Flight confirmations?
 

First time going to Brazil in March and this Canadian govt travel advisory site has an interesting comment regarding flights, wondering if anyone can shed some light...

"Reconfirm flight details with your airline and arrive at the airport two hours prior to departure for international flights and one hour prior to departure for domestic flights. Failure to do so could result in the loss of your seat, as airlines attempt to accommodate passengers on waiting lists."

Now, I'm a fairly seasoned traveler, good with airports, I don't SPEAK Portuguese but I can speak Spanish and kinda piece together stuff in written Portuguese (I'm gonna try and learn more than just the basics before I go for sure) but what's this about? I get waiting lists and I'll show up early for my flight, but I can't figure this out.

I'm assuming if you check in at T-3 then you're fine and odds are I'll be at GRU plenty early for GRU-IAH but I'm thinking I'll be coming in from GIG and I'm wondering if OLCI is good enough or you really truly need to confirm this stuff? Even though it's contract employees I can't see UA just bumping me off (I have an F ticket for this flight, but even as a Y if I'm OLCIed that's just wrong) but I could picture this for a quick TAM flight domestically.

1- No need to reconfirm flight details. This was used until the 90s.

2 - Don´t know where the Canadian travel advisory got that information. OLCI works fine normally.

3 - 2 hours for international is ok at GRU and 1 hour for domestic anywhere in Brazil also.

You're a beauty pvdecastro! Thanks for the advice bud.

I read the Canadian advisories, but I take them with a grain of salt. The OLCI part was purely my assumption that despite checking in online that maybe the airline would bump you anyway, though that didn't seem logical.

drvannostren, how are you getting from GIG to GRU? I'm assuming you are on UA from GRU-IAH? Don't know about Azul, but if on GOL, you can't check in for the UA flight on either web site. Gol tells you to go to the airport and UA tell you you are starting with another carrier. I see this all the time in my monthly trips. On a recent trip the wife and daughter made, GOL delivered one check bag to the carrosel at GRU and sent the other to UA. YMMV if you have checked bags.

TAM is a bit different. Last time I used them, I could check in and print boarding passes for TAM and UA. However, I nomally check in again and obtain UA's boarding pass.

Not sure if TAM will interline check bags as I normally just have carry-on. If only carry-on, you can use a kiosk at GRU T-3 to check in on UA now.

I'm doing (UA) YVR-ORD-GRU 2 days (O6) CGH-SDU 3 days (O6) GIG-GRU eta 1605 for a 2130 dep on (UA) GRU-IAH-YYC-YVR.

If I can check in for the UA flight online before hand, great, if not I SHOULD be at GRU with 5 hours of buffer time. Not sure what I'm gonna be travelling with yet, it's strictly leisure but I'm gonna immediately be flying back from YVR-YMM and if it's super cold I'll have to pack some extra clothes which would likely put me over a carry-on.

Didn't really notice this post when I originally started this thread.

I'm on 2 separate tickets, so I'm fine with picking up my 1 bag at GRU domestic and then going to the check-in desk for UA. I built myself a big buffer time in case anything comes up and I wanna check out the star alliance lounge in GRU as well as the terminal itself.