Minimum connection time
 

Apologies for cross-posting, but I am not having much luck in the France forum. Does anyone know how I can confirm the official minimum connection time EY-BA at CDG please? AA are telling me it is 180 minutes and they will not therefore ticket a shorter connection on a reward, leaving me with no option but to buy an expensive and unprotected BA cash ticket for the onward sector, which would otherwise be free (there being no available later connection for miles).

ExpertFlyer is probably the easiest way for us, the general public, to get access to this.

180 minutes appears to be correct, using what I understand to be the rule for reading these lists, which is to read down them until you get to the first applicable entry:-

From EF. This seems to align with what itamatrix shows as on a search no sub 3 hour connections are listed even though there are earlier BA flights.

Results from https://www.ExpertFlyer.com

While Expert Flyer is a good resource, it is no longer necessary to look up MCT's as they are baked into the booking software. Put simply, one cannot book below MCT because the system will not permit it and thus you cannot do it online, a TA cannot do it and a phone agent may not do it either.

You are, of course, free to purchase a transfer at below what would be MCT on a connection. But, you should understand that MCT represents a carrier's willingness to accept the risk of a misconnect and, in this instance, the carrier will not accept the risk. If a carrier, handling thousands of passengers per day will not do so, it is generally a poor idea for an individual to do so. Traveling on separate tickets, I generally recommend an overnight unless the onward ticket is dirt cheap.

Thanks very much. Not sure I entirely understand the data, but I assume you are reading it correctly, as it tallies with what AA are saying. Weird, as it is non-Schengen to non-Schengen in the same terminal, so one would have thought the shortest of applicable MCTs, but good to have the official information.

In general, this is correct. But it is useful to be able to check what the booking software is doing.

In particular, on this board we have a frequent occurrence of a piece of booking software that refuses to book connections that are legal for MCT purposes. That is because ba.com applies an additional rule in some circumstances that prevents some MCT-compliant itineraries from being booked. If you know the MCT, you then know that you can phone BA and book the itinerary, or to get a travel agent to book it. Without being able to look up the MCT on EF, you couldn't be confident that you are right and ba.com is wrong.

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that some MCTs are not set on the basis of pure risk, but because the airline is actively trying to discourage the connection in question. This could possibly be the case here.

If it helps to understand the lines of data, the way I understand it is this. The first line means that for a connection from any flight on any airline ("**") to BA flights 1500-1640 which involves a change from T1 to T2A, the MCT is 2:00.

The next two lines mean that same applies to any connection from any flight on any airline to BA flights 1500-1640 which involves a change from T2G to T2A or T3 to T2A.

Any other connection from any flight on any airline to BA flights 1500-1640 has an MCT of 1:30. You know it's "any other" because of the rule about reading from the top downwards until you stop at the first applicable line.

The significance of flights 1500-1640 is, I think (off the top of my head) that these are actually AA-operated flights and these are the BA flight numbers that may be carried by the AA flights as codeshare flight numbers. Hence in practice these are really dealing with **-AA MCTs. If you repeat the search for a connection to AA rather than BA, you may well see the same numbers.

The next two lines have "SUP", which means suppressed. The destination flight numbers here look like BA CityFlyer flight numbers, and BA CityFlyer does not operate to CDG. This may be why they're suppressed.

And then the following line is the one that applies to you: any other connection from any flight on any airline to any other BA flight.

Thanks Globaliser. That's very helpful.