take the final flight, as they only booked that ticket because it was cheaper.

What you propose to do, therefore, looks exactly like someone who books a ticket they don't intend to fully use and purely for the reason of getting the flights they actually want at a cheaper price.

I know that you are not intentionally trying to "game" the system, but the rules are in place to try and stop such "workarounds". Hence, your checked-in luggage becomes hostage to force you to fly the full ticket rather than buy/fly a "cheaper" ticket. Experiences reported here are mixed, but in some places, the airline staff are trained to refuse any and all requests for short-checking bags unless you pay for the necessary change to your tickets to allow this.