jmayo

I couldn't find a specific answer to this question, so my apologies in advance if this has been covered. I'm and AA EXP and have a BA F ticket booked from SFO to LHR in July. We have another onward flight to ATH four days later...but with the current Covid Green/Amber situation going on, I'm starting to lean on either buying a new LHR to ATH flight for same day transfer, or calling to see if BA would combine my current two tickets so I don't have to cross Border Control. Any thoughts or insight on this? If I had to keep to record locators/tickets, would the agent in SFO combine them and book us through so we only have to transfer in LHR and luggage travels? Or would we have to actually cross Border Control in LHR and then re-check in for the LHR-ATH flights? Thank you so much in advance.

Andriyko

You cannot combine two separate tickets. What you can do is change your SFO-LHR flight into SFO-LHR-ATH flight which will entail paying a fare difference, if any. If you present yourself at SFO with 2 separate tickets and you have luggage, the agent will only tag your bags to LHR and, yes, you will need to clear immigration control, pick up your bags and recheck them for the next flight. The best thing to do is to change your ticket.

jmayo

Thank you. This ought to be interesting since our SFO-LHR was part of an AARP discount F RT between the two cities.

dylanks

SFO-ATH is often less expensive than SFO-LHR, so you never know. It depends on fare availability now vs. your original purchase price. Could be roughly the same price or less or many thousands more.

NWIFlyer

You may wish to consider, assuming everything stays the same in terms of the US being an amber country, that actually it wouldn’t make much difference to your costs if you stayed overnight in London and flew to Greece the next day (to minimise the risk of missing the ATH flight on separate tickets).

If remaining in the UK for less time than would trigger the two day PCR test (the day of arrival counting as zero), you would not have to pay for any tests beyond the normal pre-flight one. So you could cross the border, collect your luggage, travel directly to a hotel (where you’d have to self-isolate, so you’d be stuck there) and then travel directly back to the airport for your flight the next day.

The alternative is to leave a lot of time for the connection, taking a flight to ATH many hours later on the same day, but there is still the potential for very, very long delays at the border - plus BA is cancelling lots of flights right now, so you might end up having to change arrangements anyway. There’s certainly a degree of stress in that arrangement at the moment.

Going hand baggage only would mean you didn’t need to cross the border - a transfer desk at T5 should be able to process you if you couldn’t do OLCI because of required document checks - so you’d only be judging the risk of transferring on separate tickets. If that’s on BA ticket stock, you’d be covered by their Book with Confidence if it was obvious something was going badly wrong in terms of delay, but you’d still potentially be on the hook for fare difference (although that’s still able to be mitigated by choosing at fare with free same day change).

skimthetrees

There is talk that Boris Johnson wants to get Biden to open a travel corridor between the US and UK and he is rumored to be addressing this issue with Biden at the G7 summit next week. I would hold off changing your SFO-LHR flight since I doubt you will be able to keep your discounted Avios pricing if you change it. If the travel corridor happens it may happen by the end of June.

To protect the trip I would book a backup connecting flight LHR-ATH using Avios (so you could cancel it if it is not needed). My understanding is that you can use the UK PLF to specify that you are transiting (even on separate tickets so long as less than 24 hours?) and mark that you are exempt from the day 2,8 Covid testing booking requirement on arrival to the UK (because you are really only transiting), but you still need the pre-departure Covid test.

Check:

https://www.heathrow.com/customer-su...t-restrictions

and

https://onemileatatime.com/uk-passenger-locator-form/
[Ben at OMMAT shows how to fill out PLF form]

Edit:
Updated the Covid testing info.