SAN Minimum Connection Time
 

I am trying to book PHL-SAN-MRY. There are AA and AS flights (AA Codeshare) with a 65-minute evening connection time, but AA will not allow me to book those flights together. I was told that this would not be a legal connection.

AA offers connections in PHX as short as 25 minutes. Is there a reason why 65 minutes is too short in SAN?

Unless I'm reading the MCT chart wrong, AA-AS in SAN D/D has a MCT of 60 min. However, any airline to AS going from Terminal 2 to 1 has an MCT of 75 min. From what terminal does SAN-MRY depart?

STANDARD.D/D...D/I...I/D...I/I.
ONLINE .30 1.00 1.30 1.00
OFFLINE .30 1.00 1.30 1.00
** OR * ARE ALL
AA-AS DD .30 CDS N/A - AA
AA-AS DD 1.00
**-AS DD 1.15 TRM 2 - 1
**-AS DD 1.00

The phone agent told me that AA's computer would not allow the connection because its "not legal". She didn't go into detail. But she did tell me that PHX has very short MCT times because it's a very well-run airport and has good weather. Not sure what that says about SAN...

I suspect this is a computer glitch. I could book the flights separately, but I'd rather not take the chance.

There could be married segments in play. AA may not offer this routing. Multi segment will sometimes display stuff that errors out when trying to ticket.

Booking separately eliminates the married segment issue, but has its risks.

I wouldn't say SAN is a well run airport - with a single runway there (unlike PHX's 3), there are often delays for sequencing.

What date are you looking at? The fact that the MCT at PHX is 25 mins is irrelevant, carriers will often have lower MCT's connecting between themselves at a hub than connecting between themselves and another carrier at an outstation.

March 3rd. Complicating matters is that the PHL-PHX-MRY routing has a 28 minute connection in PHX, and no MCE seats left.

Number of runways has nothing to do with how well run an airport is or is not.

Have you tried booking PHL-SAN and SAN-MRY via the multi-city booking engine with AA? (Total fare might well be higher, compared to a connection.)

AA doesn't allow same day multi city booking directly, it has to be forced with something like ITAMatrix

Yes, I tried it. It only gave me 1 flight PHL-SAN, at 8 in the morning (my preferred flight is at 4:58pm. Otherwise no non-stop offered between SAN and MRY.

Not sure what is going on with those flights but for whatever the reason the system is not letting you combine them on a single reservation. If an agent can't book it and it's also not showing up looking at aa.com or Google Flights etc. there's not much else you can do other than book something else, or just book it as separate tickets.

FWIW on the PHL-SAN-MRY routings where everything can be combined (like with the earlier PHL-SAN flight you mentioned) the pricing is crazy $1000+, versus $350 for booking it separately.

SAN is a pretty well run airport. 9/27 is usually not a challenging approach except when runway 9 operations are in play (about 10% of the time). Things can quickly go sideways because of that (the runway and terminal layout causes significant "bunching" at the departure end of runway 9).

Even more curious is that you can get the flights you want on AS for 17.5k miles on March 3 (4:58p departure from PHL with 65min layover in SAN), but AS will not sell this flight for money.

AS doesn't seem to be selling AA flights right now from the east coast.

Thanks everyone for the input. I'm going to book the PHL-PHX-MRY routing with the 28-minute connection in PHX. Since no MCE seats are available, and no SWU upgrades are available for PHL-PHX, I'm spending an extra $525 to fly in F. Then I'll keep my fingers crossed that I make the connection, or AA will provide some reasonable rebooking.