the whole situation totally sucks! You were incorrectly denied boarding.

The only thing I just thought of - with the benefit of a calm and peaceful atmosphere sitting at home - is that if they were going to allow the 24 TWOV you might have taken that, changed your booking accordingly, and then changed it back once you reached NRT (most probably too late by the time you arrived in China as they'd only give you 24 hours if that's when your return was for).

Will be interesting to see how DL resolved your situation.

I think the problem here is that from what I can glean from what you wrote, you didn't have a stopover in NRT - if that is right then I fear that the DL staff may have been technically correct....

I did a TWOV at PVG last year, and I did it on separate PNRs, so I had to research the rules very thoroughly as I knew I may have had a fight on my hands:

Both the embassy and the TIMATIC wording make it very clear that you must be travelling to a third country in order to take advantage of the TWOV rules. So, something like JFK-PVG-DTW is not allowed (it's an open jaw, but you are still travelling to/from the same country). The point about needing to travel to a country that you need a visa for is just wrong, and a red herring, you could legitimately do JFK-PVG-LHR and TWOV in PVG, even though if you are a US passport holder, you don't need a visa for the UK.

But, I fear that, as far as Delta is concerned, DTW-x-NRT-PVG-DTW, is equivalent to DTW-PVG-DTW, and is not allowed as a TWOV (after all, you can do an international connection at NRT and never enter Japan, so you would never have actually involved a third country).

Useless advice now, but it looks to me like your best bet would have been to get them to check you to NRT only, exited to landside at NRT, and then re-checked in for the PVG flight at NRT, which would then have been completely OK, and TIMATIC would have agreed with you (and anyway, the DL staff at NRT have got to be better than the US ones...) - if your ticket allowed it, that would have been the path of least resistance.

I disagree with the assertion that you should just get a Chinese visa - if you are allowed to use TWOV, then you should be able to use it, and DL should allow it! Unfortunately, assuming an on-line connection at NRT, I think you've been caught in one of the "edge cases" of the TWOV rules.

Of course, if the DL staff had a clue about either visa rules or customer service, they should have suggested the above to you at the time - shouldn't they?

Ken.

Willard the Bear - Thankfully, Bears are exempt from all Visa restrictions. (Though some nice immigration officers have been willing to stamp my passport anyway!)

They were 100% wrong, full stop.

As far as China is concerned, the routing is Japan-China-USA. They don't care (AT ALL) whether or not the OP actually entered Japan.

Delta was wrong and you are wrong, full stop.

Fair enough - it must be a bug in TIMATIC then.....

(If I put that trip into TIMATIC, the only way I can get the Chinese TWOV rules to show is to enter it as a trip from Japan to USA with a transit in China - the TWOV rules don't appear any other way for me.)

Ken.

There's no bug involved. That is EXACTLY how the trip is supposed to be entered. I'd be pretty certain that the Delta agent working the TIMATIC was entering it incorrectly by using the USA as the start point instead of Japan. With the USA as both the start and the endpoint, of course the TWOV won't come up correctly. As already said above, the only thing that matter to Chinese Immigration are the SEGMENTS immediately before and after China. Segment = Wherever the plane last touched. I do not understand why this is so difficult for airline staff (who deal with international flights) to be trained on, or to grasp.

I suspect that if the routing order had been USA-PVG-NRT-USA that the Delta agents wouldn't have had this difficulty, but it really shouldn't be made the OP's problem.

Obviously, this is too late now for OP.

About 12-18 months ago, at EVA counter, another passenger was having the same issue (CSR does not fully understand the TWOV rules). In that case, the itin was SFO-TPE-PVG-USA. The compromise I helped to broker was to get him to be checked in for SFO-TPE only and the passenger would sort it out in TPE.

If OP offered this solution to DL, would that have been accepted?

Also, it is amusing that they consulted a CBP guy. Why would CBP know any visa rules of any other country?

China should ban Delta from flying to China till Delta understand how to read TIMATIC.. and slap a big fine to them.

By the way, have you complained to the DOT as well about it?

IME Some CBP guys think and act like they have the right to permit or deny people's right to enter countries other than US.

It all depends on the personnel at the original departure airport where the document check takes place.

IME some of the ground staff at US airports working for DL doesn't sound like they have been out of their own town, let alone state. They are nice people with limited knowledge.

This is 100% the fault of some combination of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and IATA (TIMATIC). The entire purpose of TIMATIC is to provide a quick & correct means for agents who are trained solely to operate the database and not as international lawyers, to determine whether an individual has the proper documents.

There is no reason for a DL agent to know that China considers a ticket to originate at NRT when the ticket in fact originates in the USA. Unless TIMATIC specifies that ticket origination is to be considered the immediately preceding station. As the language for TIMATIC is provided by respective government authorities, put into form and then reviewed for accuracy by government officials before it is posted, it falls on either China to have caught the missing language or IATA for not having included what China provided.

Snarky comments about China fining DL are way off base as are the comments about DL agents not knowing Chinese rules. They do, it's what China provided IATA and they see in front of them.

I would hope that DL makes this right for OP as a customer service gesture and also raises it to IATA as the language is incorrect.

Perhaps TIMATIC can be improved, but you seem to be awfully keen to let DL off the hook here. I am not. I find the Chinese rules quite clear, even if the way TIMATIC formats and presents them begs for familiarity.

Delta has been providing USA to China services via Japan since before TWOV was implemented in its various forms. 72-hour TWOV has now been around for over a year at PVG and there simply ISN'T ANY EXCUSE for Delta staff that deal with TPAC flights not to have enough training to know the TWOV rules by now, or at least to be able to have a human, designated DL international expert "on call" 24/7 that individual front-line staff members (or the customer) can refer back to for a ruling if they can't sort out TIMATIC.

No excuse for this to have happened.

Nobody at DL will get promoted for interpreting the written word in TIMATIC. Of course DL could have done a lot better here. In particular, as a TPAC carrier, it should, at a management / legal / compliance level carefully parse the language of TIMATIC, especially after a significant change such as TWOV.

That does not excuse the importance of clarifying all of this in TIMATIC and that rests with the Chinese government which must instruct IATA directly.

Remember, while this incident happened at an international gateway, documents are also checked at the point of origin. That could well be a domestic DLX-only station with a single agent who pulls up the same language.

Which is probably what Delta was going on.

They do...