Transfer from IB to BA at Madrid
 

Does anyone know the procedure for arriving at Madrid from the US on Iberia and transferring onto BA for an onward flight to LHR? Is it straightforward to recheck baggage ir is there a terminal change etc?

It’ll be the same terminal 4S. This should be more straight forward as it’s a non-Schengen to non-Schengen transfer. It’s all rather well signposted and you shouldn’t have any difficulties.

Why are you asking about rechecking baggage ? are you on two PNR's as this is a whole different ball game !

yes, two separate bookings.

As noted already, Iberia flights from US use Terminal 4S, as do BA and IB flights to London. But check-in and baggage services are in the main terminal 4 building. So, if you need to recheck bags, on arrival, you will need to clear immigration, take the transit to the main terminal (takes about 10 minutes), collect you bags, check back in with the BA, then go back through security and take the transit back to Terminal 4S for departures.

and clear passport control one more time. Could take ages in some cases.
let us know how many hours you have between the two flights but you should prepare loads of walking, queuing, waiting for checkin, waiting for bags.

in my opinion MAD won’t be a nice experience. If you could ask the agent in the us to through check your bag even bribing them (kidding) would make a huge difference in experience point of view.
mid you have many hours you might want to stay in the Terminal 4 lounge as the 4s one is rubbish to be honest. Food and drinks limited options. So I would stay in Terminal 4 let say 1 hours or maybe 1 hours and 15 min before departure. Then push through passport control in 4s. :)

If your connection turns out to be under 2 hours on the day, I can't see it working. You would need 3 to 4 hours to be comfortable. Hand luggage you'd be down to sub 1 hour, so that shows the scale of the difference here. I would only book this if you could afford to rebook the London service if things go wrong.

Oh goodness ok. My advice given above needs a lot of tweaking if this is the case!! Didn’t realise this when I was responding!

Thanks to everyone for your input. When I saw Raffle's article on the potential savings on taxes and fees when taking a one way reward flight UA-UK, I realised that an IB flight in J ORD-MAD coupled with a BA flight MAD-LHR is £1120 cheaper than a direct BA-ORD flight. Sadly, when I explained the process of claiming bags and going in and out through immigration, the idea was vetoed. Unfortunately, we can’t spend any time in Madrid due to other commitments so I’ll have to shelve the idea for now.

Any reason you can't book ORD-MAD-LHR ?

Indeed, and you probably would have to call up to book that. But there are heaps of ways to handle the high surcharges on redemptions, e.g. flying AA to somewhere else or using Iberia or using Aer Lingus or Level via Iberia - but they do not make for ease of travel.