kingstontoon

Going back to the AA discussion, and just after the merger with US Airways, I had booked a one way ticket MCI-PHX-SNA, connecting the next day into the return portion of my open jaw from somewhere in Europe to the US SNA-DFW-LHR. Due to weather in Phoenix, the flight from Kansas City was diverted to Albuquerque and after several hours on the ground, we were deplaned and the onward flight was cancelled. At that point, I had no way of getting to Santa Ana in time for my flight to Dallas and onward to the UK. The customer service queues at ABQ were huge as we were one of quite a few flights diverted there, so I found a cheap hotel downtown and went out for a few pints. From the pub, I called American, explained the situation, and the agent was able to do something with the two separate reservations to route me home ABQ-DFW-LHR at 08:00 the next day. Woohoo!

Now I'm not a morning person at the best of times and even less so after a night out, so it was inevitable I would sleep in and miss my flight out of ABQ! I dashed to the airport and again was very lucky to be placed on standby for the next flight to Dallas. That was full. Same for the next. Finally grabbed the last seat on the latest flight that would get me into Dallas for my flight back to London.

Whenever I plan a trip with multiple journeys on separate tickets, starting / finishing across Europe etc, which is often, I usually don't book the last possible positioning flight or connection and leave a little contingency. In the above case, if stuck in Kansas City or Phoenix, there were plenty of options for me to get across to Santa Ana in time. But I don't think I could have ever predicted ending up stuck in Albuquerque!

IJN Harekaze

Thats nothing - Flixbus's uk division have a Manchester to Paris thats 14 hours plus (although one hour or so is on a fast ferry over the channel) which I have travelled

I really enjoyed reading this trip report and makes me wonder if I should do my own in the future

KARFA

good question. i must admit i know my previous one had some coverage for missed connections when on separate tickets. i guess the problem is insurance would give me some money back if i had go to the stage of missing the SFO-JFK flight and had to buy a new ticket to get home. if i had go to that point i am sure i would have looked to see what i could recover. however, my focus really was to try and make it as that would be much simpler.